Lost my contest cherry

Today I submitted my first to my first contests - the Fire & Ice and Fool for Love First Chapter contests. I'm hoping to get some good feedback from the judges. One of the judges is an agent I want to query when I finish my MS. I'm looking forward to her comments because it will help me submit to her down the road...assuming that she doesn't hate it an blacklist me :-)

The last revising step I did was using the Microsoft Word function to search for some icky words like that, was, is, were, ly adverbs, etc. I couldn't believe how many times I used some of those words! Especially 'that'. Luckily I was able to get rid of a lot of them. Hopefully that will lessen the feedback on grammatical and word choice stuff and heightens the feedback on characters, plot, etc. The only frustrating thing is the long wait to get back the comments. It seems some of them take five or six months! Yikes!

Anna Genoese of Tor posted on her blog that she's looking for paranormal! Tor is one of the publishers I would like to target. She even said she will take queries for novels not finished :-) Sweet tempation! Unfortunately the slots are for December 2007 or December 2008. That seems like so far away! I know it takes a while before a book is published once it's contracted, but the idea of someone submitting now, waiting two months for a response, getting the contract and not seeing the book until December 2007.

Just thinking about that tells me that date of publishing would be an important contract item for me. Part of me also thinks it would be important to get a multi-book contract for my series, on the other hand I hear advances and royalties are more messed up on those. But that's just from what I see online, you never know how reliable that is. Let's all do some day dreaming. What would be idea contract items for you other than a huge advance, that's an obvious one. :-)