So, just submitted Children's Crusade to New Directions' Novel Prize 2024 contest. I last attempted to submit to the contest in its first iteration in 2020, but the process screwed up, the file didn't load, and I ended up losing the file when my computer died a few months later (a significant revision of the middle section from In the Land of Pangaea I've never had the heart to revisit, much less a needed retooling of the whole manuscript).
I'm mean, it'd be nice to be published by anyone, but New Directions would be particularly ideal. It's the publisher behind most of Roberto Bolano's English translations, Helen DeWitt's home, and the house that put out Javier Marias's Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, all among the greatest treasures of my reading experience.
Heck, if the criteria had specifically forbidden it, I would've submitted In the Leviathan, too.
Sure it's a pipedream, and has been for decades, now, but it's still nice to be able to dream. I think Crusade came out nicely, but that's my extremely biased opinion. I have so much more I'd love to write, including a whole series of historical fiction I was dreaming up earlier today, plus stuff like A Centaur Died., Book of Doom, and of course the Danab Cycle, which demands so much more space than I reasonably have working full-time.
Just have to wait until, oh, January...
Well, I hope you do well, you deserve it. How long will it take for the judging?
ReplyDeleteJanuary next year. I secretly hope they'd realize how brilliant it is and insist on publishing it immediately. Haha. But even the winner won't appear until 2026.
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