I read on Patrick Rothfuss’s blog a while back that watching the Amazon ratings ticker is akin to crack. You get addicted to it, constantly refreshing the page to see if your rating has changed. Hopefully up, maybe down, but either way you’re like a little rewired rat pressing the button with your nose to see if another food pellet comes out. Well, the ABNA is little better. I posted a few days back that I had made it to the semi-finals in the contest. Awesome news, right? And it is. It’s just that… I can’t help myself from watching the page constantly to see if anything’s changed. Since they allow people to review the novel excerpts and the contest judges (supposedly) take into account those reviews, I’m constantly in fear of not getting enough to get noticed or getting bad reviews. And hell, I’ve gotten great reviews, but I look at the guy two books over and he has like three times the number that I do and they’re all freaking 5′s. I think this is worse than Pat’s conundrum, because unlike him (he with the killer book on the shelves with more to come) there’s a lot riding on what happens on my tiny little island within Amazon’s website.

The other thing that has struck me is how freaking good the competition is. There are a number of mediocre entries. That’s to be expected. But there are some real stars, too, books that I have a niggling suspicion will get published whether they win the contest or not. Rather than be discouraged (which, admittedly, I am a bit), the presence of such stellar work seems to stoke my internal competitiveness. I want even more to get reviews so I can, I suppose, support my flagging hopes of making it into the top 100 or maybe even the top 10. So I keep a page up with my entry, refreshing, oh, every 3 milliseconds on average. And the other time slices are spent watching the ABNA boards for any small amount of leverage I might be able to use to push my entry.

Agh!!!

I ought to just settle down. I ought to just go about my business and ignore the site and let what will happen happen. But try telling that to a crack addict. Just *stop* taking the drugs, Mr. Addict. It’s easy…

I wonder if I should form an ABNAA chapter…