Ohhhhh I dunno.
I found out yesterday via the eminently magnificent Kim Harrison that Harper Voyager is accepting unagented manuscripts during the first two weeks of October. This is pretty amazing, and I should totally submit mine.
Except they want complete, polished novels, and mine is woefully short of that. The completeness part, not the polished part. My writing style honestly looks very polished pretty much immediately – it’s just full of giant gaping holes. The sort of holes that, in Minecraft terms, lead to lava and diamonds and bedrock – but in writing terms, are just jarring and annoying. It’s 99% impossible for me to get my novel into a reasonable state of completeness in 2-3 weeks.
But I’m an optimist, so…yeah. I’m going to try anyway. I’m ready to be an author. I always worked better under a deadline, after all.
As such I will become a creepy recluse for the next two weeks. If it looks like I might really make it, I will even be missing the Mists of Pandaria release for the first few days. The opening of an expansion is always ridiculously buggy and overcrowded so I’m not sure I’ll miss much. I’m shooting for a far loftier goal than leveling quickly.
Doubtless I will be posting neurotic updates. The amount of tweeting I do also seems to be proportional to the amount of writing I do, so I’m going to go ahead and apologize now.
I would appreciate all the cheering on I can get. Also sushi and/or alcohol. Help a girl out.
Ganbatte, writer-san.
/cast iPod [Dark Knight Rises soundtrack]
Aine Crabtree 
I think if you’ve got your manuscript complete, then go for it. Harper Voyager is awesome and they do detail that editing is part of the process. I’ve always wondered about how “polished” is polished and after hearing from writers the edits they go through, I believe if your story is solid, the details are manageable. A good solid story isn’t delivered during edits, it’s there all along. But hey, I’m not published so this belief and fifty cents still won’t get anyone a cup of joe. Go figure!.
Thanks for the encouragement. The trick for me is going to be writing out the missing scenes I have listed in my overall plot list. I know what goes there – but I seriously doubt a note of “pretend there’s a scene here where this chick sets a building on fire” will fly. My novel’s not going to look very complete if it’s full of holes!