The ultimate writing contest would be one where both judges AND readers choose the winner. That's what Amazon.com has managed to create with the first ever Amazon.com Breakthrough Novel Award. Amazon has put together a truly unique writing contest by assembling an incredibly diverse array of judges.  At various times during the competion, the winning manuscript will have survived a gauntlet of reviews, opinions and votes from: Amazon editors, Publishers Weekly reviewers, Amazon.com Top Reviewers, Penguin Publishing USA editors, Amazon.com customers, and a distinguished panel of publishing luminaries including Amy Einhorn, John Freeman, Elizabeth Gilbert, Eric Simonoff, Sue Grafton, Khaled Hosseini, Ken Follett, Sue Monk Kidd, Harlan Coben, and Jan Karon.

Writers from around the world submitted thousands of entries.  Amazon cut off the submissions at 5,000 back in November, and the long process of sifting through the entries has already begun.  By January 15th, they will have narrowed the field to the top 1,000.  Then, the real fun begins as Amazon.com customers begin downloading and reviewing the excerpts. To find out how you can participate, visit the website.

A novel is fiction, but what's behind the fiction?  In Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner, his Kabul, Afghanistan is a very real place.  The setting is a key element of the book's powerful story.  But did his father's house actually have a "smoking room" that "perpetually smelled of tobacco and cinnamon"?  Outside, was there really a sorry garden they called "the Wall of Ailing Corn"?  Perhaps.  And that's where the genius lies, I think...in the perhaps.  It could have been that way.  So when Harlan Coben's The Innocent opens a scene set in Irvington, New Jersey, I'm not surprised when he describes an "enormous beer bottle" with "it's crown 185 feet in the air."  I don't know that the giant bottle of Pabst Blue Ribon beer actually exists, but I can certainly imagine it.

Inspiration.  The story behind the story.  That's what I write about here in the Tin House Tango Journal.  My stories are not real.  But reality influences my stories, and this journal gives me a place to record some of the factual tidbits that are woven into my writing.