Harlequin announced the final results of the Manuscript Matchmaker contest. Out of 132 entries in the first round, the editors offered contracts to 6 writers. I feel very privileged to be one of that number. It was an intense and amazing experience.
Congratulations to Angie Dicken, Anna Zogg, Victoria W. Austin, Whitney Bailey and Mollie Campbell! I look forward to reading your stories.
I really do believe that everyone who entered got something good out of the experience. The chance to get personalized, specific feedback from an experienced editor was fabulous. I hope all the authors who did not final in the contest take the opportunity to revise their manuscripts. In the forum posts, I was able to learn some details about their plots and characters, and these stories sounded like ones I would love to read.
Congratulations! I have also recently started to blog, and I live in southern Oregon. Our writing interests are quite different, but I did genealogical research for my father-in-law and found that ancestors came from Missouri to Oregon in wagon trains in 1849 – 1850 with some members of the Boone family, with intermarriage here and there. A fascinating time.
Thank you!
I think that’s wonderful that you can trace your ancestry back to the wagon trains.
I set my story in the area around Oregon City in 1851 because I wanted to work in some conflict with the Land Donation Act, where the government allowed a single man to 320 acres free, but if he got married by the end of 1851 he could claim twice as much (another 320 acres on his wife’s behalf). A lot of marriages took place that year. Lots of possibilities for romance stories!
Interesting. I didn’t know that. Interesting plot enhancer.
Actually we traced back to 1640 and the first immigrant ancestor from Switzerland who arrived in Baltimore in 1737. We even know the name of the ship and its captain. The available information is amazing. I envy you doing historical research. I got to do a lot of it working on my WIP, a book about a young Navajo woman.