I've been going over "The Time Travel Journals" with the proverbial fine-tooth comb. I am officially cross-eyed, but I've found and changed lots of little things like changing 'a' to 'an', or adding 'he' to a sentence that was missing it.  I've done some bigger changes, too - rewriting a few scenes, noticing places where I did too much "telling" (thanks Josh!), and even deleting a few scenes. The word count is now in the 145K range. That's down from the 153K it was at, but still up considerably from the 120K it was before an interested agent pointed out the sub-plots were lacking.

I know it's hard to get a large novel published, especially for first-time authors, but this agent was right. So why isn't he my agent? The book just wasn't going in the direction he wanted and we agreed I should look elsewhere. Mind you, I would have loved to write what he wanted, but I just couldnt figure it out. I couldnt' see the book the way he wanted it.

If it just doesn't get picked up, I may do as he predicted, and go back to page 1 and start over. It's a good story, and timely, too. But for now, I'll enter it in Amazon's contest and see what happens. I'm hopeful that if I can get past the pitch requirement, and the novel gets to actually enter the contest, that it will get at least as far as the quarterfinals. That's into the top 500, and the full manuscript gets a professional review.

That would be cool.

Cooler if it gets to the semi-finals, though. I haven't given up on other agents, either. Once it's polished for this contest (which has forced me to really look at the thing for the first time in nearly a year), I'll send it out again.

Never give up.