I just found out that Scenes from a Life has made it through to round 2 of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award (http://www.amazon.com/b?node=332264011)

This means that it was in the top 400 in the General Fiction category (there was no historical fiction option). Making it to round 2 means that the short ‘pitch’ was good enough… this time around the ‘excerpt’ section, ie the first few thousand words, gets to be assessed.

There is now about a month in which the number gets whittled down to a total of 500 across all five categories…