ShawneeDispatch.com

John Ring

John Ring entered his manuscript to Amazon's Breakthrough Novel Award contest on what one might call a whim.

The contest for unpublished novels would award semifinalists a Publisher's Weekly manuscript review.

"That's all I was really hoping for out of it," he said of entering his novel, "Wrecking Civilization Before Lunch," to the contest. ": I really thought a humor book wasn't going to have a shot - there's too many tastes in humor."

But the Shawnee resident has found that setting his sights low led him to high places. On March 3, it was announced that Ring had made it from nearly 5,000 original entrants to the top 10 finalists. With just a few more days of voting left, he will learn if he has made it to the top three. On April 7, he'll find out who will take home the grand prize: a full publishing contract with Penguin Publishing.

Ring said he didn't think about someday becoming an author until he was out of college.

"I know a lot of authors will say they wanted to write when they were 6, but it really didn't even occur to me," Ring said.

It was only after he got his computer programming degree and got a job that he started writing. He continued, on and off, and eventually he decided to try to write a novel, to emulate his favorite author, Douglas Adams.

"When I was first starting off, I was trying to write something like 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,'" Ring said.

But he found his first book was too autobiographical, so he put it aside and started on another book about "incompetent corporate terrorists."

"I got about halfway through that, and 9/11 happened," Ring said. "I thought the world wasn't ready for corporate terrorists, even if they were incompetent. So I went back in time before those characters to when story first started."

In this book, an inventor named Mark Goggin creates a flying dollhouse, but he can't remember how he did it. Convinced the floating dollhouse holds the secret that will lead to the flying car, some corporate bad guys come after Goggin to obtain his invention by whatever means necessary, chasing him through the Lake of the Ozarks area in Missouri.

Ring uploaded his manuscript in October, and discovered through Amazon reviews and votes he'd become one of 836 semifinalists. Then, Penguin and a panel of experts narrowed it down to the top 100 and then 10 finalists.

Since then, Amazon reviewers have been casting their votes by downloading and reading free excerpts from each novel and then submitting a rating and review. Of the top 10, Ring seems to be the only author with a comic novel.

Ring said he has had some contact with two of the other finalists, but he hasn't been checking them out much online.

"You really can't win by reviewing your competition," he said. "It just seemed better to stay out of it and not get into it too much."

But exchanging e-mail with a couple of them has helped him deal with the hardest part of the competition: the negative, nasty reviews that all the finalists seem to get every now and then.

The three finalists will be announced April 3, receiving a trip to New York City for the announcement of the winner, along with a 50-inch plasma television, a laptop and a printer. In addition to a publishing contract, the winner will receive a $25,000 advance and a few additional computer toys.

It certainly could make an impact on Ring's suburban life as a computer programmer and father of two, but he's sticking with his original plan of keeping his expectations low.

"I don't expect much, but who knows what'll happen," Ring said. "It was definitely easier when I thought I was going to be eliminated two weeks ago."