In Which We Find.. A Contest, and a Plea

Dear lovely blog readers,

My knitting-romance-writing friend Rachael has an urgent plea which I have pasted below. Please make her LIFE for her by voting for her, and if you enjoy it, please pass this along! (she's a pretty darn good writer BTW.... if nothing else it's good reading).

**************
Hi there.
Please forgive the mass mailing -- I have a favor to ask.
I'm in a competition you may have already heard about. I wrote a book, a romance, full of yarn and alpacas and sheep and hot knitter-on-shepherd action (no, really). I entered it in Gather.com's First Romance Competition. I posted the first chapter, and it garnered enough votes to move on to the second round (in the top 25 of more than 300), so I'm thrilled to say that I'm a finalist, with people now voting on the second chapter. It's kind of an American Idol type of thing, if you can imagine, and this second round is still vote-driven, and the the most important thing to know is that if I end up in the top three, with the most votes, I move on to the last round where THE WHOLE NOVEL IS READ BY SIMON & SCHUSTER and their favorite is published. Oh, my god. I would like that. I would love that.
So I need your vote. I *really* need your vote. I'm in the top four right now, and the three people ahead of me have LOTS of friends. I need to be in the top three to move on, and you will make ALL the difference.
Here's what you do: Read chapter one, but don't vote on it. That one is nice and content and voted on as it is. Please ignore the typos. They hurt my soul, but they're there.
Then read chapter two and please DO vote. If you like the chapter at all, please give it a 10, as they only count 10s (they throw out all votes of 1-9). The chapters with the most 10-votes win.
Even though I know you want to, don't vote more than once, since they're watching for IP fraud. And you DO have to register with their site in order to vote, but they won't spam you, and they don't share or sell email addresses. They will send you a daily email which you can easily opt out of.
Oh, please, please? And will you forward this note on if you like the chapter? To all YOUR email contacts?
Thanks so much. Here you go:
Don't vote on chapter one:
http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474977094360
DO VOTE on chapter two:
http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474977126255
All my thanks. Really, ALL my thanks. It means so much. Whoo-hooo!
xo
Rachael