So I won't go over the Writers of the Future Contest too much here. I've already expressed my feelings about it on this blog. It's a writing contest that has 4 open submission periods every year, large cash prizes plus an opportunity for winners to attend an amazing writing seminar/workshop and awards show, and has no entry fee. It accepts most speculative fiction. I think it's awesome, some people don't for various reasons. I've submitted to it now 4...I'm sorry, 5 times (just verified), and came in as an honorable mention once (or 20% of the time, woohoo!). I often use it as a good jumping off point for short story submissions since they accept almost all year round (no waiting for submission periods) and are open to a wide range of stories (no searching for the perfect market). Also, this is a hopefully limited time offer since they do not accept stories from past winners or from professional writers, and, with luck (probably also hard work), I'll get to one of those points in the next few years.
I also mentioned some stories needing to be finished all at once. I find this to be particularly true for me and my short stories. I have little patience for lingering stories. I'm not the type to write half a story, take a month or two to consider it, then finish it up in another 3 months. When I have a stimulating idea for a short story (this story happened to be another one from a dream I recently had), I need to sit down and burn that idea out of my mind and onto the page as quickly as possible before the excitement and idea fades away. Now, I do have several shorts languishing in half-done land right now, but sadly, they may stay there forever. The story I submitted last...well, earlier this morning really, had sat half-finished for about a month, and I knew that this was my only chance to finish it. If I hadn't gotten it done last night, it never would have found an ending, so yeah, it was worth burning a little midnight oil.
Then we come to me just wanted to have finished something, gosh darnit! Like I said, lately I've had a run of half-finished short stories and I've also been going back to a novel that I'd finished, but now realize needs some more work. Right now I have very few finished, polished, unpublished works, and frankly that is not how I want to roll as an author. I want to be constantly churning and building up my backlog of finished unpublished works to have ready to send out when the right publisher comes along. So yeah, I was geeked to have one more completed story in the hopper. It was a small victory, but one I hadn't felt in a while.
So I hope you'll accept my excuse for not writing my blog yesterday. This is totally not an apology. ;)
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