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| So as to not bury the lead, I wrote another story yesterday. Hopefully you'll enjoy it. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a very disheartening experience. I wrote it for the writer's cramp, which I rarely enter. For me, 1000 words is too limiting. But the prompt seemed interesting and within an hour I'd knocked out the thousand words. The prompt was posted at noon and by 3PM I'd already entered. It didn't win, and I agree with the judges. The story that did win was far superior to any of the other entrants, including mine. But what left a dour taste in my mouth was that this story got disqualified. It wasn't even considered. Why? Because apparently, I used the "wrong" ML tag when posting it. It was posted, the link was there to click on and read. Yet instead of reading it the judges threw it out. I used an ML tag - just not the "right" one. They had 21 hours between the submission and the deadline where any of them could have said something, yet they all chose not to. I won't pretend that didn't leave a sour taste in my mouth. It'll be a long time before I enter again. When I posted it, it felt incomplete and at the time I intended to go back after the judging and rework it. Entire scenes are reduced to sentences. There are no supporting characters. The ending is abrupt and lacks drama. All of this could be addressed now that I'm not hamstrung by the 1000-word limit. But I'm disgusted enough that I'm just not motivated to go work on it further. The irony there is the story got more reviews in the first two hours (none from judges) than my entire portfolio combined in the last two months - and the reviewers LOVED it. From their perspective I'm being far too harsh on my work. So here it is and hopefully there's a silver lining - at least I got this story out of it. Enjoy! Edit: It would help if I included the link! Once again, my ML skills are a work in progress to say the least... "Invalid Item"  |
| Good story and likely to be the way things would turn out. Sorry about the disqualification. It can be frustrating to have a little mistake mess you up. I remember expecting to win a contest I only thought I had entered. I spent a good deal of time writing my entry and publishing it to my portfolio. Turns out I had entirely forgotten the bit where you post the link to your entry. |
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| Ned - Glad you enjoyed it. Thanks for reading! |
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| The opposite happened to me. A story that should have been disqualified, as it didn't follow the prompt, won, and that made me stop entering. |
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| Good evening. There is a new addition to my portfolio. The other night, I thought to myself, "self, it's been a mighty long time since you've written about bigfoot." In fact, it's been almost 20 years. The first novel I ever completed was about bigfoot, and the first 80% was great (at least, I thought so) but the ending was horrible. It never saw the light of day, and alas, the manuscript has been lost over the years. Even if it did exist, I'm still not sure the ending is fixable. Anyway, I let the idea bounce around the ol' noggin and within a couple hours the Roosevelt story popped in. A day later I had the entire first draft completed. I've made a couple passes at editing, but I'm sure fresh eyes will pick up mistakes I've missed. This is the part that I can't do alone. So I leave it in your hands, readers. Hope you enjoy it. I know when the story comes out with this little effort, its a wonderful reminder of how much fun writing can be! Enjoy!
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| Brian K Compton - It's a topic that's fascinating to me as well. There's another story I may tackle at some point that I considered writing, and that's Lewis & Clark. William Clark is also convinced he met one face-to-face, only in his case it wasn't by proxy. Clark kept a journal of the trip and his actual journal still exists. I want to say it's in the Smithsonian maybe? And here's the part that makes the conspiracy types lose their mind. There is one volume of his journals which was lost sometime after it reached President Jefferson's desk. I bet you can guess which volume that is. There's a story there that deserves similar treatment one day. |
I rarely do the Writers Cramp contest but I had a slow day, wasn't in the middle of any other project, and the prompt seemed interesting, so, here you go:
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| I've been busy lately even if it doesn't show. Today I made public my entry in the Musicology Anthology contest. Presenting: Jomsviking, based upon the Amon Amarth album of the same title. I'd been looking for an excuse to write about this time period again but didn't have a story. Then I saw the contest and immediately thought of this album (and about 20 others). I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. |
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