Year End Review 2012

I had a lot of fun this year entering various competitions and I know I grew a lot as a writer. To recap:

• I came up just short of 52 contest entries (counting over half from the Writer's Digest Poetic Asides Poem A Day Challenge)
• Just over half of my prose entries were flash fiction.
• I tried eleven different contest sponsors: Midway Literary Journal, The First Line, Switchback, Creative Competitor, Fan Story, Writer's Digest, 100 Words or Fewer, On the Premises, Writer's Weekly,  Kazka Press, and finally I'm submitting to Writer's Village and the Society of Actuaries Speculative Fiction contest.
• I haven't won any major contests, just a minor headline contest.  My prize was a nice resource for writers. However...
• I had a couple journals accept my work for publication: The Binnacle accepted The Butler's Waltz, Marco Polo accepted The Open Box, From The Depths accepted a 13 word horror story, and Underwater New York accepted a handful of flashes.
• Finally I wrote a bunch of articles I'm very proud of and I hope you find them useful.

My favorite contest sponsor this year is Writer's Weekly.  They offer a seasonal contest where writers have 24 hours to bang out a short story.  They limit the number of entries to 500 writers.  Lastly, there are tons of prizes.

My favorite piece of writing this year was: The Intricacies of Cherry Cola.  And while it might not be a winner (yet), I've revised it once and I look forward to revising it again for future competitions.

On top of the work on the blog an with contest entries, I've finished the first draft of my first novel and that feels good from a personal perspective.

Hopefully you had just as fruitful of a year and will have an even better one in 2013.  I know I'm looking forward to it.  On New Year's I'll be posting my goals for writing competitions and we'll see how it all shakes out.