You'll Never Win a Contest If...

You never enter.

Duh.

I know, it's an obvious statement. Yet, this statement rang like a bell when I read Annette Young's recent article on her writing contest website Creative Competitor.

"The main element to winning is to enter in the first place. It’s as simple as that"

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.

Creative Competitor Pending Entries

I'm posting the synopsis of my other Creative Competitor entries while they are in the proccess of being judged.


For the profile contest: Meet Lief Novak, an accountant who loves to knit. 

For The Perfect Crime Contest: Tina loses her fiance during a midnight surf, but at his funeral a stranger suggests that things aren't exactly as they appear.

Creative Competitor Website Review

I first found creative competitor as I was dredging the Internet for other sites like mine.  Writers who had devoted themselves to the cause of writing competitions.

Creative Competitor does that and then some.  They host their own contests (fee based or free for members) plus have a wealth of writing resources, critique services and writing articles.

For me the biggest appeal was the constant stream and variety of contests.  Unfortunately, this about where the appeals ended.

I have been sitting on this review for a while because the website founder, Annette Young, has been promising updates, changes, redesigns, competition results etc. throughout the year.  They rarely materialized and I thought I had been taken for a schmuck and that the website was no more than a self-marketing ploy for Ms. Young's ebooks.

Then I got a sad email from Ms. Young that confirmed my worst suspicions.  Managing the site + all the other projects she takes on + life = serious personal toll. She cancelled all the automatic memberships payments and put things on hold indefinitely.

While the site did not deliver what I hoped it would, I definitely appreciate the honesty and integrity of Ms. Young.  I wish her health and recovery and hopefully some good reading.

Meanwhile, I'm going to be posting some of the entries I made to her competitions.

Joining Another Competition Site

I'm coming up on a year with FanStory.  It's been great, but as I'm trying to become acquainted with the competitive writing universe, I'm expanding my horizons and trying another site that offers multiple competitions a year.

For about $7/month I've joined CreativeCompetitor.  (Hopefully I can win one and cover my dues)Expect a review about 6 months from now.  They don't offer as many competitions as FanStory, and there is no peer review element.  However, there is a lot of great content.

For example here's an article where they talk about their judging process.

I also liked what they have to say about how to win a writing competition
"To win a writing competition, all it takes is the ability to create a strong story line, to be able to take the basic story and to weave a realistic plot around it, to introduce characters that seem larger than life and to be able to follow the rules, writing with sincerity and integrity."

My first task - write a story based on this guy