Bradbury, and the Contest
In Today's Journal
* The Bradbury Challenge
* A Few Tips for Entering Contests
* Reading for the Contest
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
The Bradbury Challenge
The whole point of the Challenge is to have fun and grow as a writer. There is no cost. The only requirement is to write at least one short story per week. Feel free to jump in at any time.
During the past week, in addition to whatever other fiction they’re writing, the following writers reported these new stories:
Loyd Jenkins "A Day in Dead Man's Drift” 1300 Space Western
Vanessa V. Kilmer "Title One" 3299 Speculative
Vanessa V. Kilmer "Straight Arrow" 3102 Mystery
Dave Taylor "Like Father Like Son” 2,815 paranormal
Dave Taylor " The Thirteenth” 2,234 Sci-Fi
Congratulations to these writers.
A Few Tips for Entering Contests
First, I miscounted yesterday. I had 15 writers and 21 stories, not 22.
I started reading the contest submissions yesterday, and I gleaned a few tips from them to pass along. I don't think any of these are advanced techniques:
Read and understand the requirements of the contest or venue to which you're submitting your work. If you don't understand a requirement, email the editor and ask.
Submit your entry in the required file format.
Spell-check your work before submitting to a contest or venue.
Also, in tomorrow's TNDJ, I'll post a guide to manuscript format for modern times. (I did not provide a manuscript format for the contest. In the future I will do so.)
Of course, when the contest or venue to which you're submitting work offers manuscript guidelines, adhere to those for that venue.
But when the venue doesn't offer guidelines, the guidelines I'll post tomorrow will work far better in these modern times than any of the old outmoded ones, and it willl work for either electronic submissions or for publication.
Watch for that. It will be eye-opening for many of you.
Reading for the Contest
By 10 a.m. I had culled only three stories (out of 21) that won't make the anthology. Then I came here to write this, then took a break.
Turnout for the contest was lower than I expected, but the quality of the submissions was great. Of the 21 stories I received, I rejected only three.
Of the three stories I had to cut from the competition, only one met the minimum length requirement of 2000 words. On that one, the opening simply didn't pull me in, and a little later I (the reader) quickly became confused about the characters.
Of the other two, one was submitted in the wrong file format (and it was under 900 words) and one was untitled (it was right at 700 words). The title was on the name of the file, but not on the manuscript.
So a lesson: Be thorough, folks. Help the editor want to publish your story. Don't make him or her go looking for what should already be there.
So again, neither of those stories met the minimum length requirement. But I read the opening of both of them anyway.
Neither pulled me in (no surprise there since they were so short) though both writers certainly had the room to write a great opening and then add some description to ground me (the reader) in the story and keep me grounded. So that was all right.
In fact, I also read another story that didn't meet the 2000 word minimum. But the opening was great and I was pulled through the story. So I made an exception and accepted it. Editors do that all the time.
Of the 18 stories in which the opening DID pull me into the story, five of those didn't give me a place to skip out and I read them through to the end. Those five went immediately into the Vying for First Place folder. (One of those was the "too short" story. So a lesson: Let the story be what it wants to be.)
Of the others, I read the opening, then slipped out, skipped down to the last few paragraphs and read the ending, then put four more into the Vying for First Place folder and the other nine into the Accepted for Anthology folder.
The point being, out of 21 submitted short stories, all but three earned their writers a slice of the pie.
So three writers will win the cash prizes for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd places, and the other 15 writers will each get ten bucks for each story as payment for inclusion in the anthology.
So in a way, I'll have three prize-winning stories in the anthology plus 15 honorable mentions. Not too shabby from a field of 15 writers and 21 entries.
Thanks, everyone!
However... of TNDJ's over 200 subscribers, I have to wonder how many more of you might have placed in the money had you chosen to take a chance, believe in yourself, and submit a short story (or two or three) to the contest.
Even these days $10 will buy you a burger if you forego the fries. Or a dozen eggs or whatever.
Of Interest
The Strategic Author's Guide to Amazon's Kindle Unlimited I didn't vet this, so....
The Numbers
The Journal…………………………… 830
Writing of Blackwell Ops 45: Sam Granger | Ghost Trail 2
Day 1…… 2637 words. To date…… 2637
Day 2…… 3648 words. To date…… 6285
Day 3…… 3483 words. To date…… 9768
CUTS…… -4437 words. To date…… 5331
Day 4…… 3212 words. To date…… 8543
Day 5…… 2715 words. To date…… 11258
Day 6…… 2044 words. To date…… 13302
Fiction for May………………………... 85039
Fiction for 2025………………………. 463452
Nonfiction for June………………....... 1720
Nonfiction for 2025…………………… 127870
2025 consumable words…………….. 583812
2025 Novels to Date…………………….. 11
2025 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2025 Short Stories to Date……………… 27
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………..... 115
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 297
Short story collections……………………. 29
Whatever you believe, unreasoning fear and the myths that outlining, revising, and rewriting will make your work better are lies. They will always slow your progress as a writer or stop you cold. I will never teach the myths on this blog.
Writing fiction should never be something that stresses you out. It should be fun. On this blog I teach Writing Into the Dark and adherence to Heinlein’s Rules. Because of WITD and because I endeavor to follow those Rules I am a prolific professional fiction writer. You can be too.
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Questions are always welcome at harveystanbrough@gmail.com. But please limit yourself to the topics of writing and publishing.
Congratulations to the Bradbury crew! And to all those who submitted stories for the contest. Sounds like a lot of really great reading. And, $10 will get a burger AND fries if you get a coupon in the app! 😉 Hoping for more people to believe they can ( because they CAN!) and enter a story next time. It was a lot of fun doing something different.