It's Great, Really, But How About an Honorable Cash Prize?

Just before the New Year I got an e-mail from Writer's Digest, advising me that my work warranted an Honorable Mention in a recent horror contest. The May/June issue of WD will list my name as honorably mentioned in the contest, and I get a free copy of the 2012 Writer's Market. Which is nice, and the cost of the book means I'm ahead about $10 above my entry fee. Yay!

The story in question is "Gone to Earth", the title of which I blatantly stole from an early-20th-century book by a female author named Mary Webb. A sample (of my story, not hers):

The silence maddened her for the first week, but one day she shut her eyes and sat on the porch and listened, and she heard it finally: the whistling sounds of the trees, the industry of squirrels, the chittering of nesting birds, faraway burbling water. The clamor was deafening if you listened. The expectation of television, of booming car stereos, of next-door Smiths embroiled in domestic battle, had drowned out the real sounds that existed in this place. She was suddenly dizzy with the altitude.

Two weeks later, and she is knitting her fingers into the tiny garden’s wet dirt. A woodpecker is sporadic in keeping her company as she kneels in the damp earth. She hums Springsteen. A pale green tendril from a bush nearby snakes its way around her moving wrist.

She ceases and looks at it. It is still for a moment, and then it moves again, climbing its way up her arm to the crease of her elbow. She stands up at speed and the tendril slips away harmlessly, lying on the ground.

Shelly is shaking, her eyes wide, the tune in her throat forgotten. Her earthen hands dangle. The tendril does not move. It is another three days before she goes to the garden again, and by then the seeds and weeds alike have uncurled into life, the weeds twice as large and throttling the squash.

I wrote the story a few years ago, and although it really does belong in the stable of genre work, not literary, it was still (at the time) the closest I'd ever come to writing exactly what I had in mind. A piece of work I'm proud of. One day I want to place it in Weird Tales - it was rejected two years ago, but maybe with some more work it'll be worthy.

As I said a while back (while I was agonizedly editing "Gone to Earth" down for this very contest, in fact), I don't really know what's up with contests, how they work, but thus far this is the third one in which I have been granted an honorable mention. I'm pleased that I warrant mention, especially of the honorable sort, but I'm kind of starting to wonder what's up with this. (I'm an Honorable Mention winner from way back, all the way to science fair projects in elementary school and whatnot.) What do I do to break through from "yeah, we liked it" to "this is outstanding by any measure"? More characterization? Fewer adjectives? Thicker paper?

In other news, I bought Florence + the Machine's new album (Lungs has been listened to a nub, or would have been, if it hadn't been listened to entirely in digital form), and have discovered that noise-canceling headphones are really the only way to listen to Florence + the Machine. I just want to lie down and let her voice soak into my body, maybe for a day or two straight.

Also, totally blocked from working on the horror novel, either through laziness or perfectionist fears or whatever else is making me chemically unable to put one word in front of the other. I think this evening I'll try lubing up with a cocktail and see where that gets me. Yeah, not a wise habit, but it worked nicely with the Greenland book, and I didn't wind up with an alcohol problem after it was all over, so I think I'm OK. Also also, someone with more talent in the tip of her nose than I have in my entire brain has just e-mailed me a WIP for me to read and chat with her about, so I am apparently being revenged for my impatience with my readers. I can't wait to dig in.

If you cut my story, does it not bleed words?

I don't know anything about writing contests. I have been a finalist in two of them, but I really don't know what distinguishes contests from the usual query for publication/get rejected dance, except that there's payment involved. I'm talking about quality. What is it about these stories that makes them good enough to deserve a prize, rather than just the prize of publication?

I also don't know what kinds of writers win these contests, and what they do with the money and prestige that they win (if any). I don't know how many writers I'm going up against, whether a few dozen or a few thousand. I don't know if there's some kind of a scheme to winning them, or whether they matter more or less than regular-style publication. I just don't know that much about them.

But I've dived back into writing during the fullest swing of the fall contest season, and I'm damn well going to take advantage of it. Two nights ago I decided to enter a short story into a genre writer's contest at Writer's Digest. The short story in question was 4,800 words, and the word limit for the contest was 4,000. I am pretty happy with this story the way it is; it squeaks going around corners maybe once or twice, but I don't think it needs shortening, unless it's the Crisco kind of shortening. But I was sure it was a good idea to enter this story in this competition, so I put on my Fictator hat and I sat down to chop until I could chop no more.

It was a nightmare. It was two hours of work to lose those 800 words. I must've read through it seven or eight times, lopping a word here and a sentence there. When my progress was too slow, I held my breath and cut 400 words of really fine character development. I do not think this made for a better story, really I don't, but I had 800 words to lose and, in the end, I lost 804.

And I paid my $20 and entered the contest. Lord knows if the story even belongs in the horror category, or if it's up against stories by much more seasoned and worthwhile writers, or if the contest will decide to go belly-up and they'll keep my money (it's happened before), or - what is most likely - I won't win and won't know why.

Once I entered a contest where your entry fee paid for a copy of a book with all the winners published in it, and when I was sent the book (so many months after the contest ended that I'd mostly forgotten about it), that was my first notice that I hadn't won anything. When I read the stories, I didn't really understand what they had that my story didn't; sometimes I understand why I got rejected from a publication when I read a copy of the publication, and sometimes I don't, and this was one where I didn't.

So, that's that. Fictator success; contest entered. Everything is super.

I am exhausted this morning. For the third time I am the victim of temporary insanity leading me to agree to substitute for a sunrise yoga class, and I had to get up at 4:30 to make it there in time. And all night I woke up every hour because my brain was worried I would oversleep. And no one even came to the class. Fool me thrice, shame on me.