Well the final results are in. I didn’t place among the top 10 in the writing contest. They don’t arrange the 70 participants who didn’t win in any order, so I really don’t know where I finished other than at least eleventh. The feedback from the judges was mostly positive, but their main complaint about my story was they generally didn’t care for the ending. They also made a comment or two about it being too long a story to cram into 250 words. Fair enough. I still did better than I thought I’d do, and I may go in another one and see how it goes.
To make not winning more palatable, instead of turning to beer or ice cream, I decided to seek therapy by googling the people who finished in the top five to see what sort of competition I was up against. The winner was another Canadian who has at least nine published books, mostly fantasy and children’s book. Next was a poet from the eastern USA who has been published prolifically. Third was a science writer who has, among other things, contributed to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Fourth was a person whose bio describes him as an award winning writer and film maker. Last among the top five is another novelist who is only 25 years old and will likely write many books in her life, but so far has only nine novels published. So, being an unpublished and often grubby civic employee, I was sort of in over my head. Still, that little exercise made me feel better about how I did, as somewhere in all of this I likely finished higher than some other published novelists.
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