WriteLife
This month, Sarah and I ventured outside our comfort zone—we entered a writing competition. The two of us barely have enough time to work on our novels, let alone work on something new for the sole purpose of submitting to a competition. I had never looked particularly hard at what competitions were on offer. And, for some reason, using our current WIP as a competition entry didn’t cross our minds.
It’s not that we haven’t tried our hand at competitions in the past. We’ve dabbled in a couple, entered one or two but never had much success. We pushed them to the side and forgot about their existence entirely for a few years. We focussed entirely on writing our novels.
Then, one of our good writing friends (thanks Sue!) sent us a competition she thought we should send our WIP to. That same week, one of our Author Spotlight interviewees (shout out to Melissa McTernan) gave some great advice. She talked about how she had just discovered competitions, and how beneficial they were to her.
It felt like the stars had aligned.
Sarah and I decided to give it a go—it wasn’t going to be too much more work to get the necessary excerpt ready for submission. And I got to put some of the feedback from our novel critique group into action. It was also a nice change of pace getting back into editing mode as we have spent most of the past year writing the first draft of our Ancient Greece book. It has made me really excited to jump into editing a bit more while Sarah is on maternity leave.
Do you regularly enter writing competitions? Have you ever submitted one of your WIPs into a competition? Let me know in the comments below.
-A
I’ve done a couple. My first short story ended up as a finalist. So, that was encouraging. I might give it a go again.
That’s so cool! And would have been really encouraging!