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Fortitude - A Daily Magazine for Being Human: They accept any pieces of original writing. I wonder if it's worth submitting a few of my short pieces there. If they make the front page, I'll get $10 for them.
Xomba - another site where you can use your Adsense. Check it out or ask me about it.
My Xomba posts
I also write for Freelance Tips.
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Writing Words - writing it is the only way of getting it written
You think NaNoWriMo is insane? 30 days to finish a novel draft seems like a long time if you consider there's a 3-day novel contest. It takes place this coming weekend (September 4 - 6) and registration is open until Friday. I have to get back to the day job tomorrow and won't be able to write next Monday (it's not a holiday in the UK), so I'm not going to enter the contest. There are plenty of other writing challenges in September, however:
NaBloPoMo: One blog post a day for a month
The September theme is ART. Your blog posts don't have to refer to the theme, though, you can blog about any topic. NaBloPoMo is great for waking up a dormant blog. I've participated twice already this year and will have another go at it in November.
Write a Mini-Novel: 500 words a day
Someone on the NaNo forums is looking for people to join him in a mini-novel challenge in September. He suggests a minimum of 500 words but states in a later post that "there are no wordcount police for this". 500 words a day isn't much, though, most people will be able to write that in 30 minutes. I'm tempted to join the September mini-novel writers.
750words.com One Month Challenge: Write 750 words every day
750words.com took the concept of writing morning pages and created a 21st century solution for it. I've only signed up recently and am planning to write a blog post about the site after I've used it for a while longer, but I do want to draw your attention to their challenge. If you are familiar with the concept of morning pages and have always struggled with them, this one may be for you.The challenge runs every month, so you don't have to sign up for the one in September.
Thirty Days of Creating challenge: Not just for writers
CoachCreativeSpace is a community for creative people across the board. They run a Thirty Days of Creating challenge in September to help you establish a creative routine. There is no minimum word count, the only thing you have to do is create something every day. Even if you just write five minutes a day, you'll finish this challenge successfully. Might be a good one for freewriting exercises, this one, as there is no minimum word count you have to reach.
First and third person narratives are common forms of narration. In general, writers are told that second person narrative is best avoided.
Thing is, I like telling stories from the second person perspective. I like using "you" rather than "I" or "she" - not in every story I write but every now and again. There are stories when the second person point of view just is the best choice. Stories that almost write themselves. It's fun to address the reader so directly.
I agree that if the story isn't written well, second person narrative is even worse than first or third person. If done well, though, I love stories told from second person point of view.
So here's what I'm going to do: I'm going to write a couple, maybe three short stories in second person and submit them to upcoming short story competitions. Let's see if I can bag a few successes.
Travel writing is an ideal genre for fiction writers who want to branch out (I should know, I am a travel writer by day). Even though you have to base your writing on facts, it's important to bring the place you write about to life. You have to make your readers smell the sea air, feel the sand beneath their feet and wish they were there. Travel writing is all about show, don't tell.
If you want to try your hand at travel writing, why not give the Leaf Books Postcard and Short Travel Writing Competition a go? You could win the £150 prize. The competition is fairly open as long as you evoke "a clear sense of place" and don't write more than 300 words. You can send it your submission on a postcard, too. The deadline is the 31st of August and the entry fee is £3 per submission or £10 for four postcards.
"You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist."
Isaac Asimov
Wise words. I'm not sure Asimov was talking about short story competitions there, but his quote is true for all aspects of writing that involve sending your work out. You have to be persistent. Keep sending your stories out and take on all the criticism you receive in the process. Might not be fun to be told where you went wrong, but take criticism as helpful advice and implement it. See if it makes a difference. Above all, be patient and persist.
The links to short story competitions I've posted recently were mostly run by UK magazines and other literary institutions. Today, I'm looking across the pond to Canada.
The Writers' Union of Canada runs an annual Short Prose Competition for Developing Writers with a prize of CAD2,500. To be eligible, you need to be a Canadian citizen or a landed immigrant. Submissions may be up to 2,500 words long and must be previously unpublished. They only accept hardcopy submissions and there's a CAD25 entry fee. Deadline is the 3rd of November.
The Canadian Writers' Union runs a number of other writing competitions, but the 2010 deadlines for those have all passed already. It's never too early to prepare for the 2011 contests, though.
Are you playing Warcraft, StarCraft or Diablo? Do you enjoy writing stories set in one of these game universes? Then Blizzard is running the perfect writing competition for you: the 2010 Blizzard Global Writing Contest.
Stories can be between 2,500 and 7,500 words long, the deadline is the 23rd of August. The first prize is a a trip to Blizzard HQ in California, so you really have to be a fan of the Blizzard games.
If you want to write competition-winning short stories, you have to read lots of them in the first place. Don't know where to start? I have a suggestions for you:
Stories, a new (short) story anthology edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio has been published on the 15th of June. It features stories from a variety of authors - Joyce Carol Oates, Chuck Palahniuk, Roddy Doyle, Jodi Picoult and Neil Gaiman, to name just a few - and genres, even though they are all broadly fantastical. The mix of established and newer authors and stories of different lengths makes Stories an absolute must-read for writers of short fiction.
Writing Words is turning into Writing Competition Alert Central these days. But what I can I do, I keep finding these grate competitions and I know I'm not going to enter them all, so I might as well share them with you.
Today's find is a flash fiction contest for pieces between 250 and 750 words, the Biscuit International Flash Fiction Prize 2010. The entry fee is £9 per submission, which seems a bit steep, but then the prizes look good
[ Click here to read more ]
Here's another handful of writing competitions I found while researching short story competitions on Sunday.
Cinnamon Press runs three competitions twice a year with deadlines on the 30th of June and the 30th of November
[ Click here to read more ]
King Lake Publishing is running an Unpublished Author Competition for a year. It started in May this year, so there's still 10 months left for writers to submit their unpublished novels. Writers who had short story, poetry or non-fiction published can enter the competition as long as they haven't published any novels - self-publication counts for this, too.
Every month King lake Publishing are looking for novel submissions in a different genre
[ Click here to read more ]
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