The Writing Show Contest Update 5

Well, it's Monday night.

I originally said I'd be aiming to have an entry by Monday; I said this on Thursday.

After I posted it online I realized that the 5000 word limit on the short story came to about 20 pages of text. There's no way I could do that in only five days' work; you're not an author, this isn't your full time job.

I don't have an entry ready for submission. I do have one ready for editing, though. The word count when all was done was about ten words shy of 6,000 words.

I am rather dissatisfied with it too. I felt that as the ending (and my self imposed deadline) loomed I had taken the quick way out and the ending seemed too tacked on, too much like something you'd expect from a young adult story.

There was more I wanted to do with it, but if I realized those ideas it would probably end up being 10,000 words or more, easily. And this was without editing. I don't know if the tone or voice was anything worth reading by someone else. I'm fully prepared to have my "first reader" come back to me telling me that it sucked.

Unfortunately it's my wife that will be reading it first, so chances are she won't come out and say how horrible it really is. But once it's trimmed by about a thousand words and any glaring errors are corrected I am hoping that it will be an entry. I also doubt I'll win, but my goal is to manage an entry. If I'm really lucky I'd have some feedback. I'm trying to face my fear of failure and criticism by entering this contest so I suppose that by redefining "winning" as even entering the thing...I'll reach that goal.

Right now I'm waiting for my wife to look at it and see what she can cut out and reword. Maybe there will be sections to redo, I don't know. But at any rate I'm hoping that I'll be able to export it to PDF and email it in to Paula B. at The Writing Show within a couple days.