Suvudu Writing Contest, It was worth a shot

Well, it's over and done.

The powers that be at Suvudu have released the names of the winners of their writing contest... Congratulations Richard Gropp. I am sufficiently jealous of your success.

:)

Actually, Richard's submission sounds absolutely intriguing:

About a young photographer who travels to the barricaded city of Spokane, Washington, in hopes of gaining attention for his work by photographing the bizarre incidents occurring there. No one knows why people seem to vanish from the city, or why some eyewitnesses report strange manifestations while other onlookers see nothing.”

And from the looks of things, it wasn't exactly an easy contest to judge. 700 submissions to go through in roughly two months... Yikes!

So now I've got to get to cracking on what's what with my own writing... I have a few ideas and of course there is always Plan B. But I need a little more refining with my manuscript - something that will really get my creative juices flowing. And I think if I take a quick break away from the "must get published!!!!!" mindset and just start trying to write - I would do a lot better.

Of course, publication is still the ultimate goal. I just need a less stressful way to go about it.

So I started looking at other writing contests that I could find. Here's a list of what I've found thus far:

Edit Fast is a complete writer's resource that offers proofreading, editing, a list of literary agents and publishers and now writing contests. In fact, they have another novel writing contest in about a month or two.

The International 3-Day Novel Writing Contest - in short, this contest is NaNoWriMo on speed. Labor Day weekend, 72 hours - Write! Okay, so clearly this novel would not be eligible for that contest; but the contest itself is interesting and it might just be worth it to take a break from this one and see what I can do there.

Last but not least, Writer'sType is holding a first chapter competition. Essentially, if I choose to enter this novel into their competition, I can only submit the first chapter... From there I'm not really sure what would happen but it sounds interesting to say the least.