m. c. de marco

As part of being back on the wagon, I wrote a new story this week and submitted it to Writers of the Future—-at 11:50pm Thursday night, thanks to their new online submissions policy. Today I finally got around to logging it and my NaNoWriMo novel in my giant writing spreadsheet, and I noticed that I’d gone over the million word mark back on November 30th. Since I started writing in the summer of 2001, I also managed to do the whole thing in just under 10 years.

Thanks to some fellow Odyssey graduates for pointing me to the latest Writers of the Future contest news. The first set of honorable mentions for last quarter has been up at the new location of the WotF blog for a while now. The second set appeared in a press release last week; yours truly was honorably mentioned. The semi-finalists and finalists came out yesterday in another press release.

Clarkesworld Magazine announced that they’ll be accepting submissions up to 8,000 words in 2010, although they still prefer 4,000.

SFScope reported on the fourth annual Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest, being co-sponsored by the National Space Society. Submissions should be positive, near-future space exploration stories of less than 8,000 words, due April 1st.

I was browsing the Writers of the Future blog for this quarter’s results (more Honorable mentions are up, but no finalists yet) and I came across some old contest advice: K.D. Wentworth’s top-five list of what not to do when entering the WotF contest. To summarize: grammatical errors, bad spelling, withholding information, tropes, and infodumps are bad; showing the sf/f content early on is good.

I got another mysterious Honorable Mention certificate in the mail yesterday. I hadn’t seen my name on the Writers of the Future blog back when the finalists were announced for last quarter, but this time when I checked back I found myself listed after all. I thought the story was pretty good, although possibly doomed by thoughtless typos, so it was a relief to find out they also thought it was passable.

I’ve been wondering what became of my WotF entry from last quarter, and today I think I found out. I got an Honorable Mention certificate in the mail, along with my SASE. This could be a stray certificate from another quarter—-my name was not mentioned on the WotF blog this time—-but the timing suggests this quarter.

Via SFScope: it’s Bulwer-Lytton time again, and the 2008 winners have been denounced—-I mean, announced. Bulwer-Lytton penned the eternal “It was a dark and stormy night,” and the contest challenges writers to produce worse opening lines than that gem.