Honorable Mention

So Cathy, against my better judgment, sends my novel and the $100 entrance fee to the Writer's Digest Self-Published Fiction Contest.

The coolest thing about this is it means she believes in me: enough to pay the money (ok, it's our money, but still...), put the thing in an envelope, lick the stamps, walk to the post office. I can keep reminding myself about this whenever I need a boost.

The second coolest thing is I won an Honorable Mention. Which means they'll list me in their magazine and on their website. I'm not sure what their circulation is but I'm sure it's multiple orders of magnitude higher than my blog.

And they gave me a nice little certificate, and a "commentary sheet" that says things like: Plot: 5, Grammar: 4, Character Development: 5. (Grammar 4? What, you guys don't like sentence fragments and parataxis? That's a stylistic choice, man...) And then they say some nice things like "The writing style is quite sophisticated and ambitious...I found the voice to be controlled and confident. From the beginning of the novel, we are presented with a character with complex internal and external conflicts, a clear question/problem that needs to be solved, and a pace and plot structure that delivers a payoff at the end...Calvin and his friends are characters we understand and relate to, and the writing delves so deeply into their character developments that the reader is compelled to empathize with them."

And I get a gift certificate for $50 of Writer's Digest stuff. Hmm...$100 entrance fee, and I get $50 worth of stuff from their storeroom...