OddContest: Results are In

I entered my very first writing contest.

It was a Flash Fiction contest and I was required to keep the wordcount at <500.  Whew, that was hard to do.  How do you create interesting, whole, fleshed-out characters, place them into an interesting setting, crafting a whole story from start to finish, while delighting and surprising a reader AND keep it to less than 500 words?!  That was fun.  I gained something from that exercise.

Let me save you from the suspense…

I didn’t win.

However, it was a good exercise.  I’m submitting writing to publishers now too and collecting my rejection letters.  It’s good for me to put it out there and work at it, improve my writing, release it to the wild and start again.  It’s a process.  I’m becoming more creative.  I’m getting better at the technical aspects.  I’m learning how to look at my work with a critical eye and see how I can make it better.

My silver lining: I suck more now, at my own personal beginning, than I will ever suck in the future.  I will never achieve this level of incompetence (in writing) ever again.  I’m crossing that threshold of realizing how much I really don’t know.  I’m beyond blissful ignorance and moving into a place where I realize how little I really know and how much I am going to need to learn if I am ever going to be able to do this.  I can already look at something I wrote a year ago and pull out the critical errors.  That’s something.  That’s learning.  That’s growth.

Sucking less is a great goal, towards which I am striving every day.

Tomorrow I am going to write something that sucks less than my rejected story.  One day I hope to write well enough to even be GOOD at this.  Baby steps for now.

Oh and here’s a link to the actual winners of the contest