Hey!
So, I know some of you have enjoyed some of my “loser” flash fiction entries. And more of them are coming in the next week or two. But did you know that I don’t always lose? For copyright reasons, I couldn’t post the winners because they were going to be published along with the other winners.
Well, now you can check them out. And if you’ve liked some of my non-winners, you owe it to yourself to see the good ones, don’t ya think?
Although, let me say up front that I don’t get any royalties from these sales. The money all goes to the company that put on the contests so that they can hire interns to be totally wrong about all of my other entries (but totally right twice, just like the blind squirrel on the VCR clock). The main thing I get from being published in these anthologies is that I can now expose myself in public without… hold on, I’m starting to think that’s not what they meant by “exposure.” Hmm. Good thing it’s too cold for me to test my theory this time of year.
The first story, which appears in “72 Hour of Insanity, Vol. IV” is called “Those who Rule the Stars and the Universe,” and it’s the first one with that title. They gave us the title and we had to run with it. It’s a historical fiction. There were a few other options to choose from, such as a sci-fi story called “The Cartographer” and one that I really, really wanted to write, which was a romance called “Beating the Boardroom.” Hoo boy, mine woulda been sticky. But instead, I decided to go with the Trial of Galileo, as the question at its heart was, quite literally, about who rules the stars and the universe. Oh, and there are some distinct nods to “Assassin’s Creed.” See if you can find them.
In the second round of contests, I again placed one story, although this one was only a third place finish. I don’t care. I’ll take it. The story in “72 Hours of Insanity, Vol. 5” (yes, they went from Roman numerals to Arabic – something about Amazon publishing being less user-friendly than CreateSpace was) is titles “Over the Top.” It’s another work of historical fiction. Hey, I’m seeing a trend. We were given five options. My first inclination was the Gunpowder Plot, but then I focused in on the Spanish Flu. This was a major epidemic that started at the tail end of World War I. It ended up wiping out more people than the War did, at least in the United States. So I went with that motif, a soldier who escaped the trenches but couldn’t escape the Flu.
So out of ten events, I won one and came in third place once. They gave out five places for each event, so let’s see, two times out of fifty places. I’m four percent of a writer, now! Although I technically couldn’t place more than once per event, so two out of ten? Twenty percent? But then something, something, third place out of the number of entries, and carry the four, and…
You know what? I think I’ll stick to historical fiction.
Thanks for all of your support, peeps.
The Writing Wombat 