Image courtesy of Stockvault.
We had a guest speaker at our Saturday writer’s group who dropped a whole load of information on us about getting published. Writing contests count for being paid, since they award prizes. I never looked at them for the same reason I haven’t been looking hard at magazine publications. It involves writing outside my comfort zone, and although I can take rejection, it always hurts on some level.
However, I was informed about how many paid contests don’t spend much of the submission fee on overhead. Contests that cost money mostly go to paying the prizes to winners. The way our guest put it, she said that it’s always a noble cause to support fellow writers. Looking at it that way has given me the excuse that I should at least try to submit to one or two contests a year, as funds permit. That way, I can at least feel like I’m doing something to support fellow writers.
That said, my income isn’t increasing or anything. I haven’t sold anything lately. And I feel guilty about doing writing contests before buying books of authors I know. For whatever reason, I feel like the journey of revising my own work has disqualified me from reviewing the works of others (when I can scrape the money together to buy them).
In the meantime, I’m looking to still write shorter fiction while finding the time to work on a book. The manuscripts I do have seem to take a backseat to everything else lately. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever find the time to publish them.
Amusing Nonsense 