This year I decided to participate in the Victoria Times-Colonist's writing contest. The first round was a free-form submission (poetry, prose, fiction, non-fiction) of no more than 500 words, due by September 9. From the pool of entrants, judges would select four finalists who would be given four assignments over the next month (1 per week). Each batch of assignments would be judged weekly and the winning entry printed in the Sunday Edition of the Times-Colonist.
My entry was a story about two brothers growing up in rural Tennessee, a fictional piece I put together the night before deadline. Fiction is new to me, so it was a challenge but the characters had been rolling around in my head for about a year so when I finally sat myself down to the work it wasn't as hard as I'd expected.
Almost immediately after this my trip down to the
Olympia Weekend in Las Vegas (article forthcoming) and I more or less forgot about the contest. Then, while at a truck stop in southern Nevada on my return journey I received a call from Denise Helm, acting Editor-in-Chief at the Times-Colonist, informing me I had been selected as a finalist!
My first assignment arrived immediately and so I began work while making my way home, using my voice recorder to take notes while driving during the day and transcribing those notes in motel rooms at night.
As of today the contest is two weeks in and my third assignment was submitted yesterday. The judges notes will be sent back Thursday and I'll know by Sunday whether or not my piece was chosen out of the four on offer.
Readers are allowed to vote for their favorite piece on the newspaper's web site and the author deemed "Reader's Choice" wins an iPad classic. Overall winner receives a trip to a writer's festival next year on the Sunshine Coast.
Read my submissions and vote for me (Brennan Storr, in case you were unsure) as "Reader's Choice" at
www.timescolonist.com/writingcontest.
