Reay Jespersen

So the winners for the first mifiction contest were announced today, and I was none of’em. Basically, they’re taking the classic Choose Your Own Adventure-style approach to stories and formatting them for use on mobile devices. Great idea, to be sure, and one that I think will do well. However, it would seem that my concept - having the reader be a superhero and take on various criminals en route to discovering what a supercriminal mastermind is up to at the climax - either wasn’t done well enough, or wasn’t their cup of tea (no UK pun intended). What makes it a little more disappointing is that I had thought that if it were a success, my story could very easily be spun off into other stories featuring the same character. Much like a comic series.

Having said all that, I’d already known for the last week or so that even if I were rejected, I’d plow through and finish the story, at least for myself. It’s not only proving an interesting challenge to offer the reader multiple choices for certain actions while trying to keep the main thrust of the story moving forward - a unique challenge to this kind of format - but at over twenty packed pages, it’s also easily the longest (prose) story I’ve written since high scool. Anyone who knows me knows that while I’m constantly struck, and smitten by, new ideas for stories, characters, and settings, following through with them to completion happens all too rarely - typically due to getting hit with other ideas which then lure me away from work on earlier ideas. So having pushed myself to get this far in the hopes of publishing through mifiction, I’m eager to finish the story, if only for myself. I at least want to finish the first draft, as I’m not sure how much polish I want to bother putting on it when it’s not going anywhere at the moment, and the often-advised putting it in the proverbial drawer and forgetting about it will let my fresh eyes in months or years to come take a more clear-headed approach to editing and re-writing, should I wish to fix it up in the future.

This also raises an item of note I’ve been considering the last couple of weeks:
It shall be my New Year’s Resolution to submit stories and/or screenplays to no fewer than twenty-five contests or publishers in 2010. A scant number for writers who’ve been pushing themselves on submissions as hard as I should’ve been for a long time, but a wholly achievable number for someone who’s done precious little submitting in the past. An average of two submissions per month (plus one for good measure) should by rights be something I could do in my sleep. And if I happen to blow that target out of the water early on in the year, then so much the better.

In light of that, if you’re a writer and submit your stuff to contests or publishers who are looking for short story/flash fiction or feature-length/short screenplay material, please mention them in the comments section or contact me directly with your (much appreciated) insight.

Thanks very much!