L. Ron Hubbard and Me

Back in January of this year, an English zine offered writers the opportunity to do a NaNoWriWee. Now, we're all familiar with National Novel Writers Month, aka NaNoWriMo, where intrepid writers vow to write 50K—yep, that's fifty-freakin'-thousand—words in a single month, and not even a month with 31 days. No sir, NaNoWriMo takes place in November every year, so the said intrepid writers lose an entire day of writing as opposed to some other month.

Okay. So I've succeed at NaNoWriMo—been there, done that, accomplished the amazing feat of writing 50 thousand words in 30 days. Twice, in fact.

But the Kernal, the English zine I mentioned, wanted to up the ante. They proposed a NaNoWriWee—in other words, a National Novel Writing Weekend. Thought it was gonna be 'week', didn't you? Nope. Weekend, as in three days; okay, a long weekend, but still. And they didn't necessarily insist on a true novel in three short, frantic days, but the goal was for a sturdy-sized, complete story told in a novella.

Okay, I read about it and I was in. After all, who really knows how much she can write in 3 days…until she tries, right?

So, I had an idea, a steampunk-tinged zombie mashup, that I wanted to try out. I did. Got just a shade over 18K before I finished up late on a Sunday evening in January.

And I entered it into the competition…and came in either second or third, since there was a winner and two runner-ups. I'm calling it second, though the other runner-up might have some issues with that. Never mind.

So anyway, I had this reads-surprisingly-well-in-my-opinion novella, and bragging rights about coming in second—or possibly third—out of about 130 entries.

Now what was I going to do with it?

I decided to enter it into L. Ron Hubbard's Writers of the Future contest, of course. I had to whittle it down to 17K words, cause that's the limit, but that wasn't too hard. I write fancy sometimes; don't we all?

Anyway, I entered. Do you know how many people enter the Writers of the Future contest every quarter? Me neither, but I'm leaning towards somewhere between a whole bunch and a gazillion, from lots of countries too.

Did I win? No, I did not.

But I did get an Honorable Mention, out of all those bunches of submissions.

So I'm happy.

And I'm working on a sequel.