A call came through last night, and the voice on the other end of the line told me that my story had made it to second place in Writers of the Future.
Wait, what?
This is my fourth entry in the contest and, while I’ve received encouraging placements before, I did not expect to make the jump to the top three in my quarter.
If you’re considering a submission I recommend it. Sure, thousands of people submit in each round but it’s open to all non-professionals, free to enter, and has one of the best pay rates in speculative publishing. Check out the official guidelines or visit The Grinder for more details.
My story is 17,000 words of adventurous and sometimes humorous science fiction. I love it, and am very pleased that the judges liked it too.
“Piracy for Beginners” will be published in the 2022 Writers of the Future anthology.
Yesterday’s dramatic image showcased an Icelandic waterfall and tomorrow is Monday. Iceland plus “Oh great, Monday, I could use some humor” equals Horse Mail.
Growing up, we were taught to give books the first sentence test. If that first sentence drew us in we’d move on to the first paragraph. I consider that mindset excellent training for authors running the editorial gauntlet.
Here are a few examples of good openers. While I may not love every one, it’s a good collection, made even more useful by the side-by-side comparison with other great literature.
My afternoon disappeared with a giant sucking sound, so please enjoy this story about hope, the power of community, and doing what you can where you are.
Lieutenant Auri Murr knew the exact moment when her grandmother died.
She was on duty in engineering when Grandma Shanna’s dappu-wood bead on her kin-necklace cracked: a sharp, dry, quiet sound, unmistakable to anyone from Darmindu Colony. It could have woken Auri from a sound sleep.
The impact day broadcast of the actual test will start on Monday, September 26 at 6 p.m. EDT, which you can watch on NASA TV, a livestream on NASA’s YouTube channel.
On Monday (Sept. 26), the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft will slam into a small space rock called Dimorphos — on purpose, at a staggering 4 miles (6.6 kilometers) per second. The exercise comes in the name of planetary defense, which aims to protect human civilization from any large asteroid that may be on a collision course. For the mission to succeed, scientists need to measure exactly how much the orbit of Dimorphos around its larger companion, Didymos, speeds up. And the DART spacecraft won’t be in any shape to make that measurement itself, so mission personnel are relying on ground-based telescopes to track the aftermath of impact.
If this trial run works, terrific, but even failure would better prepare us to defend Earth.
“Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you’re going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book…”
The Booker prize-winning author of the Wolf Hall trilogy, Dame Hilary Mantel, has died aged 70, her publisher HarperCollins has confirmed.
Mantel was regarded as one of the greatest English-language novelists of this century, winning the Booker Prize twice, for Wolf Hall and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, which also won the 2012 Costa book of the year.
…
Writer and broadcaster Damian Barr said her death is “such a loss”.
“With every book she redefined what words can do,” he tweeted, adding: “She’s the only person I ever interviewed that speaks in whole, flawless paragraphs. I can’t believe we won’t have another book from her.”
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“The pen is in our hands. A happy ending is ours to write.”
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