I got my email today from Writer’s Digest, informing me that I was not among the finalists for the short story competition. I would have been pleasantly surprised if I had been. The story I wrote was put together pretty quickly, and I didn’t have time for an outside editor to look at it. There are changes I’m going to make to the story, and I will get someone else to look it over. I’m considering trying to submit it to Clarkesworld, but they’ve closed submissions for now. They were flooded with “stories” cranked out using things like ChatGPT. If nothing else, I’ll post the story here.

I’ve submitted a short story to the Writer’s Digest Annual Short Story Competition. It was something I wrote over the past week, and I probably rushed it. But all I have to lose is the entry fee, and it’s a start. The top 10 stories get published in Writer’s Digest, and that’s the main draw for me. Several of the top positions get prize money, and first overall gets a trip to their annual writer’s conference in New York and an opportunity to pitch work to editors and publishers.

Once I know the outcome, and if I’m not among those selected to be published, then I’ll post a copy of the story here. It’s a science fiction story, and set nominally in my Unimanse fictional universe. It was also an experiment: I chained together a series of drabbles (100-word microfiction stories) to form a larger story. It was fun trying to make it work, keep the plot focused, and make each 100-word section a story of its own.