Remember This Excitement

Alright readers...have you ever submitted your work anywhere? I don't necessarily mean your novels and anthologies to publication houses (though that too), but I'm curious about the little things. Does your library have a creative writing contest? Does your school? What about creative essays for scholarships? Have you written for your local newspaper? (Doesn't count if you're part of the normal and paid staff!)

What was it like for you? Did you win? Were you published? What did you get from that experience?

I ask because today I'm reminding myself of how much all the little things really do mean and just how much they can boost your confidence.

Last year I finally entered the Writer's Digest Annual Writing Competition after watching it drift by for several years. I decided it couldn't hurt to try. My goal wasn't winning. I knew it was a huge national contest and my chances were ridiculously slim. (Not to say that winning things is a bad thing!) So instead my personal goal was to place. There are 10 categories and I entered 2 of them. In the rules, Writer's Digest stated that they would recognize the top 100 entries in each category. There are thousands that get sent in for each category, so being recognized at all is pretty exciting.

And lo and behold...I placed. I got 98th place in the Rhyming Category for my piece "Exploitation of a Chair". (If there's enough interest, I will be happy to post the poem.) 98th place can sound rather discouraging, but I didn't take it that way. I did exactly what I set out to do. I placed! That means out of the thousands of submissions the editors read through for months, I stood out enough for them to set aside my name. Wow.

This year I plan on entering again. It can't hurt, only potentially help. My goal is the same. I want to place. I want to get a number next to my poem and not end up in the discard pile. And if I want to take that goal a step farther, I want 97th place, one better than last year!

You can enter too! Go to Writer's Digest and check out the contest. May 2 is the deadline, though there is a late deadling of May 20. It's not just a poetry contest, there's something for everyone. Best of luck to all!

The Writer's Digest competition isn't the only thing that got me thinking about the excitement of accepted submissions. A good friend of mine Tea & Yarn recently started writing for Yahoo's Contributor Network and referred me to it. (This used to be called Associated Content if that is more familiar to you.) It's a fascinating service in which people post articles or bits of creative writing and get paid as people view them. But the payment isn't the big reason we started with the service. (Because let's face it, you probably won't get rich off this service anyway.) But it's the joy of being able to submit our work on something other than our own personal blogs. It's also the encouragement we get from actually have writing projects to work on outside of our own long-term goals.

Today I submitted my first article and I'm as eager as a kid on Christmas watching it sit there with it's status saying "Submitted" and waiting for it to say "Approved" instead. Once it does, I'll post a link here for all of you!