2008 Writing Contest Winner

The 2008 Writing Contest was over for the authors at the end of April. It took us another month to get through the backlog of submitted manuscripts. Finally, we reached a decision as to the three finalists, and we now have selected a winner who will be announced on June 21st on our website.

Last year, many of the submitted manuscripts were not well written, had numerous grammatical and punctuation errors in the first few pages, and were generally not ready for prime time. (Hint: don't send us a note asking that we ignore spelling errors because you are a poor speller!) As a result, we could weed out many manuscripts by reading only a few pages.

This year, the number of submitted manuscripts doubled and the quality was markedly higher. We estimate that only 25% were rejected in the first few pages. Ten or so manuscripts were read completely by more than one reader. In the end, the final decision wasn't clear, either. We had some really good submission and we certainly thank all of you for submitting.

We also apprciate your patience if your submitted a non-contest manuscript during this time. We sure got bogged down, but we are now back on track and trying to catch up. We are only about five weeks behind at this point!