Website Domain Move

That was exciting. It took us nearly 72 hours to accomplish what was to be a ten-minute change to our web site. We still don't know what went wrong, but the engineers at the ISP had to get involved twice to unravel it. We apologize for having the website down for so long, but it was out of our hands. As we grow, backup and redundant systems will have to come into consideration.

Meanwhile, we are working with the manuscripts of our contest finalists to hone their work into publishable form. We've been considering a second writing contest in the fall. We think this one would be less restrictive about the geographic connection. If you'd like to see such a contest, please email us or post a comment here. Thanks.

Writing Contest Finalist Profiles

Our writing contest finalists now have brief profiles on our web page. We hope you'll give them a look (see Author Profiles). They have three very different tales. We hope to make a few pages available on our website so you can see a sample of what they wrote. The announcement of our winner is expected on Friday, June 8th.

Writing Contest Thoughts

With the announcement of our writing contest finalists, it’s time to reflect on the contest itself. The website was our most difficult challenge with the contest. Without some patience on the part of the submitting authors, we’d still be wresting with problems. We certainly appreciate your assistance in working out the kinks. Next year, we’ll probably expand the geographic ‘limits.’ We had lots of complaints from those who didn’t meet our geography criterion.

About the submissions: An estimated seventy percent of the submissions read our submission guidelines and followed them. The other thirty percent went their own way, to one degree or another. There’s nothing that discourages a manuscript evaluation reader more than getting a manuscript in some fancy font, single spaced in a PDF file. We can’t even reformat it so it is readable. Margins and double spacing seemed foreign to these authors. You also must spell-check your manuscript. One submitter even asked that we forgive the numerous spelling errors in the submitted manuscript! If the author doesn’t take the effort to fix his/her own spelling, punctuation, and grammar then we likely won’t take the effort to read the manuscript.

We also received several short stories, a smattering of non-fiction and off-genre submissions. It’s not clear why these authors pay the ten dollar submission fee when they know they’ll be rejected.

There were also two non-finalist submissions that were routed to our regular submission readers for publishing consideration.

Writing Contest Finalists

We'll be announcing the three finalists on the web page this weekend. The details for announding the winning manuscript will be forthcoming shortly thereafter.

Writing Contest Status and Fallout

We've identified two candidate manuscripts as finalist in our contests. There are about a dozen that have not yet been reviewed. It would be really nice if we had a staff of twenty to read all the manuscripts, but we don't. We're getting through them as fast as possible. Should be complete in ten days and off to the judges for selection.

We've also been getting some negative email and web posts for no apparent reason (at least that we know of). Fifty rejections are bound to annoy a few authors. On the other hand, we are inching along, slower than we anticipated, but still moving forward. We hope to be able to post the covers for the first two books, maybe even a third, in a few weeks. Copy editing, cover development, and life in general seems to thwart our best efforts to hurry up.

Writing Contest Comments

Some of you who have submitted to the novel writing contest might be intersted in how it is going. So far, we have about twenty manuscripts that seem to be worth a full read. In our estimation, that's a lot out of 100 or so that were submitted. We're a little swamped with all of the reading so our planned website update is on hold for the moment until we catch up. Thanks for your patience.

Running a Writing Contest

Whew! That was a challenge. Our Novel Writing Contest is now closed so maybe our website issues will subside. We had no idea how many ways users would try to access the web pages. And here's an interesting one we still haven't figure out -- when non-US users enter data, they have their own computers with local keyboards and language-specific local characters. How do we search a database from our US-English keyboards where the user's name has an oomlat? We also learned that authors are terrible readers. Many don't, won't, or can't read the instructions. Of course, we learned a lot about writing clear instruction (and we'll do better at this next year). It was an interesting experience and we got some excellent manuscripts. We got some stinker's, too. We're still curious as to why some registered and paid their entry fee, but never submitted their manuscripts. And why do people register with email addresses that can't receive email from us?