Contest Season

I mailed off my GH scores, and as usual, I have mixed feelings. Not about the entries–I’m darned clear about how I feel about them–but about me.

The score range on this batch covered more territory than in some years, and I even saw a couple that were in the wrong category. How is it possible to miss that? One actually had the proper category printed on the cover sheet, yet that wasn’t the category I judged. The other just wouldn’t fit, period. So is this a case of writer can’t get it straight, or writer thinks the competition in category #2 will be weaker, so I’ll just plop mine in there?

Huge errors like that make me feel better about my own writing. At least I can keep my categories straight. But they also show problems that I wonder about for myself. Backstory dump? I do that (hazard of writing my way into a story). Blocks of description? Also guilty. “Meh.” I worry about that, too.

Contest entries can give you props, too, especially if you don’t make usage errors like rein/reign or write synopses that read like DVD programming instructions translated by non-native speakers into English.

The thing that worries me is the story. Some of these ideas were really interesting, and I wonder whether mine by comparison are dull. Same-old, same-old. Behind the curve. Whether what I write stands out or ends up a competent 6.7 on a 1-9 scale. I’m not a huge contest junkie because I’m too damned competitive. I don’t mind feedback (ask my critique partners), but there’s something about the “me against them” aspect of contests that brings out the Viking in me. If I can’t pillage, I don’t want anything to do with it.

Friends of mine who believe in me tell me I should enter (fill in prestigious contest) because they’re sure I’ll do well. It’s happened once. Once, and the manuscript that hit isn’t publishable now because the targeted line closed. Everything else–stuff I’ve cared about–has been close, but no cookie. It’s frustrating. And now I have an agent, which means more of the same, but a bigger ouch when the “no” comes back. You can chocolate and massage your way out of a low contest score pretty easily. Not so with an editor.

I’m interested to see what finals.