Writing Wrongs

October 03, 2005

During the drive to work, I was thinking about this short �story� I wrote a while back. Right around New Year�s as a matter of fact. I eventually titled it Auld Lang Syne and for reasons still unknown, submitted it to a few contests.

It vanished into a black hole. And that�s okay. Sometimes I write stories that work for other people and sometimes they only work for me. And sometimes I can�t tell the two apart, unfortunately, until some time has passed.

I was thinking of retiring this particular story. No regrets for either writing it or sending it out. It simply was. It served its purpose at the time, which was to get me to write something absolutely freeing.

So I�m sipping my chai while logging into my email account and what do I see? An email with the subject line: 3rd Place! The sender was obviously excited. At this point, I�m not entirely sure it isn�t spam, so I open it with some trepidation.

Nope. Not spam. In fact, it seems Auld Lang Syne placed third in the contest. And hey, that comes with $50.00 prize money too. The contest coordinator mentioned that it made the top ten rankings of at least three judges (at least three? That�s a lot of judges for a short story contest).

So far I�ve resisted the urge to write back and ask them if they�re aware the story doesn�t have much of a plot. Oh, it has lots of things, like a star quarterback returning to his hometown after twelve years, references to prom and puking (I wonder if vomit stories are a new trend for me), class rings, Motel Sixes, and Miller Lite, but I�m not sure there�s an actual plot wrapped up in all this.

Still, I�d hate to part with that fifty bucks, so for now, I�m keeping quiet. Line up, the chai�s on me.

Charity Tahmaseb wrote at 11:17 a.m.

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