I Love Writing Contests and Pitch Events

There are a lot of writing contests and pitch events coming up, and I am going to enter every one I can. I love contests and pitch events! All the contests I have entered so far are the result of my participation on Twitter. I love contests with a Twitter feed I can follow. It is at times nerve wracking, but most of the time it is educational and fun. So, why do I enter contests? Let me tell you.

Friends and Community

I have yet to meet any of the friends I've made in contests in real life. But, having a growing network of people I know who I can root for and who root for me is awesome. I learn so much from other pre-published authors. We share cool stuff we find online and encourage each other through the #amquerying trenches and doldrums. It is great when one of the people I've been in a contest with who has gone on to gain agent representation comes back to encourage the rest of us in the next round of contests. Y'all rock!

Feedback

This is one of the main reasons I enter. The hope of getting feedback on my work is such a draw for me. I love getting feedback from other writers and people in the business. Friends and family are generous with their praise and criticism, and I really appreciate their words, but to get feedback from someone in the industry is priceless.

FREE STUFF and Discounts

Some contests are big enough and well known enough that companies will use it as a way to promote their products and offer discounts to participants. That is how I first learned about Scrivener a wonderful  word processing software program that is for writers written by writers. I use it for most of my writing now. Along with companies, individuals often support the contests through give-a-ways of critiques or editing. I have benefited greatly from their generosity.

Winning

Yeah, winning would be nice, but the other stuff is good too. I've made it to the final rounds of a few contests, and that has been great and beneficial, but honestly, I think if I ever do gain agent representation, I will miss the excitement and camaraderie of these contests.

To Tell These Stories

After months of hearing that I should have a blog, I'm taking the plunge and starting one. One of the reasons for finally doing this now,  I admit,  is that I always felt left out when people do blog hops during writing contests. I didn’t have a blog because I don’t think I write well enough to have one. Yeah, you read that right.

 I don’t think I write well enough to have a blog. 

You may ask, ‘Then what makes you think you can write well enough to write a novel?’  The simple answer is that I may not write well, but I do a heck of a job revising. As my kids say, my rough drafts sound like they are written by a six-year-old. But then I revise, and they tell me I write as well as, or better than, a lot of the authors who are currently published.

I love my kids. They are my harshest critics and my biggest fans. 

Writing takes time, revising takes, even more, time. By the time I finish writing this post, it will probably have gone through four or more revisions. I’m not a good writer. I’m a good reviser, and I’d rather be revising fiction than blog posts, but I’ve been told that when I become published, it will be good to have a blog.  Another reason I haven’t started a blog until now is partially explained in this blogs title, To Tell These Stories. When I write, I want to write about things I care about. I don’t write to become famous or to have people notice what I have done; I write because I have something I want to say. I don’t know if I have enough things to say, that people would want to hear about, to maintain a blog with what I would expect to be at least weekly posts. But, here it is anyway, a very unimpressive first post. This is my blog, To Tell These Stories. Welcome.