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 (just the) "Writers of the Future" Entries WotF: Finally a Finalist! September 16, 2008 I'm currently one of eight finalist in the Writers of the Future contest, 2008Q3 (quarter ending June 30, 2008). I'll find out in the next month or so whether I've won. Got the call last night from Joni Labaqui, and she posted the results a few hours later. How do we feel about this?  ...except with less beard because I don't have a beard these days. This is the story I was working on and hoping to finish when I had my mild traumatic brain injury last December (err, welcome, new readers!). The story was probably 80% completed then, and with medicinal amounts of caffeine and working in short bursts, it took me another six months to finish. I first entered WotF in December 1998. This was my 20th entry over the past 9.5 years, and my first time ever getting past the first reader/coordinating judge (formerly Algis Budrys, currently K.D. Wentworth), who reads and sorts everything, and passes only the finalists on to other judges. My current tally is... 8 nonplacers 9 honorable mentions/quarterfinalists 2 semifinalists 1 finalist (or better!) And I believe I'm one "pro" sale away from being disqualified for the contest.
 "Dry Frugal with Death Rays," now at Futurismic August 5, 2008 My story Dry Frugal with Death Rays is live as this month's featured fiction at Futurismic! It's an absurdist (or at least absurd-ish) SF office romp loosely inspired by (a) a Bruce Jay Friedman short story called "The Punch" and (b) Joseph Heller's Catch 22.  This is my first story written post-Clarion to see print and my third submission to Futurismic. And, while not an SFWA-qualifying sale, I _believe_ this puts me at one sale away from Writers of the Future ineligibility. Thanks to Jen, James Maxey, Abigail Ferrance-Wu, Jud Nirenberg, and Bill Ferris for giving the story a critique last year. Couldn't have sold it without ya.
400TH REJECTION CONTEST (2008 Submission Log Weeks 25-27) July 4, 2008 (scroll down for the "Guess my Rejection" contest) Submissions 530-544 No brain power for links, maybe I'll add 'em later. Weird Tales (9th) The Colbert Report (1st) Drawn & Quarterly (2nd) The Believer (1st-5th) Abberrant Dreams (1st) Writers of the Future (20th!) ChiZine (7th) Supergrrrl Adventure Comics (1st) Asheville Film Festival (1st) Light (5th-7th) Rejections 393-397 F&SF Haiku Contest (date not available) The Believer (8 days on three poems) Asimov's (15 days) Hold Request From Fantasy, 18 days. Here's hoping. Acceptance 74, Tentative Acceptance 75 Sale of "Dry Frugal with Death Rays" to Futurismic, 42 days. Tentative acceptance from Supergrrrl Adventure Comics (1 day) pending a rewrite. This is a new, nonpaying zine from Rachel Edidin and Jen Vaughn. Pulled, Folded, or Otherwise No Reply 67-70 Cosmos (story), Interzone (story), Murky Depths (2 poems) Of Interest Yes, I entered the McCain greenscreen challenge thing. Don't know what I was thinking other than I needed to finish a project I could actually finish. A couple of bad PCS weeks, last month. Completely flaked on catching the F&SF issue announcing the winners of the haiku contest. Mine was an obvious joke anyway; glad it only had an audience of one (the editor/judge). Wow, 20th sub to Writers of the Future. It's what I was hoping to submit the week I got in the accident, so I _think_ it's finally submission ready, six months later. Brain injury aside, this story had more technical challenges than anything I've ever written, and it's been brewing at least since April '05 when I pitched it to a friend as a comic. Guess my 400th rejection, win a prize! Hey, time sure flies. First (up to) THREE PEOPLE to correctly guess where my 400th rejection will come from wins:
Currently at Rejection #397. Current outstanding subs:
And, okay. If all of the above end up as acceptances, and my 400th rejection has yet to even be submitted, I will be so happy that once I recover from the shock, I'll do my best to give everyone who enters a prize of some sort or another. (EDIT: And if something I've yet to submit--not listed above--ends up as my 400th rejection, prize goes to whoever guesses #401, and so on.)
2007 Submission Log: Weeks 35-37 September 23, 2007 Submissions 420-427 A Public Space (my first sub there) Asimov's (my 17th and 18th) Durham Emerging Artists Program (1st grant proposal for a comics project) Realms of Fantasy (my 9th) Writers of the Future (my 16th) Hardboiled Horror (my first) Weird Tales (my 6th) Rejections 300-304: McSweeney's (4th rejection, just over 6 months) F&SF (20th rejection, 13 days from JJA) Clarkesworld (4th rejection, 14 days) Writers of the Future (Honorable Mention, 15th non-winner) 2000 AD (5th rejection on 6 subs, 68 days) Of Interest: Actually quite pleased to receive my 2000 AD rejection. After no response to my fifth submission, and my sixth one going out just a week before their London offices were flooded, I was starting to think it wasn't meant to be. No comments this time, though, so there's still plenty of reason to be disappointed... Sending out a second story to Asimov's before the last one's back, which is a first for me. Odd that I didn't think to do this when their responses were running 3-4 months last year, instead of now, when I can probably expect a 4 week rejection for the first of the two stories this week. And the latest Writers of the Futre tally: 6 washes 7 quarterfinalist/honorable mentions 2 semifinalists and one pending. Back to work.
2007 Submission Log: Week 25 June 22, 2007 Submissions 395-396: Stories to Shimmer (my 2nd) and Writers of the Future (my 15th). Though with the finalists posted a few weeks ago on the WotF blog, my story is already at the next market. Rejections 273-274 Honorable Mention from Writers of the Future (2007Q2), rejection from Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show (just over 3 months). Of Interest: "Honorable Mention" is WotF's new name for quarterfinalist, which I think is a smart change. I remember when I received my first QF, having to to clarify with other writers whether it meant "You are a finalist and we'll let you know what happens when the judging is over" or "you were a finalist, but it's all over. Attaboy." And it breaks my baboon heart to read the excitement of recent entrants/quarterfinalists who go from elated to crushed as a veteran entrant reluctantly clarifies. Also a smart move (IMO) is the decision to not list the quarter judges for the contest in the QF/Honorable Mention letter anymore, since Honorable Mentions and Semifinalists don't make it far enough to be read by anybody but the first judge. So the current WotF tally for me at 14 entries is... Non-placers: 6 QF/Honorable Mentions: 6 Semifinalists: 2 Finalists: 0 Placers: 0 ...with the fifteenth in the mail this week, because apparently I need someone to publish and send me a copy of a book called "Dude, Writers of the Future's Just Not That into You."
2007 Submission Log: Weeks 22-24 June 16, 2007 Submissions 391-394: Stories to M&FSF (my 18th), Strange Horizons (9th sub overall, but 6th fiction sub), Asimov's (15th overall, 9th fiction), and Analog (10th). Rejections 266-272: Two from MF&SF (28 days from GVG, 9 days from JJA), Futurismic (32 days), Flytrap (37 days), and the last of the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest non-placers which I'll be counting here (see below). Of Interest: Of my last six subs to MF&SF, it looks like every other one got to GVG, and often not the ones I'd expect, based on my judgment of the stories and my reading of the magazine. Decided to stop counting Cartoon Caption Contest entries as submissions, because I don't want it to get to the point where I've "subbed" there more often than I have anywhere else. Might still throw jokes their way, so long as I have stuff in the New Yorker's "real" slush pile. But it's a throwaway thing, on the off chance that my name will flash across an editor's eyeline, but it was never an important part of my submission strategy. Writers of the Future has posted its 2007Q2 Finalists to its blog at just 60 days from the entry deadline. Nice because this has freed up my entry-story to send it to another market, even before I got my rejection.
2007 Submission Log: Week 19 May 14, 2007 Submissions 381-385 Poetry to Mythic Delirium (my first three; I believe this is the first time they've been open to subs since I picked up my first copy) and New Yorker (6th submission there), and--since I have something in the slush pile--why not resume throwing my name into the Caption Contest pile again (for the 14th time)? Still at 264 rejections, but I've got some miscellany to cover here: First: I noticed that I skipped rejection 259 in my last two Submission Log entries, which is a shame because it was a fun one. I wrote a humor story for the John Joseph Adams-helmed issue of Shimmer near the beginning of the year. I had some time before the deadline so I sent it to JJA in his role as slush editor at F&SF first. He passed it up to editor Gordon Van Gelder, which I believe is the only time he's liked one of my humor pieces enough to do so. It didn't grab GVG, so I queried JJA to see whether he'd want to consider it for Shimmer. "Yes, please," he said, and off it went. It made it to the final cut before getting the axe, but JJA said he liked it enough that if he had more room in the issue, it would have found a home there. Second: Though I received a quarterfinalist notification for Writers of the Future's 2007Q1 period in my SASE back in March, I recently received a semifinalist notice for the same story, along with a critique by first judge KD Wentworth, in a second envelope. If the critique, which specifically discussed my story, hadn't been included, I'd be inclined to think the semifinalist notice was the mistake of the two, but it looks like I can upgrade my current tally to... Non-placers: 6 Quarterfinalists: 5 Semifinalists: 2 Finalists: 0 Placers: 0 ...with my 14th entry awaiting a verdict for 2007Q2. Small victory there, I guess. Third: I began sending out queries last month. Not sure whether/how to tally them here. I figure queries are going to be a big part of my writing life over the next few years, so I better come up with a system before I get overwhelmed.
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Alex Wilson writes fiction and comics in Carrboro, NC. His work has appeared/will appear in Asimov's Science Fiction, The Rambler, Weird Tales, The Florida Review, Futurismic, Shimmer, ChiZine, FutureQuake, Pif, and Dragon. Locus Magazine has called him a "promising new writer," and Publishers Weekly also has nice things to say. Alex runs the audiobook project/podcast Telltale Weekly and the writer wiki Guidevines. He publishes the minicomic/zine Inconsequential Art. He is a 2006 Clarion graduate. Blog Archives 2008 - Clever Label TBA 2007 - BadYearNoCookie 2006 - Clarion! 1st Pro Sale! 2005 - Peers and Peerless 2004 - Telltale Launch 2003 - Dog bites, acting out 2002 - In my mind, I'm going... 2001 - Marriage, Macs, 1st Cons 2000 - Setback, Milestones 1999 - Engaged, Graduated 1998 - Creative Independence    Powered by MT 3.35 MySpace Profile Technorati Profile |
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