Nothing ventured
It takes guts to enter competitions.
We hold our work up to the world and say ‘Here it is. I’ve worked hard on this. It’s as good as I can make it.’
It’s easy to leave those finished or unfinished bits and pieces on the hard drive and start something else rather than refine and polish and read aloud and edit and edit and edit until they are competition ready.
You may not have the required 60 – 100,000 words needed for a novel but think ….
Novellas are between 20,000 and 40,000 words.
Short stories anything between 2,000 and 10,000 words.
Flash and Micro Fiction is only 99 to 1000 words and usually around the 350 mark.
Be brave, people. Take a chance.
Thank you, Kit. There's a novel that an Irish woman I know wrote and then she got ill and left it untouched. At 60k words it seems to fall short of what's being looked for but I think she is now well enough now to dust off that novel and go back in and refine and rewrite. She also got a lot of input from a very well-known and generous author, so it would be a shame for all that to go to waste. Hope you are thriving. Great to see you on here, Val.
Absolutely! Thank you for sharing.