Why I Strongly Suspect the UW-Whitewater Creative Writing Conference Awards Are A Scam
1. It costs $21 to enter. First place prize money is $20, second and third considerably less.
2. The 2nd place winning story in the Fantasy and Science Fiction section was 14 pages long. The rules state entries must be a maximum of 10 pages. So a winning entry broke the rules of the awards.
3. Most of the winning entries had poor writing on a technical level--that is, they had poor grammar and sentence construction that should make an English teacher despair. Of course, so did most entries.
4. The number of awards per category varies each year according to 'the number and quality of submissions per genre.' No information is given on how awards are decided--possibly by a rubric, since there were several ties for third place.
5. Lastly, and most importantly, because I did not win.
Hopefully that last line made you realize I was being facetious. Perhaps I'm just a little miffed that I helped Nicole DeGaile beat her thesarus-ridden story into managability, and then she beat me. And my sister. With a story she wrote in one day. And edited with help from me.
Mind you, I have nothing against Nicole DeGaile and wish her all the good fortune in the world. Provided she doesn't beat me in my own genre. And with misplaced commas, to boot.
Ah, screw it. I rewrote my entry and today I sent it off to Clarkesworld. No, I don't really think it's that good. But if I get a rejection from Clarkesworld, chances are good that I'll get some more helpful comments.
Though they probably won't be as constructive as the stuff I got from the UW-Whitewater Creative Writing Conference.