Hello everyone, If I may ask how many of you are participating in the competition 'JOY'.
who has submitted and who are waiting (like me) till the clock ticks 12, on the 15 feb.
Hello everyone, If I may ask how many of you are participating in the competition 'JOY'.
who has submitted and who are waiting (like me) till the clock ticks 12, on the 15 feb.
I guess that if she shot them in the head while they were on the edge of the cliff then they might have fallen off from the blast, in which case she could get the best of both worlds.... she missed a trick there! Anyway I'm looking forward to reading it Richard whether it's accepted or rejected! :)
However Malinah has a good point, there are very few calls for happy themes, but that could be because (IMO) you have to be somewhat cynical/brooding/darkly humourous to be a writer so the people running the competitions are probably the same and would avoid happy themes where possible. Wouldn't you agree?
Also Malinah If you've managed to write a truly nice story I do applaud you- I would really struggle to do that. There always has to be something sinister lurking beneath my works!
Well Malinah, I wrote eight short stories in January for eight different Short Story Competitions. The chances of winning any are extraordinarily remote so I just write whatever I want to! They only take me a couple of days to write, and as you say, there are plenty of them out there, so I feel liberated in being able to express my creativity in any way I please - such is the "joy" of writing!
In this particular case I really wanted to write a story about a girl who lures young men up to a certain spot in the Lake District, has sex with them and then invites them to either "Jump for Joy" (off the cliff edge) or have their heads blown off with a shotgun.
As I found when writing the story, they all seemed to prefer having their heads blown off rather than jumping, and she was always a little disappointed, but she found great "joy" in both having sex with them and then blowing their heads off with a shotgun.
If I'd had written about two gay and happy little people having a "joyful" time running around in a field looking at butterflies or counting clouds, two things would have happened. Firstly I wouldn't have won the competition (obviously) and secondly I'd have found the whole thing so tediously boring that I'd have probably driven up to the Lake District, found a suitable cliff and blown my own head of with a shotgun.
Oh dear. Richard, the web abounds with calls for submissions of horror, crime, and erotica stories. It's rare, at least in my experience, to find calls for submissions with positive themes.
Why don't you submit to a horror competition instead? Dreamspinners press is looking for gay romance stories with bittersweet endings...
My story is called the Mischief-Makers. It's about a brother and sister who are constantly playing tricks on each other, but some of the tricks are on them. Joy can be found in an unexpected way, if they can ever figure out how to get along...
Looking forward to hearing all of your story ideas.
Whats your story about, Ashwerya?