In the last post I mentioned how I learned about the Contest, and I set myself the goal of submitting each quarter. I promptly… uh… didn’t do so well at writing and finishing a story. So, faced with a choice (/foreshadowing: a choice that would reappear in the future /foreshadowing): Submit something–anything–at all, or don’t and make it a whole 0 quarters before failing my goal.

I chose to submit something.

That something was an epistolary story about the discovery of King Tut’s tomb that I had I started scribbling in free moments. I felt great about the concept, great about the open, meh about the rest of the execution, and bad about the ending. Essentially, I treated it as an historical fantasy. I used real dates, and in at least one instance, an actual telegraph sent by Howard Carter. I knew when he died. I kind of just ended the story, rather than giving it an ending. There was no good set up. It just sort of ended.

Anyhow, I dusted my hands off, and did two things, 1. Didn’t learn my lesson about starting earlier in the quarter, and 2. Forgot about the submission.

Then a month or more later, I received a thoroughly unexpected email:

Dear Entrant,

Your story has been judged and is an Honorable Mention for the 3rd quarter of the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest. (3rd quarter is 1 April to 30 June)

Congratulations!!!

Dang.

My initial thought was: “Maybe I can actually do this.”

My second was: “Uh oh… Q4 ends on September 30.”