Writing Contest!

Hawk and Young have created their first ever writing contest!

https://hawkandyoung.com/scifi-fantasy-alien-life-flash-fiction-contest/

Hawk and Young are seeking tales of alien life bent on conquest. This can be scifi or fantasy, or a mix of the two. Where did they come from? What do they want? We like underdog heroes, strong character development, vivid settings and a good twist at the end.

EVERY ENTRY WILL RECEIVE A WRITTEN REVIEW!! We will write you a personal review of your contest entry.


Enter by June 15th

Many times when you enter a contest, you get a rejection letter that simply states that your piece was enjoyable, but not what they are looking for at this time. That is not helpful at all. You cannot know for that response how close you were to winning, what you did wrong and need to correct, or what you did right and should not change.

Having the opportunity to get a review of your piece, someone to tell you what you did right and what you need to work on, is invaluable!

While the steps involved here are separate and require some additional work on the part of the writer, for the cost of a coffee, you can get the feedback you deserve, plus, if you write well, you could win a gift card and get yourself promoted on their website. That gives you credibility.

Hawk and Young also offer promotions and author interviews. That's publicity.

Credibility and Publicity.

You should do it just for that!

Sci-Fi and Dragons

In my writing world, I've been doing a lot with Dragons and with Sci-Fi. I know, two different variations of fiction, but sometimes that's how things go.

2017 is going to be a year of the Dragon for me.

Also...

Hagrid approves!!

I started writing a dragon into a piece that I was stuck on, it worked. It was on Ficlatté, so I wasn't messing up some new manuscript or anything. Read it here.

My co-author and I are writing a book that involves a dragon. We're actually working on the book that comes before the dragon part. It involves Vikings, a Chinese Monk, Harpies born of Nephilim who loved the hive-mind and the beauty of butterflies, and the King of these fisher-folk who commands this giant Sea Serpent. In the second book the main character meets his Dragon. They have to fight these Knights commanded by a Christian King bent on conquering the world.

Then there are all these Sci-Fi stories.. This has inadvertently been a Sci-Fi weekend. I was inspired to write a little Sci-Fi piece on Ficlatté because I read some Asimov which my co-author sent me to read. Nightfall

Then he suggested 2 more pieces, one by Harry Bates, and one by Anne McCaffrey, of which I am reading a book, too. Anne McCaffrey writes about Dragons and Sci-Fi ...and here we have come full circle!

Meanwhile, my husband queued up 'Lost in Space' last night while I built a Lego Dragon.

So there were more Sci-Fi and Dragons.

I'm not finished reading those links, so until I do, the pattern continues. I may end up writing more about Sci-Fi or dragons, or neither. Who knows!?

Anyway, KEEP WRITING.

Sci-Fi

I don't venture into Sci-Fi very often. I'm a dabbler in it. Recently I wrote something a bit Sci-Fi and since it is a rare thing, I thought I'd share.

Let me preface this by saying I sequeled a story where the Main Character created a time machine and supposedly an error in calculation left them 10,000 years in the future instead of 100.

After months of walking, surviving, fighting off beasts, eating only things I saw other creatures eating, and building a hut and a fire, I have given up hope that humankind survived.

Putting together a rough signal transmitter from the parts in my time machine, I wait here, the latitude and longitude beeping out endlessly into the sky above. I wrote a message with rocks ten feet wide on the top of a plateau. I am building myself a wall.

I could travel farther, keep looking for clues, but it seems this land of forest and wild things has recovered from some terrible shock. The trees here are too young, the vegetation fast growing, I assume it has only been the last 50 years that this area has bloomed.

What did we do to the Earth?

I began to dig just last week. I was looking for trash they said would never decay. I found a layer of dark rock, the kind made by intense heat and quick cooling. I can’t get past that without advanced tools.

I am sure my ancient race lies below it.

The neat part is, a person sequeled me and took my new looking land and turned the mathematical error BACKWARDS, thus creating the existence of homo-sapiens.

:D

Behold the power of collaboration!

Update: I found another Sci-fi piece I wrote recently and still am collaborating on. Here's my earliest contribution.

They were watching her. A myriad of screens lit up their faces with a blue glow. Tiny cameras were everywhere, undetectable, always watching. Dakota couldn’t get the image out of her head. Somewhere safe, those sick bastards were refusing to help her, watching like she was the animal on some documentary that is hunted by a lion.

Stealthily she crouched, laser pen her only weapon, walking with knees bent so her shoes wouldn’t squeak. She measured her breathing and tried not to sweat too much because there was only one beast that could smash a steel lab table and break through the wire enmeshed glass, and it was blind. It hunted by smell and sound. Tiny polyps along its frilled neck sprayed a paralytic on its victims so they wouldn’t run as it pounced on them. Its venom smelled of cucumbers. The lab reeked of cucumbers.

This could be why her team did not come for her.

Or the people behind the cameras could have set this all up. An exercise, a test, to see what she could do.

Well, she could live.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.