Behind the Story: A Worthy Proposal

My word it's been a hot minute since I've written a behind the story segment, but worry not dear reader! Not only am I back with a vengeance, but I'm also coming to you live with TWO behind the scenes entries from my fall escapades.

That's right, as my last post mentioned, I had two competitions that I had enlisted for in the month of October. The professionally judged Fear 2025 battle, and the peer judged Autumn 2025 battle. After much waiting, the results have finally come in... And well, without spoiling too much about my results, WE ARE SO BACK BABY!!

We'll start with the professionally judged fear battle. This one was a 1000 word short story with the prompts of Thriller/Suspense, Mysterious Stranger, and Engagement Ring.

I'm not going to lie to you, coming off of my last stories absolute flop of score (the dreaded 3/10 if you recall) I was definitely humbled coming into this one. Not to mention the fact that the last time I had done a professionally judged contest with my Caitlyn Clambake story, I didn't make it past the initial round of judging.

Still, this actually gave me a relatively good mindset coming in because the pressure was off. I was no longer on my upward trajectory, and I was now starting to see artistic contests like these as subjective. However, another problem remained... this contest was running right in the middle of a trip I had planned to Portugal/Spain which I had foolishly thought I would find time to write during (spoiler alert, I did not).

Luckily for me I'm not much of procrastinator and knew I wanted to get a draft done before I headed off. And so, using my prompts I crafted a VERY rudimentary version of the story and sent it off to one of my friends Alix before I boarded my plane. And yes I did believe that I was going to send it off many many more times after that to get more feedback... But I didn't.

As mentioned, the whole Portugal trip thing happened and I was having too much fun being a chic traveling European to even crack open my computer once. It was like pure bliss. But alas, when I landed back in CPH the realization hit me that I now had under 36 hours to completely overhaul my story so that it was fit for submission AND our sweet cat Lucy suddenly had a swollen cheek from a tooth abscess that needed to be addressed.

An angel with an abscess

CUE THE REGRET AND PANIC. First up was dealing with Lucy, but once we realized she wasn't going to keel over anytime soon I got to writing. And let me tell you, despite all the individual work that goes into my stories, the version you read would not have existed if it wasn't for the amazing feedback provided by my friend Alix. She gave me the push to guide my story in a cleaner direction and the tips to make my characters pop. It was a crunch to reach the deadline, but if it wasn't for her I wouldn't have gotten there at all.

So yeah, at the end of the day when I hit submit I didn't feel too happy about my story. I felt like I didn't give it the time it deserved, didn't get enough feedback on it, and didn't even know if I had written a thriller story. I felt kind of bleh about the whole thing, especially knowing it was going to be professionally judged. Honestly I wrote the whole thing off and prepared myself for a bad score once again.

But wouldn't you know it, I was being too damn hard on myself.

Not only did I make it to the final round of judging beating out many other stories along the way, but overall I reached the top 64 stories in the competition! It certainly isn't the best score I have ever received, but it also wasn't my worst. If anything it was another lesson that these sorts of things are just so unpredictable. Other friends wrote stories that I would consider 1000% better than mine that didn't make it through and that just seems unfair. As long as we all keep writing, the battle will eventually be won by one of us, of that I'm confident in.

Thanks as always for sticking around.

Until next time,

M