I Got A Silver Honorable Mention!

Great news! The Writers of the Future contest has posted their official winners for the Second Quarter of Volume 35, and I got a Silver Honorable Mention! This means that out of thousands of contestants, my story “ALIENS!” made it to the top 25. So while I didn’t win or even place, I’m happy to see my work is at a competitive level with other writers. It’s incredibly validating.

I had this to say about “ALIENS!” in a post I shared a few months ago: What I’m Working On

“ALIENS!”
Sci-fi short story about 5k words. This project was inspired by my years in Japan, one very interesting SCUBA instructor, and memories of my grandpa introducing me to various SETI programs. The whole story is essentially a conversation–hopefully an interesting one.

And well, it looks like someone at WotF found it interesting. Not interesting enough to win, but interesting enough to make it to the top tiers, and I am so so grateful for that. I would guess that the stories are judged in brackets, since it’s unlikely that every judge would read every story. I like to imagine that there was a judge championing my story, pushing it up, until it finally met its match and was superseded. But its nice to think that for a short period, someone believed in it.

In the meantime, the rights to the story still belong to me, so I’ve submitted it to a sci-fi/fantasy magazine to see if I can get it published, and share it with all of you.

Thanks for coming on this journey with me,
Christine