I’m one step closer to accomplishing my goal as an aspiring writer.
My story, “The Loaner”, won the grand prize for the A.B. Betancourt Short Story Science Fiction Writing Contest. Another story, “The Visitor”, was selected as one of the seven short stories for a science fiction anthology.
I usually enter many writing contests and submit stories I’ve written before. Both times around, I went through the backgrounds of the contests and the judges to see which of my stories suited the contest. I also asked my husband, author of Blubber Island, to look at my stories and give me a critical critique. After I got his feedback, I went through the stories and fixed some of the story problems or grammatical errors I had overlooked. Last year, I entered many contests and won none of them, but I also didn’t put in at least one month of writing, editing, and researching into them. This made all the difference this time around.
You can find “The Loaner” on A.B. Betancourt’s blog. A.B. Betancourt is the author of The Key.
The Ends Don't Tie with Bunny Rabbits 
[…] I think that this is another series every aspiring manga creator should read. Some of the methods that Kyoko learns are essentially from method acting. If acting were reduced to a more puristic level, acting comes from a script or screenplay, or written works. Great dialogue isn’t by expression alone. It’s by good writing. Skip Beat made me realize that I have to write in a similar way. Now, I act out the dialogue of each character I write and I put myself into my characters’ shoes. This has improved my writing, even helping me win one writing contest and get selected for an anthology (The Loaner and The Visitor). […]