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Monday, October 03, 2005

Uploaded

On Thursday, after I had gotten done frantically re-keying and editing a short story for Rockstar's Upload Contest, I almost blogged a bit complaining about their process.

I'm quite glad I didn't. The main gist of my complaint was the lack of confirmation. I still think that's valid, but in all fairness I did get the confirmation email the next day. More to the point is that in terms of contests, Upload is actually quite good. For one thing, a $3,000 cash prize for a short story is pretty sizeable. Plus, there is no entry fee involved - which is very nice. Finally, simply being able to upload the entry instead of using a SASE is convenient ... even if it could use a bit better user friendliness in the long run.

In short, there aren't many contests like it and I'm damn glad Rockstar is doing it. And it's not even like they have hardcore ulterior motives involved in the contest, they're just doing it because they want to do it.

For the curious and potentially masochistic, my entry can be downloaded here in PDF. It's a more flushed out version of a tangent from my NaNoWriMo work, Greenscape. And I'll say the same thing I told the girl ... I'm sure I missed a typo somewhere ... but I don't want to hear about it if I did...

Again, though, thanks to Rockstar for organizing a great contest.

2 comments:

Brinstar said...

Are you doing NaNoWriMo this year?

I did it last year, and met the word count goal, but I didn't finish my story. I don't think I'll have time to do the 50k words this year, but I'll probably at least work on finishing the story...

Josh said...

I might, although I'm more likely to lurk and go through and re-edit this one instead. I tried to get into NaNoEdMo, but it felt really small and lacking compared to WriMo.

Just going back through and working on this simple four page short showed, I have oodles of work left to do and don't really know how many bad novels I need under my belt :) So it might turn into an every other year thing, alternating writing and editing. I do find having a deadline to be very, very productive.