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Cathy C. Hallhttps://cathychall.wordpress.com/I write, write, write. Then I rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. THEN I submit all those polished-up words out into the world and sell 'em. It's a plan that's worked pretty well.

Finding Something Friday: Contests, Contests, Contests

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Who would have guessed that August would have so many contests? My guess is that the people who come up with contests come back from vacation all refreshed and bursting with great ideas. So let’s take a peek at some of these great ideas…

FundsforWriters is sponsoring its annual fee/no fee contest. I LOVE this idea. You can write an essay for either the Fee contest or the No Fee contest, but the theme is the same: The Best Advice I Ever Had and followed OR The Best Advice I Ever Had and ignored. Um, right off the bat, I think it might be easier for me to write about the latter topic. I could write a book about the advice my mom gave. And she could probably write a book about me not heeding her advice (Title: I TOLD You So, Cathy). Check out all the details here.

Over at The Muse Marquee, you can find The Mother Hen’s latest contest. It’s a no fee, short fiction contest, but you’ll need to check out the details here before you start writing.

And you still have time to submit to the WOW!Women-on-writing flash fiction summer contest. It’s an open theme this time around so polish up one of your favorite flash stories and send it in before the end of August.

Oh! I almost forgot my own contest entry! Life in the USA is sponsoring an essay contest with no fee and a prize of $1,000! Life in the USA is a website devoted to helping students and immigrants develop a better understanding of guess what? Life in the USA. So if your essay is accepted (yep, you’ve got to query first!) it will be published and available online and then judged by an independent panel of judges. Clicking on a story doesn’t affect the outcome of the prizes, but you know you want to read my essay. So check it out here. Even if I don’t win a prize, I can be happy in the knowledge that somewhere, a teenage girl has taken my older-but-wiser advice.

Which, I guess, is more than I can say for myself.

What Not to Do Wednesday: The Heat is On

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Is it possible to be too hot to think? ‘Cause I’ve just spent two days working on a 500 word article that should have taken 30 minutes to complete.

Well, okay. Maybe it should have taken two hours to complete. Three at the most. But everytime I wrote something, the words melted together until the whole thing looked like Letter soup. Or maybe it was just the insides of my brain melting together like soup. The point, grasshopper, is that sometimes, it really can be too hot to think.

Um, what was I writing about? Oh, yeah, the heat. I think I’ve made my point.