ADIS vs. Writers of the Future Results

And the results are . . . a not-win for "A Day in the Sun". That's the price you pay for shortness: ask any man under five feet tall and he'll tell you that it was his shortness as that held him back. I think that may be ADIS' problem too, in this competition. With a max word count of 17,ooo, other entries had as many as 13,000 more words to help them "sell" their story than ADIS, which came in at a short 3,904 words. Next stop for ADIS will be Kurt Vonnegut's Fiction Prize. With a word limit of 7,000, ADIS will be more of a competitor in the Fiction Prize. We shall see, anyways.

In light of my discovery that Writers of the Future winners all seem to be at least 9,000 words (usually more in the 14-16,000 range) I am considering putting a run of stories together under a single title and then calling each story Part 1: Bond of Truth, Part 2: The Wasted Portion, Part 3: To Turn on One's Own, etc. My only concern is that each "part" would read like an individual short story, and I have no desire to change that, meaning that I personally am okay with that. I would enjoy reading it, even if no one else did. Someone must like that kind of stuff or David Drake would still be practicing law instead of carrying on the career brought about by the Hammer's Slammers collection (which, though he did eventually write some Slammers novels, the first books were short story and novella collections).

In other new I have set to editing and revising Tales from the Laughing Grass now that I am on Winter Break. It is going a little slower than I had hoped, but I have been enjoying going back through those stories. It has been very encouraging.

Write On

R.