WOTF rejection

So a couple days ago, I got a phone call from my Mom.  A piece of mail had come in from the Writers of the Future contest.

Yeah, it was a standard form rejection.

Well, everyone puts in their time.  I guess this counts toward that.  A modified version of this story did well in the Mayhew contest, so I know it’s not utterly bad.  But I can see, in retrospect, how it wouldn’t do well with WOTF.

The main body of the piece was a scene I took from the middle of my novel–really, it was more of a scene than a coherent, unified story.  I threw on a beginning and an end, to try to fix that problem, but it probably didn’t mesh well with the real meat of it.  Which is fine, because it was originally meant as a scene, not a short story.

The thing is, I’m just not much good at short stories.  I don’t usually read them, and I don’t generally write them.  Novel writing is my craft–every time I try to write a short story, I end up writing a novel.  Once and a while, something clicks and a short story pops out (kind of like a Polaroid), but it’s not the usual thing.

So I’m not discouraged by this rejection from submitting to WOTF again, it’s just that it’s going to be kind of sporadic.  I have one more short piece that I could submit to the contest right now, but I don’t expect it to go far.  Still, it’s better than letting it sit in my hard drive.

In the meantime, I should probably submit that WOTF piece elsewhere, see what happens.  That’s probably what I’ll do.

What I really need to do, though, is work on my novel.  World Fantasy is coming up!