I was reminded today that the BYU Symposium on science fiction and fantasy (Life, the Universe, and Everything) is next week. In reading the information, I found that they have a writing contest with a deadline this weekend.
Well, naturally I decided that I should enter something in the contest. But what?
I considered my stories from back in college. Uh-uh. Embarrassingly low quality.
I finished four stories last year. All four of them are currently submitted somewhere, so they can’t be used.
I just need to make a few revisions in order to finish the Zeppelin story, but I’m going to submit that to All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, which also has its deadline this weekend. So i can’t use that.
So I started looking through my bits of stories, to see if there were any I felt were near enough to completion that I could finish. There’s a very short time-travel one that could work, but I really want to do a major expansion on the concept. So it’s out.
And then I ran across a piece I’d completely forgotten. It was an assignment for my creative writing class: show a family party. It had a complete story arc — it’s a somewhat amusing tale of a Mormon who finds out he’s married into a family of demons.
It’s the kind of story that really hasn’t got much of a market for me to sell it to (most Mormon-related markets aren’t looking for stories about demons, and most demon markets aren’t looking for stories about Mormons), but it just might fit for this contest. It just needed a little bit of filling out and some polishing, so I did that tonight.