Don’t Break The Rules. Unless You Want To Win.
Put away your white hat, it won’t be needed.
I am pissed off. Yes, I said it, pissed off. Before you laugh and think, “so what?”, hear me out.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a Flash Fiction piece that I thought was deserving of greater recognition. I entered it into a contest at a popular magazine thinking my brilliance would be shared with hundreds of thousands of new readers. They rejected the piece with the standard, “it wasn’t a fit for our current edition” form letter.
As expected, I read the winning entries and was disappointed to see the trite bullshit that beat my story to publication. I have read the winning piece half a dozen times and while the writing was good, full of marvelous words, I cannot tell you what it was about. It had hundreds of flowing adjectives and adverbs but no story.
Later I submitted that rejected piece to another publication and as expected the story received excellent reviews. As a bonus, the second pub was a paying gig, so I made a few dollars. Revenge is sweet.
Not again?…
Then yesterday I learned another piece I wrote failed to win a different Flash Fiction contest. I thought the story deserved to be a winner. It fit perfectly within the guidelines of the contest which clearly…
