To keep myself from losing track of:
all the contests I've entered,
all the contests I've volunteered myself as a judge (or let myself be voluntold into judging),
all the books I've had to read as a contestant or as a judge,
all the deadlines,
a...
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Excavations is competing in Poetry.
Ancilla is competing in Supernatural.
I'm a Science Fiction judge. (The books I'm judging are listed on my Judging page).
UPDATE (7/11/24) - Science fiction books (all six of them) have been judged. Anyone who is curious about the results can check the contest page.
Excavations won
FIRST PLACE - POETRY
Ancilla did not win or place.
I'm noticing that I'm getting more consistent good results if I enter it in a Romance category, or in General Fiction, than in Paranormal and Fantasy - which makes sense to me because Ancilla leans more to the realism side of magical realism, and the vampires in Ancilla are not supernatural beings.
Self-identified real-vampires will pick up on the descriptions of vampiric feeding in Ancilla right away, but how common are real-vampires? It's a small subculture, compared to the self-identified therian subculture; I see book clubs and communities for therians existing on Wattpad, but not for real-vampires. The chances of a reader picking up on the vampirism in Ancilla without me yelling, "Hey, MY CHARACTERS ARE VAMPIRES" are slim. Even then, the reader's response may very well be, "Yeah? Where are the fangs? Where are the superpowers? What about undeath?"
I think from now on I will stick to Romance and General Fiction when Erotica and Magical Realism are not listed as categories.
A pity there is no category in any contest anywhere for Dark Academia. Then again, don't all Dark Academia books need to have a murder in them?
