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...
Oh, boy, did this one turn into a fecal display. Your guess is as good as mine as to the species.
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I entered Morsels in Short Story Anthology, Ancilla in Romance, and - uh, hmm. I seem to have entered a bunch of mini/special categories, because "Drink Deeply From Summer's Cup" (from Excavations) took First Place for Best Opening Line, and Morsels came in second for Best Cover (this contest does not seem to have first, second, and third places in the mini categories, though, so it might be more accurate to say that Excavations won a mini, and - bother, I have no idea if I entered Ancilla in any of the mini categories, or if Morsels is in any mini categories other than Best Cover... I should have written this stuff down when I entered. I DITZED)
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UPDATE 1/10/2025
What a debacle.
I'm going to post my bad review here, and then the following page is going to be screenshots of a side conversation that happened when katiegoesmew messaged me in Discord to tell me about a review that had just been posted of Morsels that looked like it might have been at least partly AI-generated.
She had good reasons for letting me know why she thought AI might have played a part in Dreamcatcher - one of those reasons is in the side conversation on the next page, while other reasons involve a fanfic contest she took part in that I sat out, and that's her story to tell, not mine.
Anyway. Morsels did not do well in the Short Story Collection competition at all, partly because the reviewer did not feel comfortable reading sexually explicit material.
I'll let the review speak for itself. I am too tired to correct the many, many SPAG mistakes my reviewer made while writing it. Maybe she was so disturbed by what she read that she was unable to write coherently. We'll give her the benefit of the doubt, here (although it is my opinion that people who are so confused about rules of grammar that they need to consult Google should probably avoid judging books in contests in which grammar is one of the elements that is being judged).
