Write to the death
Last November, I decided I was finally going to do National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo, as they like to abbreviate it). I’m here to say that what came out of it for me was 50,000 words of completely unpublishable junk (something about a female chef, and two love interests, and blah blah blah), but it was completely and utterly worth it, for the discipline it instilled in me alone. Workng a full-time job as an editor/writer during the day, then coming home to write a minimum of 1666.6666 words every single day for 30 days was challenging and exhausting, and yet I think I’ll probably do it again. The folks at NaNoWriMo are encouraging and supportive throughout the month, and make you undertand that it’s a competition only with yourself. What you produce doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be.
However, for all of you folks out there who are more turned on by competition than a self-contained sense of accomplishment, there’s a new writing contest in town, brought to you by the folks at Toronto’s Broken Pencil magazine. BP is probably the biggest alt culture read in Canada. And now, they’re sponsoring what the Montreal Gazette is calling a “literary survivor” and an “indie writers deathmatch.” Oh dear.
More from the Gazette:
Asked how the deathmatch will work, (Associate Editor Richard) Rosenbaum says “the top eight submissions get posted to our website, where readers can vote for their favourite, and cheer on or hurl insults at the writers and each other, with the writers themselves having to survive round after round of online voting as well as fending off the armies of their opponents’ supporters.”
If after that description anyone is still interested in entering, you can do so if your entry is postmarked by December 31st. Check out Broken Pencil’s website for more information. To the victor go the spoils, including $300 in cash. If you can handle the taunting, anyway.
