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The Fiction Writing Contest Lottery


On what fiction writing contest should you squander $20? I calculated the return-on-investment (ROI) of several different contests. I have summarized the results in the table below. The return number quantifies the investment in a fiction contest, based on the entry fee, effort to write a story according to contest guidelines, and probability of winning the contest.

Contest Return
ReadMe Publishing What If? Science Fiction Competition (40)
Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction Award (49)
Alligator Juniper’s National Writing Contest (50)
Barry Hannah Fiction Prize (50)
Fish Flash Fiction (59)
Newport Review Flash Fiction Contest (126)
Springfield Writers’ Guild Literary Awards (161)
Inland Empire California Writers Club Writing Contest (409)
Bards and Sages Speculative Fiction Contest (484)
Silver Quill Society Short Story Contest (485)
Cadenza Open Short Story Competition (UK) (487)
Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award (489)
Juked Fiction and Poetry Prizes (490)
Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction (494)
Mississippi Review Prize (494)
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Award for Imaginative Fiction (508)
Boston Review Annual Short Story Contest (659)
Zoetrope All-Story Short Fiction Contest (810)
Fish Short Story (819)
Earlyworks Press Open Short Story Competition (UK) (967)
Chautauqua Literary Journal (1134)
Greensboro Review Robert Watson Literary Prizes (1200)
American Literary Review (1294)
 

How should you read this table? Just as you may gain or lose money after investing in a 401K or stock, you can gain or lose your time and money by entering a fiction contest. Basically, you want to avoid contests with a return in red, which represents the effort, expressed in a dollar value, that you lost by writing a story for the contest and paying a fee to enter the contest.

Unpublished Guy Blogs

Fiction Book Synopsis for Ambrose Bierce Falls into a Wormhole

Posted by: Unpublished Guy on 11/10/2009

Ambrose Bierce, Main Character of Unpublished Guy's Fiction Book to Be
Ambrose Bierce, Main Character of Unpublished Guy's Fiction Book to Be

Here is the brief synopsis of the fiction book I intend to write this month.

In 1913 while traveling in Mexico to observe that country's developing revolution, Ambrose Bierce, satirist and author of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (mandatory reading for US high school students), disappeared with no explanation. What could have happened to Ambrose Bierce? For nearly century, it had been a mystery. Now, my book provides the most logical explanation of how a literary great of the 19th century could have disappeared without a trace in a country wracked by lawlessness and chaos. Simply put, Ambrose Bierce fell into a wormhole.

This is the story of Ambrose Bierce, who reemerges from the wormhole with a tedious number of digestion complaints. Also, his moustache has taken on a life of its own—much like the nose in Nikolai Gogol's short story, The Nose. Aided by the actor Jerry O' Connell, Ambrose pursues his errant moustache through space and time, and the story continues in an episodic fashion with a series of vignettes. A key moment occurs in a parallel universe where Ambrose's moustache leads a cult of potato people. Ambrose confronts the moustache, and it returns to his face. Ambrose enjoys the return of his moustache, but his ecstasy is brief. After a horrible accident involving a giant microwave and a vat of sourcream, the moustache and Ambrose's face are once again parted.

The eleven vignettes in the novel are united by the conflict at the heart of the story, Ambrose Bierce's struggle to accept his mortality. Unlike the nose in Gogol's The Nose, where the nose returns to the face of the noseless main character, Ambrose's moustache never again returns to his face. In his final adventure, Ambrose realizes that he can achieve an immortality of sorts by allowing an Owl to nest on his upper lip.

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