If you want to become a better writer, you need to practice deliberately, and one of the best ways to practice writing deliberately is by submitting your work for publication. Submitting acts as a kind of test of your writing skills, and studies have shown that people improve at a skill faster when they're tested.
I know submitting can be scary. You feel vulnerable, like all your insecurities and flaws are exposed. However, if you want to get published, you need to learn to submit your work, and not just when it's perfect.
Today, you can make a breakthrough in your writing. You just need to submit your work.
Test Yourself
For the next ten days, we'll be hosting a contest for writers who want to put their short story writing skills to the test. At the end, we will choose the best short story as the winner. If you’d like to get a sense of what we’re looking for, get a copy of the book Let’s Write a Short Story.
If your piece is chosen, you will receive the following:
- All formats of my new ebook, Let's Write a Short Story (if you already have them, you can give them to a friend).
- The workbook, 15 Days to Write and Submit a Short Story.
- A new, soon-to-be-released video guide on how to write and submit short stories.
- A $50 Amazon gift card!
At the end of the month, we’ll publish your edited piece on the Write Practice where hundreds of people will get to read you at your very best. For example, read last month’s winner, Doc O'Connor's Relay.
It gets better, though. In the next few months, we plan to collect all of these pieces and publish them in a book. Real paper, real cover, real ink. So if your piece is chosen, you will be able to consider yourself a published author.
Ready to get started? For rules and details see this page: Let's Write a Short Story Contest.
The Last Contest Of the Year
For the last year, we have been hosting the Show Off Writing Contest, where once a month, you can put your skills to the test. This will be the last writing contest we host this year.
If you're interested in being published (in print)? If you would like to get better at the writing craft by working with an editor? Do you enjoy a little friendly competition? If you want to win an Amazon gift card and a couple of free books?
Then this contest might be for you.
Photo by Canned Muffins
So is this like the last Show Off Contest as well? 🙂
Hi Unisse. Yes, at least for this year. We may try something new and different next year.
The last contest? No! I was hoping I had several more shots to win! I guess I’ll just have to give it my best shot. 🙂
Yes! You should, Beck. I promise it’s not the last one forever, though, just of this iteration.
I am disappointed that this is the last one of the year already and that there is no theme. I like reading different takes on a central idea and having something to focus on when I’m writing.
Sorry, Steph. 🙁
Do you want me to make up a theme just for you? 🙂
I was getting to the point where I would try to guess them…I had this month narrowed down to Back-to-School, Harvest, or Pregnancy 🙂 . Guess I can pick one!
Ha! Yes, I’m predictable, aren’t I? I was going to go with Back-to-School. Great guess. 🙂
Miss Maizie County’s Public Disgrace
It all started because Mama got caught standing
buck-naked in the picture window of her living room. The sheriff come out and talked to me about
it. Her house set across from Harmony
Baptist and the Sunday morning crowd had gotten an up-close-and-personal look
at her. Even hell-fire-and-brimstone can’t
compete with a naked lady standing atop a divan, kind of spread eagled and
pressed up against a plate glass window.
After the sheriff’s visit, I brought mama to my
house. She had days when she was fine, and then there were days when she was as
lost as a ball in tall grass. She’d wander.
She’d forget who I was. When I found her wading with the cows in the
neighbor’s pond, I called on Doc Patton, who put his hand on my shoulder and
told me to check her into the nursing home. Which I did.
The story should have ended there, with Mama in the
rest home, me alone in my trailer, and Brother Debo at the pulpit, preaching to
the fully clothed.
But then Brother Debo come by. I opened my door and there he was, dressed like
he was fixing to preach a funeral.
“Miss Huggins,” he said. “I don’t believe we’ve met.
I’m Ransom Debo. I was wondering if we might have a little talk.”
Once inside, I swept the magazines off the divan and
motioned for him to sit. “Florene,” I
said. “My name’s Florene.”
I sat facing him. “What can I help you with?” I asked.
He took my hand.
“Doctor Patton mentioned you had to put your mother away. I’m so sorry.
I didn’t know her well, but she did visit me at the church a time or
two. Lovely woman.”
“Wait a minute, preacher,” I said. “Don’t go acting
like you cared about Mama. If that was the case, you wouldn’t have called the
law on her like you done.”
He let loose of my hand and fiddled with his tie
tack. It was a tiny gold bible with a
ruby where the “O” in holy should have been.
I looked right at him. He wasn’t
much older than me. Maybe thirty-two or thirty-three. And handsome. Even in that preacher get-up,
he was handsome.
“Let’s start over Miss Hugg…, I mean Florene. I’m truly concerned about your mother.” He
cleared his throat. “However, there is another reason I’m here.”
“Big surprise,” I said.
He kept going.
“Your mother’s house sits across from the sanctuary, and our
congregation needs the space. If we had your mother’s house, we could move the
adult Sunday school classes there.”
I remember looking in his eyes. They were green with
gray rims. Kind of like cat eyes.
“Well,” I said. “I ain’t giving Mama’s property
away.”
Brother Debo smiled. One of his front teeth was
chipped. “I find prayer helpful when I have an important decision to make,” he
said.
“Pray all you want,” I said. “I’ll be figuring out what Mama’s house is
worth.”
The next week Brother Debo showed up again.
“Just stopped by to see if you’ve decided anything,”
he said when I answered the door.
He sat at my table, and after a bit he stopped
talking like a preacher. He sounded kind of regular, like somebody you’d meet
at the Piggly Wiggly on double coupon night.
“You ever been married, Florene?” he asked.
“I was seventeen,” I said, “I’d just been crowned
Miss Maizie County for the third time.
Ain’t nobody beat my record, not in all these years.
“My husband was one of the judges. He didn’t date me until after I was crowned,
I want you to know, so I earned my title fair and square.
“It ain’t a remarkable story. He drank beer like it
was oxygen and he run around on me.” I shook my head. “So, I left him and got my old name back.”
Brother Debo took my hand for the second time since
I’d met him.
“You know, Florene, I don’t think divorce is so bad.
If God can forgive lying and stealing, I don’t see why he can’t allow for a few
failed nuptials.”
He opened up to me. Started talking about his
shut-in wife, how she was practically bed-ridden with some mysterious muscle
disorder. He mentioned how they weren’t able to have relations. Had a way of
telling it, made you think he was a saint for staying with her.
I started watching the road for his car, hoping he’d
come by. Which he did, late one Friday. He showed up on my steps, his Lincoln nowhere
in sight. He followed me inside,
circling his arms around me when I turned to him, and leaning me up against the
paneling.
“It’s wrong, I know it’s wrong, but you’re all I
think about,” he said.
I swear I almost called him Brother Debo, but I knew
that two people about to do what we were would not be encouraged by religious
titles.
I called him Ransom for the first time.
He kissed me, and I sagged against him.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked.
“I could show you Grandma Cant’s quilt,” I said, and
felt my face go red. “It ain’t much but
I could show you.” I pointed down the hall. “It’s on my bed.
“See,” I said, when we got to my room, “it ain’t
much to look at.”
“It’s beautiful,” he said, looking at me instead of
the quilt. Then I laid down beside him,
my three Miss Maizie County banners hanging on the wall above me, and realized
I was about to become a great sinner.
Damned if I didn’t fall in love. We talked on the
phone every day, and we made love in my bed, and we didn’t tell a soul.
I sold Mama’s house, for too little money, on a
Wednesday morning. The deacons shook my hand, and I walked out into the October
sun, clutching a cashier’s check.
I called Ransom, and he didn’t pick up. I called again, and he told me his secretary
had seen my number come up too many
times on his phone bill, in the early morning hours and late at night, and she was
talking.
It must’ve been true. I was getting snubbed
everywhere I went. On Saturday, Ransom’s
wife came to my house, leaning on a cane, and yelled at me, saying I’d seduced
her husband same as Delilah troubled Sampson. I have one thing to say about
that. For an invalid, she sure had a
good set of lungs.
I called Ransom when she left, but his number had
been disconnected. I drove by the church. The sign announcing Sunday’s sermon read:
Genesis – It Was The Woman Who Sinned.
I knew then that Ransom wasn’t coming back. It hurt
the way fire hurts: both sharp and lingering.
I bought a bottle of Wild Turkey and went to the river and drank.
The next morning, the sun spilled across Harmony
Baptist. I could hear the choir from my spot inside Mama’s house, which hadn’t
been touched since she left. Ransom’s sermon was long and punctuated by loud amens.
It was after noon when the invitation began.
I climbed onto the divan then, and pushed back the dusty curtains. The
sun felt warm on my naked breasts.
I leaned against the window, listening as the last threads
of “Whosoever Will May Come” faded and
then died, and ached for those church doors to open.
Hi Marla!
Thanks for entering. For this one, we’re taking submissions over at http://letswriteashortstory.com/short-story-contest/. Would you mind copying and pasting it over there. Sorry about that!
Thanks Joe! Doing it now.
Thx this help me a lot.
Hi, can you give me some update on this, Im interested in participate in this kind of events its not about the freebies but i love to improve my skill so i can be a author someday… its really my dream to publish my own novel? although i have some problem technically but i know i will improve as the time goes by 🙂 – Heartysmiley 🙂