Here's a continuation from
yesterday's post, in which I ran some highlights from
Jacob Appel's article in
Poets & Writers entitled "The Case for Contests." (More highlights just for you, little rodents):
"Of course, multiple submissions can be costly. While a single contest fee is not going to drive even the poorest writer into bankruptcy, once one starts sending out ten- and twenty-dollar checks by the handful, the sacrifices entailed may seem prohibitive. Yet I urge my students to submit their fees anyway. Find a way! If they were studying to be physicians or attorneys, I remind them, they would pay far greater sums for multiple years of schooling--banking on a future payoff. To my mind, creative writing is as much a career as medicine or law, even if the odds of meaningful financial gain are considerably lower (especially if you are a poet)....
...
"What appeal to me most about writing contests, on a personal level, is that somebody has to win. Well, I should qualify that. Occasionally, a final judge declines to declare a victor and the sponsor pockets the entry fees anyway. But for the most part, somebody walks away with a garland and a large check and an entree into the literary limelight. At a time when more and more structural barriers and layers of protection prevent obscure and emerging writers from having their work considered by major publishing houses, or published in glossy magazines--and ultimately landing on bookstore and library shelves--the literary competition is the unknown author's best friend. A good contest opens doors to anybody with a ten- or fifteen-dollar check and a brilliant work of original literature..."
Oh, wait, one more part of Appel's article for a little hair-raising fun! I thought it was interesting: "Several years ago," writes Appel, "I entered the St. Louis Short Story Competition, a contest with a five-dollar entry fee and a five-thousand-dollar grand prize. To my delight, my story "Counting" was declared the grand-prize winner on the competition's Web site. Alas, the swindlers administering the contest never paid up. (I do not take such matters lightly, as bad actors of this sort tarnish the reputation of contests more generally. In fact I pursued the matter with law enforcement authorities in Missouri--up to and including the state's attorney general--and the FBI. The investigation is ongoing; the mills of justice grind finely, but slowly.) Even under these exasperating circumstances, a contest victory succeeded in garnering me multiple inquires from reputable agents who had read my "winning" story on the Internet."
Michelle Obama reportedly brought a hostess gift to coffee at the White House on Tuesday: a journal and pen for Laura Bush, who sold her memoir to Scribner for $1.6 million. (First Lady Hillary got $8 million). As surely has been pointed out by others, perhaps the bargain rate for Bush was due to her life being scooped by the Curtis Sittenfeld's novel, American Wife. 
