OK…some of you know part of the story.

 

Quite a while back (there have been delays) I entered a contest by a horror fiction and game company called White Wolf.  The contest has several phases.  In phase one, entrants (I don’t know how many entered…but I’m told it was more than the company had anticipated) write a 250 word synopsis for a novel set in their World of Darkness (basically the real world…with vampires and monsters and such).  From all of these submissions, White Wolf picked 99 people, gave them $50 and invited them to round two (I was one of the 99).  From here, we had to write a larger, more complete synopsis, and a sample first chapter.  I wrote it and sent it in quite a while ago.  Deadlines came and went and White Wolf had to keep delaying the announcement of the winners of round two (they would choose five people, give each of them $1,000, and invite them to round three).  They were supposed to finally announce it this last Tuesday…but nothing…not even an announcement of delay.  Finally, this morning, they had an anouncement that the winners had not yet been determined…but that they had narrowed the ninety-nine down to ten (and would announce the five winners on the 28th).  Well…yours truly made it as one of the ten! 

At the end of the month, I’ll see if I advanced (I just have to beat five more people out…even at random odds that’s pretty good).  If I get to be one of the five, I get a thousand bucks and will then have to write the whole novel.  The five novels get judged and the company chooses a winner (who gets a $10,000 advance on royalties for the soon to be published novel)…but…they also said they would consider any of the other four for publication under their normal book contract.

 

This would be a nice jumpstart…as the months tick away on the defermint of my student loans.  A nice snub, in the face of old man real world.