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AWW News
The Good Read Novel Competition enters a new year
At
A Woman's Write, we want to give new or as yet unrecognized writers a
chance to have their work read and analyzed, along an a opportunity to
win a significant cash prize to assist in furthering their creative
ambitions.
Here's how it works:
Submit the first 75 pages of your unpublished novel to our Good Read
competition, along with a $40 fee. Within a few weeks you will receive
a thorough, thoughtful critique with editing comments and corrections.
You will be given an opinion about character and plot development.
You then have the option to resubmit the entire novel, having applied
changes based on our comments and suggestions. This resubmission will
be accompanied by a $20 reading fee and represents your final entry
into the competition.
Entries submitted initially for critique will be judged if not
resubmitted. Resubmissions will be judged as the final entry in place
of the original entry, with no exceptions.
This lower fee scale including critique will, we hope, serve as a
motivation to all writers in these economically pressing times to send
their work for a professional analysis, with the further incentive to
make an effort to improve the work -- and the possibility of winning
$500.
The Good Read competition runs yearly from January 1 until November 30.
December will be a closed month in which judging will take place after
all entries have been read and critiqued. A winner will be announced on
January 1.
We have been rewarded many times over by our entrants who write and
thank us for our incisive and helpful comments and edits. Some of our
authors have gone on to win other awards and to get published. This
makes us believe that at A Woman's Write, we are doing something right
for women.
Please read the rules thoroughly, and send us your entry to the Good Read novel competition.
If you have a memoir or other non-fiction
prose work you would like to have us read, please follow the
instructions for entering the Good Read fiction competition (send
the first 75 pages, a short but thorough synopsis and a cover
letter) and pay that fee. Your accompanying letter will inform us
that it is non-fiction, not for the competition. You will receive a
thoughtful developmental critique and ten pages of line editing to
highlight errors of grammar, punctuation and point of view, if
any.
The Good Read novel competition
has its 2011 winner!
We had a fantastic round of entries with an
international flavor for the Good Read competition in 2011. Deciding
the winner was no easy matter. So we’ve selected the grand prize
winner, and two writers who merited an Honorable
Distinction.
This year the grand prize for a Good Read
goes to Australian Kate Pascoe, who has written an
evocative novel about a slum neighborhood, Frog Hollow
, and the eccentric people who live there. This snippet
provides a flavor of the literate expressiveness and human touch of
which Kate is capable:
For a moment, quite out of the blue, an
old fear stirred in her, a bedtime story told long ago from the
Children’s Bible, about Noah and the great flood. Forty days
and forty nights teeming rain and the world washed away. It
had set a terror in her as a child. Back then when hard
rains had fallen, Emma would run to her room and hide under the
bed, and although she could hear the voices of other children out
in the street, laughing and shouting as they kicked water at each
other and sent paper boats spinning down the gutters, it did
nothing to quell her fear. Emma learnt to count the distance
between the thunder strikes, the higher the count – the further
away the storm.
Looking back Emma couldn’t say if it
had been just one summer or many, she’d known that dread.
She remembered a school day when a storm was brewing and Sister
Mary Joseph had found her pale and trembling, alone in the music
room. In a quivering voice she’d tried to explain it, how
she saw the world filling up with water till there was no space
left to breathe between the land and the sky.
Sister Mary Joseph, quick to lay the
child’s fears to rest, explained God’s promise never to curse the
ground again by flood. “God gives us the rain so that all things
may grow and prosper. Do not be afraid of it,” she said. She
put her arm around Emma’s shoulders and gave the child an
affectionate squeeze. It was a clumsy moment; their heads
knocked together and Sister Mary Joseph’s glasses were pushed
up. In that split second, Emma saw her differently.
Younger, smooth skinned, motherly. After that she saw the
rain differently too.
Kate has this to say about herself and about A Woman’s
Write:
“I've lived in Sydney all my life and began writing at
a very young age. Some of my poems were published in the
junior comic section of the Sunday newspaper and this would fill me
with pride and encourage me to keep writing, much the same as the
Good Read competition as done for me now. I am very much interested
in local history; I find there is a never ending supplier of stories
and characters to be dug out of old newspapers, diaries, and letters
held in the city's archives, and from these I like to spin tales and
place them in more contemporary settings, as I like the contrast of
the old mixed in with the new.
“I
have nothing but praise for A Woman’s Write and the Good Read
Competition. It's rare to find a competition that offers to
critique the work it receives. This is valuable feedback for budding
writers, and can give them new eyes through which to see their work…
AWW goes a long way to empower women to write and we need more of
that in the world today.”
We’re betting that Kate Pascoe will soon be a
published novelist.
Two of our entries won Honorable
Distinction awards
and will have their
entry fees refunded:
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American physician/author
Jennifer Frank has a passion for chick-lit. She
sent us Alison’s Big Do-Over, the farcical adventure of a woman who’s trying to
change her life by moving up in her profession, but discovering
that the pitfalls of ambition can be as complex as the woes of
being stuck in place. Frank has a talent for making life’s little
annoyances seem like hugely hilarious cosmic catastrophes. We wish
Jennifer well in her own new career well started.
-
Eugenia Cosinschi wins
Honorable Distinction for her novel, The Plan
, a
breezy, zany saga of what can go awry when a young woman decides to
quit her job and see what happens next. When she comes up with what
seems like a reasonable a plan for survival, everything, including
her love life, begins to come unglued. Eugenia writes in a pleasant,
idiomatic style belying the fact that English is her second
language. Seems like a formula for future success.
As you
can see, we are welcoming international writers (women 18 or older,
writing in English). All entrants receive, in a timely manner, one of our
invaluable critiques (we’ve been told that the help that we offer to
new writers through our critiques is worth far more than the cost of
the entry fee). Some of our entrants may later seek our editing
services, which are refreshingly inexpensive and carried out with
professionalism and a personal interest in making good books
better.
Our new submission year for the Good
Read novel competition
begins
January First annually. By submitting earlier in the year, writers
have a chance to resubmit their work based on the editorial
suggestions of our reader/editors. It’s one of the unique features
of the competitions at A Woman’s Write that is much appreciated by
our participants.
Truth to Tell has its 2011 winner!
Cyndy
Drew Etler is the winner of our first annual Truth to Tell non-fiction
book prize. Her harrowing memories of life as a teen held captive in a
rehab facility is the basis for her current work with troubled
teenagers. Her book Straightling is part of that endeavor. Cyndy writes:
I
never was a badass, actually. Or a slut, a junkie, or a stoner, like
they told me I was. I was just a little kid looking for something good:
a grownup with some love to spare or a place, a safe place, to hide. I
was a wannabe in a Levis jean jacket; anybody could see that. Except my
mother. And the professionals at Straight.
“So begins Straightling,
my young adult memoir about Straight, Inc, a cult masquerading as a
drug rehab. With a fourteen-year-old’s voice, the book takes readers on
a first-person rollercoaster ride. It rips through my wide-eyed
childhood, then on into my sixteen months locked in a building, singing
preschool songs and being spit on by a hive of troubled teens.
“As
I slog through the process of submitting to agents—fidgeting through
lag time and gnashing through heartbreak—this award from A Woman’s
Write serves as glorious validation. What a boost for a striving author.
“To learn more about Straightling, and to receive a free sample chapter, please go to www.straightling.com.”
The Good
Read Novel (fiction book) competition has a yearly close-out date
of Novemeber 30th. Contestants receive a swift, thorough and
thoughtful critique and the chance to re-enter before the contest
closes. Please read our rules and send your submission!
>> Get the details on our RULES page.
We have a winner!
Our Good Read winner for 2010 is Margaret Rodenberg, whose novel, Little Song,
tells a twisty tale of a rogue ex-husband who returns, spends a week
living with the heroine and her new husband, and gives everybody a
chance to get some serious thinking done about the distinctions between
love and romance:
…My whole life, my best friend was that boy next door, big blonde Sammy Bear.
"You shoot him, and I'll cut off his ears," Sammy said whenever one of
Momma's men got near me. Then we'd get to planning how we could bury
the man in the woods, covering up the fresh dirt with hemlock branches.
Even picked out the best spot on Vancouver Island, at the base of an
old-growth cedar that's been there a thousand years and more. The
Grandmother Tree, they call it, because it's surrounded by its
children's children. But, though Sammy Bear had his nasty side and
liked to catch things that squealed—squirrels, weasels, cats, an otter
now and then—he never did help me kill any of Momma's men.
Grandma said the Bears had long been trouble—bad blood will out, don't
you know?—and she told tales of banishment and crimes. As time passed,
and Sammy and me got skin-close, her tales grew more horrific, her
charges touching sacred taboo and ancestral sins. I heard bedtime
stories of moons stolen, whale-women raped, cedar spirits felled
against their will, dancing masks cursed, and, inevitably, intercourse
with all the wrong sorts of bears.
But, though my face looked a lot like Grandma's, our brown eyes didn't
see the same when it came to Sammy, so it wasn't a surprise when I
married him right after high school. And, if you knew Sammy and his
wandering ways, it wasn't much of a surprise when he took off eight
months after our son Josh was born. The surprise came when he showed up
sixteen years later…
Margaret says: "This work--the characters, story, setting, and
words--are close to my heart so I deeply appreciate the recognition
this award brings. I hope A Woman's Write continues giving
encouragement to emerging women writers for many years to come."
We congratulate Margaret, who won our Good Read prize in a field of
excellent competitors, and we thank all of you who contributed and
expressed your faith in A Woman's Write for another creative year. Now
it's time to start polishing up your entry for the 2011 contest!
>> See published AWW winners on our SUCCESS STORIES page.
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