Hi Everyone.
I hosted a romance contest that took place from September-December 1999.
I hosted this contest in order to try to inspire new stories from some of
our great tg writers. To this end, i offered a dozen or more TG books
from my collection (Empathy Press, Reluctant Press, etc.) to anybody who
was willing to write a story. That way everybody who wrote a story would
be a winner, be rewarded. I also offered a grand prize of a set of
illustrations that for the winning story.
i'm very happy with the results. 10 great stories. And now, Sapphire
has been nice enough to host them on her site!
The winner of the contest was:
This was a most difficult decision, because I really, really liked many
of the stories. I wish I had time to do illustrations for all of them. I
want to commend all the authors for doing such great work. I almost felt
like just closing my eyes and picking a winner because there were good
qualities in all of them.
Off the top of my head, I'd like to commend DAVID'S DILEMMA for being
perhaps the most romantic of all the tales. The way love developed
between Brad and Tina was truly touching (and sexy!). Speaking of
romance -- everybody did a fine job with that. THE MIXER contained a
nice tale of a newly minted girl falling for his former best friend (one
of my favorite kinds of stories), and Ellie balanced the romance with
humor -- Carol Collins' did a good job with teen romance -- as did Brian,
who was submitting a tg story for the first time. His characters touched
my heart. If you haven't read it -- everybody should be lucky enough to
have a mom like Harvey/Lee's. One could feel the love between them -- a
moving, wonderful tale that could have easily been the winner.
I commend Dawna Tompson's take on a love that dare not speak its name (at
least for a little while!), and for taking a stab at writing romance
without ever having read a romance book (not that that was required) ...
the trip to the sixties commune in Sarah Miller's RAINBOW CAMP was a blast!
I was greatly pleased the way the authors hit so many different tg
topics, from an SRU story by Jeremy Thompson to a former boy and his
girlfriend realizing that love transcends gender in Troy's touching tale.
And last, but certainly not least, i greatly enjoyed DOUBLE AGENT by
Bashful and Chrissy. I must commend Bashful for working on 2 stories for
the contest. I liked DOUBLE AGENT for its originality and for being, in
my mind, really a love story between Lily and Lawrence.
If you don't know what i'm talking about because you haven't read these
stories, do yourself a favor and take a look. They're all up on Carrie
Gore's site (except for THE PHONE CALL and ROOMMATES. If Carrie isn't
able to put them up, I'll get them posted to fictionmania soon, so
everybody can read 'em!).[ Host's Note: Carrie's Pad has sadly gone away, and you are reading this at Sapphire's Place ]
As for SOMETHING BORROWED ... to me it had everything i like in a tg
story. Body swaps, great characterizations, subtle mind shifts,
fiancees, wedding plans, etc. Paul1954 made it all fresh and convincing
with his sensitive writing. Great job!
Now as for the nitty gritty -- books and illustrations. A couple people
who have requested books have asked me not to send them until after the
holidays, so I'm going to hold off sending them until the first week of
January (i promise!). I still haven't heard from everybody regarding
whether or not you want books -- so if you haven't given me a definite
answer, i'll be contacting you in private (or better yet, email me!) ...
i hope y'all can handle LOTS of books, because i plan on sending out a
couple dozen to everybody. If you have a size limitation, let me know that.
As for the illustrations for SOMETHING BORROWED, I'm going to get started
on those shortly. My time is scarce between real life stuff and another
project i'm working on (mum's the world on that for now!) ... but i hope
to have them done by the first week of january as well.
I hope everybody had a good time with this contest. i've heard some
other contests have created bitter feelings, but as i stated at the
beginning, my main goals were to give some great authors a nudge to write
a story, and to reward people for writing by offering free books to
everybody who entered.
Special thanks once again to carrie gore. the contest would not have
been as successful or as enjoyable without all of her help and input.
and thanks to mindy, for giving her blessing for the contest.
I think that's all i have to say for now. thanks for writing tg tales,
everybody!
femur
p.s. once again, for the record, here are the stories that were submitted
for the romance contest:
I hope you enjoy these stories as much as i did.
femur
SOMETHING BORROWED, SOMETHING BLUE by Paul 1954.