Expert: Cathy Clamp - 11/9/2008

Question
hi cathy,
  i'm currently a high school senior going through the stressful college process.  my english teachers have told me that i'm a great writer (not that i really believe them but...).  one of my teachers told me how one of her ex students received top priority (and eventually got in) from Columbia university when she won second or third at a national essay contest.  now, that got me thinking.  are there any big national or even state (new york in this case) essay or short story contests that will be ending/announcing results in december, like mid-december?  i've looked online, but i'm not which ones are legitimate, so i had to turn to an expert like yourself.  and also,i'm more concerned with short story contests cuz i think i got a winner on my hands (though i said the same thing about hillary a couple of months ago...)
 thanks for ur time!

Answer
Hi, jacky!

Sorry for the delay in answering, but apparently I didn't get your question the first time. Fortunately the nice people here at AllExperts forwarded it to me.

Unfortunately, any contests that might be announcing in mid-December probably had a submission cut-off some time ago. It takes that long to judge major contests. If you're interested in writing short stories, you probably need to look at genre-specific contests in whatever genre you write. The two "all-genre" contests that are well-regarded in the industry (so winning them would look good on your school resume) would be Zoetrope and Writer's Digest. Here's a link to Zoetrope. As you can see, the deadline was in October, so you'd be looking at the 2009 contest:

http://www.all-story.com/contests.cgi

Writers Digest's information is here (but it's also closed for 2008):

http://www.writersdigest.com/annual/

There are a few others, but again---it depends on your genre. Here's a site that lists legitimate contests regularly so you might check back from time to time to see if there's anything there.

http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=113082

Then, if you decide to post questions at any of these sites, you really need to spend more time on your posts. "Posts" are writing, and if you want to be taken seriously as a writer, proper punctuation and capitalization are important. Also, text-message-speak such as "ur" for "your" won't get you taken seriously at many sites.

Hope this helps, and good luck with your writing.

Cathy