Query letter/Prose and Poetry Contest

Writer’s Thought for the Week: There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away. ~  Emily Dickinson

QUERY LETTERS

Want help with writing query letters? Here’s a video of Marla Miller’s query workshop. Four writing read their queries and the class and Marla give them critiques. Three are for nonfiction books and one is for a novel. The advice is succinct and on the mark.

THE BINNACLE 10th Annual Ultra-Short Competition
Deadline: March 15, 2013

This free-to-enter contest seeks prose works of 150 words or fewer and poetry of sixteen lines or fewer and fewer than 150 words. All works should have a narrative element to them. A minimum of $300 in cash prizes will be awarded, with a minimum prize of $50. Submit no more than two works total, prose and/or poetry.

Channel your characters/Slice Magazine

Writer’s Thought for the Week: You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.  ~ Plato

Talk to Your Characters

I’m not much into metaphysics, so when I listened to Diane Chamberlain’s video on channeling characters I doubted the technique would work for me. I tried it anyway. When I asked my character how she felt, she told me things about herself that I did not know. Really. I’ll be using this technique again. Listen to this short video on characters and setting and give this method a try if you write fiction.

SLICE Magazine

Accepts short fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. The issue 13 reading period runs until March 1, 2013. The theme for this issue is The Unknown. Submit stories or essays up to 5,000 words.

Previously a nonpaying market, Slice now pays contributors $100 for stories and essays and $50 for poems.

Tuning Chapter 1/Gulf Coast Journal

Writer’s Thought for the Week: Success is never final, failure is never fatal. It’s courage that counts. ~  John Wooden

When submitting a novel to agents or publishers, your first chapter is key to grabbing their attention. This free download from Writer’s Digest gives you some genre neutral tips on fine tuning that chapter.

The submission period for GULF COAST closes on March 1. It pays a minimum of $30/poem, $20/page of prose up to $150, $50/review, and $100/interview. Only one submission per author.

Their 2013 contest is open to submissions in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction until March 15. Prizes are $1,500 and publication to the winner in each genre and $250 to two honorable mentions in each genre. The $23 fee to enter the contest includes a year-long subscription  to Gulf Coast.

Copyright protection/Prose contest

Writer’s Thought for the Week: Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures. ~ Henry Ward Beecher 

The U.S. Copyright Act isn’t just about copyrights. The law includes other issues writers with book contracts should be aware of, such as a termination clause that may help some authors escape onerous contracts. For details, read “Will the CopyrightAct Open a Floodgate of Contract Rewrites for Authors?” 

LIBARTS LONDON PRIZE
Deadline: February 28, 2013

First prize: £200. Second prize: £100.

Word limit: 1500
No entry fee

If you could change one thing about the world, what would it be? Use text, video, audio, photographs, or a combination of these to tell your story. Your story can be about anything: Freedom, Politics, Parents, Religion, Sex, Nature, Race, Education, Beauty…anything. Open internationally but text should be in English.