Thursday, May 31, 2007

The History of the InnermoonLit Contests

It's almost time to announce the results of the 2007 Best First Chapter of a Novel contest. These are the best two times of year--the announcements and especially the trips to the P.O. to buy the money orders and send the prizes! I think we get as excited as the winners.

Now for a little backstory.

As long as I’ve known Brian, he’s had big ideas. About his own writing, yes, but also about ways to help sustain writing in a broader sense. Here’s someone who’s sacrificed so much and poured his all into writing and who hasn’t yet received the recognition he deserves, and already he wants to give back. It is any wonder I love him so? [I am letting my mushy flag fly freely as we just celebrated our 6 year wedding anniversary last week. I am entitled. :)]

We’ve had extensive talks about starting a small press, down to picking out names, constructing budgets, and investigating all manner of business, legal, and tax minutiae. Time and again, we got discouraged at the state of publishing. Even an editor and publisher has limited power and is at the mercy of the distributors, book store chains, and assorted other members of the filthy lucre set.

If we started our dream press, published what we loved with no considerations about what would actually sell in this world of few readers and even fewer book buyers, it would surely be an endless money pit, not to mention an insane amount of work.

So those aspirations languished, till somewhere along the way Brian had a revelation. We didn’t need to start a press; we could just start a contest. No S-corporation rigmarole, no worries about whether our selections were the most commercial, no authors angry if we published them but were unable to make their books bestsellers, and a much smaller investment of time and money.

Brian decided first thing that he wouldn’t charge entry fees, aghast as he is at how much writers have to pay nowadays to enter most contests. This was never envisioned as a for-profit enterprise but more as a service to art.

We don’t publish the winning entries because that gets us back into purchasing rights, drawing up contracts, and generally acting more like suits than either of us care to. We don’t take snail mail submissions because that would mean you and us both would have to reveal our secret locations to the whole internet. Plus, who wouldn’t rather cut, paste, and hit submit than deal with printing out hard copies and toting them to the post office?

Anyway, that was sometime early in 2005, and the contests have evolved nicely since then. We hope they will continue to grow, so spread the word, will ya?

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Ghost in the Machine

We interrupt our regularly scheduled entry because there are some strange things going on with the contest submission form.

On Friday, I received a submission in my Outlook inbox. Which is strange, given that the form is set up to send to Brian's email address. It wasn't forwarded to me or sent directly from the person--it came through the Yahoo webhosting route. This particular entry was either a very late or early Best First Chapter submission (which we are no longer accepting since this year's deadline was March 1 and we don't start taking entries for next year till September 1). So I figured this person had gotten creative and figured out some way to hack the submission form in an attempt to avoid disqualification, even going so far as to figure out my work email address and sending it to me.

Then today, there were three submissions for the Short-Short Story Contest in my inbox. I am confused.

Let me back up and say that, although I'm not a very tech savvy girl, somehow I know just enough to put me in positions where I am responsible for various tech-related things. This is true at my job and with Brian. It's a little bit scary, but I seem to be able to scrape by and figure things out as I go. We built his website together; I am his web author. He tells me what he wants on paper, and I try to execute it electronically.

So whatever is wrong with the form is my doing. I just can't for the life of me figure out what I did. I updated Brian's website (see the new dog pictures under the kayaking photo gallery) and started this blog on Monday, so maybe something weird got embedded in his site then. But that wouldn't explain the Friday entry.

I've gone back into the Yahoo Sitebuilder software, and everything looks correct. The form is set up to mail to his email address. I don't see mine anywhere on the site. Yet I ran two test entries, and both came to my email, not Brian's. Eerie.

I guess it isn't such a big deal really, except it has me wondering if entries could possibly be sent to other strange email addresses at random. Is someone in Australia receiving mysterious short-short stories? And how would we ever know?

If anybody out there has any suggestions, I'm all ears.

Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Accounta--who?

I guess the comment I made yesterday about accountability might've seemed like it came out of left field. I don't know if corporate America worries about such things, but assessment and accountability have become big buzzwords in academe. Simply put, it means: Are we doing what we set out to do? And more importantly, how can we prove to the legislature and accrediting bodies that we're doing what we're supposed to?

There are so many shameful scams targeting writers out there, I sometimes worry that people look askance at Brian's contests and think, 'Where's the catch?"

You have every right to be skeptical. Heaven knows there seems to be no end to the people out there devising ways to get into aspiring writers' pocketbooks and wallets. Every time someone asks you for a contest entry fee, conference registration fee, workshop tuition, reading/editing/book doctoring fee, or to buy their how-to-be-a-writer book, magazine, or DVD, you have to question whether the cost is justified. And in cases like this that might seem too good to be true, it's healthy to look for the catch.

I see this blog as a chance for a kind of site visit where we let outsiders examine our processes and we show that everything is in order. I hope to present you with evidence and information to put your mind at ease. So stay tuned...

Monday, May 28, 2007

Raison d'etre

It’s been just over two years since Brian came up with the idea of the InnermoonLit contests, and as I recently sat reading entries for the second annual Best First Chapter of a Novel Contest, I couldn’t help feeling like something was missing. Behind each entry is someone reaching out, sharing some piece of themselves, and for the most part, we never get to make contact with those outstretched hands.

We communicate with the winners, of course, and we get to find out who's behind our very favorite entries, but the rest of our entrants remain as mysterious to us as we probably seem to them. They may read the contest results on Brian’s website but never hear directly from us. We used to send emails confirming the receipt of entries but soon became overwhelmed and trusted that the website’s automatic confirmation page would suffice to quell writers’ worries and assure them their work hadn’t gotten stuck in cyberspace. (Judging by the number of multiple entries we get, usually sent two or three minutes apart, it doesn’t always work.) Sometimes Brian gets emails from entrants who seem to think this contest is run by a faceless computer or possibly a vast board of trustees.


So I had this urge to humanize the InnermoonLit contests—to let you peek behind the scenes a bit. I’ll admit, part of me wants people to recognize what Brian puts into this venture. He throws his considerable diligence and discipline into judging the contests, and the prizes and administrative costs come out of his pocket (and as you know, there are no entry fees). Then too, I have this accountability compulsion, probably from working for so many years as a staff person in higher education. I plan to lay bare our working methods so that you can see how we operate and possibly even provide suggestions for improvement.


So just remember, we are a mom-&-pop type outfit here. In a way, we are high tech…but just slightly so. When you email us, you’re not subscribing to some computerized mailing list or addressing a board of directors.

It’s just us, a couple of nice people who love writing and want to reach out to other writers, to give them a little pat on the back, a virtual high five, to maybe help keep them keeping on when the work gets tough and the outlook is bleak.