You may have seen my all-caps but rather cryptic Twitter post last night about WotF...

Fun story which I would have posted last night, except I didn't get home until 10pm and Hubby had to get up at Stupid Early AM, so Bed was a Thing:

As you know, Bob, one of my werewolf stories made Finalist for Q4 at Writers of the Future. I've been waiting for four weeks to find out the results. I knew the call had to come soon...

The handsome and hard-working Eric James Stone had his "Unforgettable" book launch last night, which I attended. Scott Parkin saw me and asked "Did you get the call yet?" I answered in the negative, and he commiserated with me for a moment before going back to where he'd been.

Ten seconds later (like, literally), my phone rings.

"Hi, Julie." I've spoken with Joni all of three times in my entire life. I still recognized her voice. She sounded happy.

Therefore I refrained from saying "Hi, Joni, just tell me I didn't win." Instead I said "Hi, Joni." I'm pretty sure I already started bouncing, though I tried to contain myself.

"You won. Third place."

I have often described characters feeling "like a marionette with cut strings." I've never actually felt like that... until last night. I, uh, held myself up on a handy shelf. I told her how shocked I was to win with this story, because of Dave's famous werewolf hate, and she said "I guess he liked this one!"

And so did the rest of the judges.

I swear I wrote this as part of a Codex prompt; I finished it in February 2015, and I remember the idea being something about abysses (Weekend Warrior? Anyway, it ended up being too long to actually enter, and I'm not sure I finished it in time in any case), but I cannot for the life of me remember anything else. I actually ended up revising it for the Contest with Dave's sensibilities in mind, expanding it and changing the ending to something a little less-- okay, a lot less depressing. Especially in light of what he said about about my last Finalist, which was "is it a story about a werewolf, or is it a story about belonging?" Well, that first one wasn't, particularly, at least not in my mind, but this one definitely is.

There were a bunch of people I knew at the book launch, of course, because the Utah writing community is vast, and they were all super happy for me. Utah has a ridiculous proportion of winners, as well--four of us were there. We took a picture. It was awesome.

SO. ANYWAY. I'M GOING TO HOLLYWOOD. DO THE DANCE OF JOY WITH ME.

So, here are my WotF stats. 29th time is the charm!

Raw numbers:
29 entries
14 form Rs
11 Honorable Mentions
2 Semi-Finalists
2 Finalists
1 Win

I entered the contest with my first "original" story in December 2007. It garnered a plain form R. To be fair, it's an actual Firefly knockoff which I scraped the serial numbers from--as in, it was fanfic first before I rejiggered it. That being said, that story has spawned four others in the same series, three of which have found homes, two of which have found two homes. Publisher's Freaking Weekly even said something nice about one of them!

My next entry (March 2007) also garnered a form R. However it was also my first pro-rate sale, to Cosmos.

My next three entries all garnered Honorable Mentions, though they weren't calling them that yet for the very next one. I'm not going to go through them one by one. That would be ridiculous. However, for your elucidation:

2007: 4 entries (3 HMs)
2008: 4 entries (3 HMs)
2008: 2 entries (no placement)
2010: 4 entries (1 HM)
2011: 0 entries (The Year Roleplay Ate My Brain. Whoops.)
2012: 3 entries (1 HM)
2013: 4 entries (1 HM, 1 Finalist)
2014: 4 entries (1 HM, 2 SFs)
2015: 4 entries (1 HM, 1 WINNER)

The moral of the story? NEVER GIVE UP, NEVER SURRENDER.

Also, find your niche and play it to the hilt. My last six placements were all werewolf stories, except one, but it had werewolves in prominent secondary roles. Two of those were Finalists, and two were Semi-Finalists. Dave Farland (famously) hates werewolf stories--he said so in the blurb for my novel! You can make someone look at something they don't like twice if you just do it well enough.