NEW USERS! INTRODUCE YOURSELVES!

Nice to meet everyone here! My name is Elizabeth, but please call me Liz. I'm an ME (Mechanical Engineering) undergraduate from Nevada who's a published author on the side. Because of my full-time college career, writing has been pushed as a side hobby, but it's a life-long ambition to inspire others through my books. I started writing to Writers of the Future at 17 and received an Honorable Mention at 18. Since then, I've been focusing more on poetry than sci-fi/fantasy, but a trilogy and short story are in the works!

Here are some of my interests: superhero media (not current Marvel or DC movies), auto mechanics, video games, sports (especially basketball and football), digital art, guitar, watching crime videos and songwriting. 

Welcome, Liz!

Welcome to the forum Liz. You live a very busy life with all those hobbies. Hope you get a win to go with the HM.

@elizabeth-k Welcome

@wulfmoon Thanks to everyone for the nice messages! and sorry for the late response..my computer gave up on me for a while. Time for a new one. I also find that Brandon Sanderson's career is fun to follow. Always awesome to see authors do new things and communicate with their readers

Hi, I am Olivia. Right Now settled in Australia. A content writer by Profession. My work could involve a variety of content creation, from copywriting to engaging in different forums to interact with people. 

Welcome, Olivia!

Posted by: @robert-j-sawyer

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Hi, folks. I'm Robert J. Sawyer. I've been a judge for the Writers of the Future contest since 2005. I live just outside Toronto and I'm looking forward to seeing this year's winners in Los Angeles in April.

A brief bio:

Robert J. Sawyer has won the Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards, all for best novel of the year, as well as the Robert A. Heinlein Award, the Hal Clement Award, the Skylark Award, and more Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards ("Auroras") than anyone else in history. Rob is a member of the Order of Canada, the highest honor bestowed by the Canadian government. The ABC TV series FlashForward was based on his novel of the same name; his latest novel — his twenty-fifth — is The Downloaded.

Thanks for saying hi to the group, Rob! Very kind of you!

@elizabeth-k 

Welcome to the Forum, Liz! You have diverse interests that will serve you well in writing. Well done!

Dont forget to take the WotF Online Wokshop, taught by some of the best in the industry. And you’ll come out with a story to submit!

Welcome aboard!

@olivia-ava 

Welcome, Olivia!

Writing is writing, so your experience in content writing will serve you well. There are additional tricks to fiction stories, and taking the WotF Online Workshop will surely help you there. And it’s free, taught by some of the best.

Welcome to the Forum!

@elizabeth-k welcome to the forum, Elizabeth! Great to have you here

@olivia-ava Hello Olivia! Welcome!

Hi. My name is Evelyn. Im a 16 soon to be 17 junior in high school. My dream is to publish a novel and to write Comic books for DC. Im currently working on the first draft of my first real book. 

Welcome, Evelyn!

@eveywagoner That's awesome, Evelyn! Welcome to the forum.

Posted by: @eveywagoner

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Hi. My name is Evelyn. Im a 16 soon to be 17 junior in high school. My dream is to publish a novel and to write Comic books for DC. Im currently working on the first draft of my first real book. 

Welcome, Evelyn. We’ve had some young winners.  My illustrator for my “Super-Duper Moongirl and the Amazing Moon Dawdler” story in Volume 35 was only fifteen years old when she won the contest on the illustrators’ side. 

As for help with writing, I do recommend you take the WotF Online Writing Course. It’s free, and it will help you see what makes stories work.

Welcome aboard!

Welcome @robert-j-sawyer! Thank you for your On Writing columns. They were a huge part of my early writing journey and I learned a lot from them. Awesome to see you here in the forum!

Hello, Fellow Writers

I am a retired life science and high technology marketing executive living in Portland, Oregon with my wife and three cats. One of my cats, Millie, is my constant writing companion who jumps up and walks across my keyboard whenever I am on the computer. I credit her with several original stories only other cats can understand. 

I have written 11 eBooks, 32 short stories and a host of political commentaries, and most of them are up on Amazon Kindle, Barnes and Noble Online, Apple books, Smashwords and others. For whatever reason, my most creative period is November through January--probably because I am stuck inside from the cold weather--and the rest of the year I am reading books, traveling and writing grants for scientists, engineers and physicians--my main source of extra income. 

I use the name, Klatuu, from the Day the Earth Stood Still, my favorite all time SF movie, but in the movie the alien, Klaatu, come to Earth to warn us of our impending doom if we do not change our ways and live peaceably with one another, is spelled with two a's and not two u's, as I do. No reason why.  

I greatly enjoy talking with other writers and getting their input on my work, if possible. 

So good to join you all in your author quest. 

David F Eastman aka Klatuu33. 

Hi! I have a question to ask. Does the rule with no novels or short novels published prior to entering the contest apply to any language, or only to English? For example, I am from Romania, and I have a complete, but not yet published novel manuscript written in my native language. That's why I asked. To see how I should proceed with both my manuscript and my stories for WOTF. Thanks in advance!

@olivia-ava welcome.

@eveywagoner welcome. You can find a lot of good topics and training in this forum. I wish I would have found this place when I was younger (much younger in my case haha)

Hi everyone, I haven't spent a lot of time in this forum yet, but I plan to, and figured I'd start by introducing myself.

I've been writing most of my life, and earned my first dollar (actually, twenty-five of them!) selling my first story shortly after high school. After attending USC's School of Cinematic Arts, I focused on screenwriting and did my best to break into Hollywood, to no avail. I've spent my career in a variety of writing roles (freelance writing, travel writing, technical writing, and now, UX writing), and my fiction took a back seat, other than a smattering of published stories here and there.

With the goal of getting serious with my fiction once again, I've been cranking out some short stories and trying to earn more publishing credits -- including, hopefully, WOTF! I'm currently working my way through the WOTF Online Workshop, as well as Brandon Sanderson's excellent YouTube course (free!), and I just got accepted to Western Colorado University's Creative Writing MFA in Genre Fiction program. 

And now, I'll start lurking in the forum!

Welcome (@stricklandia). May you win the grand prize that you seek.

@stricklandia Welcome

@klatuu33 

Welcome to the WotF Forum, David! Sounds like you have the expertise to write some excellent hard-SF stories.

It’s still a good idea to do a run through of the WotF Online Workshop—you’ll understand what the judges are looking for. Have fun taking part in our discussions, and we wish you the best of success!

Posted by: @mihai-balaceanu

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Hi! I have a question to ask. Does the rule with no novels or short novels published prior to entering the contest apply to any language, or only to English? For example, I am from Romania, and I have a complete, but not yet published novel manuscript written in my native language. That's why I asked. To see how I should proceed with both my manuscript and my stories for WOTF. Thanks in advance!

 

 

Hi Mihai!

Congrats on the novel. You haven’t published it yet, you haven’t hit 5000 sales or hits, you haven’t been paid 8 cents a word. Language it’s in does not matter. While I wish you the best of success with the novel, you will likely be qualified to enter this contest for years to come.

Cheers!

 

Fi

@stricklandia 

Welcome to the Forum, Michael!

Good to hear you’re taking the WotF Online Workshop. While it appears you have screenwriting/screenplay experience and story is indeed story, screenplays and short stories are definitely different animals and do require different skill sets. This is also one of the best places to learn the additional requirements necessary to win Writers of the Future and to be published in one of their bestselling anthologies. I will say it’s worth every effort. Multitudes of speculative fiction careers have been launched through this contest.

You are on the path. I wish you the best of success!

Very excited to meet you in April! 

Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya… Waitasec. That's not right. Let me try again.

Hello, my name is Rob. I typically write under the name Rob Cornell because my real last name is…cumbersome. I've self-published a number of novels (mostly in the dark fantasy and crime genres) but they haven't made me rich and famous yet.   I made my very first professional short fiction sale last year to ZMB Presents, which was awesome. Especially since I've been writing and submitting short stories off and on since I was 15. (And it's been a long time since I was 15.) I've entered WotF only a few times sporadically, but have managed to snag 2 HMs. I've decided to buckle down and start subbing to the contest more regularly. I have one story in for last quarter and I'm working on the next to get in before the end of March. This one I am very deliberately putting the stuff from the free workshop and Wulf Moon's awesome book into practice, right down to planning out each try/fail and making sure I slather on the emotional butter.

Hm. Now I want toast.

Anyway, that's me. Consider this my delurking post.  

Cheers!

@luckycharms 

Hi Rob!

First, allow me to hold up my hand. Note that I do not have six fingers. Just wanted to make that clear.

Welcome to the WotF Forum! You've come to the right place to learn how to hone your craft and write winning stories! I'm also glad you're enjoying my writing book. It's a compilation of the best from the Super Secrets of Writing thread I started right in this forum, plus some extras to help you stay the course! Combine that with the WotF Online Workshop and you'll be on your way to crafting your winner like so many others following this same pattern have!

Keep working on that emotional resonance you're slathering on in your stories. Strong internal arcs create strong stories!

All the beast!

Wulf Moon