Mezzo Magazine has asked TheNextBigWriter to help it find a special story to publish in their September 2009 debut issue. The challenge of this competition is to create a short story that has the right ingredients to be featured in Mezzo Magazine’s September issue. So what is Mezzo Magazine looking for? In their words:

“The stories we publish are intelligent and creative but with no pretence of intellectual aspirations. We want to enjoy the read, not study the text. We appreciate edgy and irreverent writing that makes us see, hear and be in the story. Our editors use their judgment, and review the following elements to score your submission.

• Opening lines - Does the beginning make you want to read more?
• Plot - is there a continuous thread of suspense?
• Setting - Are the sensory details effective?
• Voice and Tone - Is the narrative voice consistent and unobtrusive?
• Conflict - Are the stakes and the conflicts surrounding them clear?
• Dialogue - Is the dialogue natural sounding? Is it easy to read?
• Resolutions - Does the story have a satisfying ending?”

The subject is your choice, but no stories with excessive gore, violence, profanity, hate or discrimination.

The story should be a minimum of 1,000 words but under 3,500 words.

Contest submission deadline: June 30, 2009.

I’ll repeat what I wrote last year when we announced the finalists because I think it best summarizes the intent of the competition:

Hopefully, even if you didn’t reach the finals, you won by receiving the feedback and motivation needed to hone your starting chapters to perfection.  The ultimate decision makers are the agents, publishers, and readers who will purchase and read your books and we have no doubt that we’ll be hearing about the success of many of the entries.

This year’s finalists in alphabetical order are:

- Daughter in Exile by Ama Adjapon

- Far From Happy by Jeni Decker

- Meter Man by Benno von Archimboldi

- Sensing Passion: Travels of a Fifty-Five Year Old Divorcee by Christy Cumberlander Walker

- Spangled Star by seanwelsh

- The Boy Next Door by rlvs

The first three chapters of the finalists will be sent to the Final Round judges and the winners will be announced on June 18.

Congratulations to the finalists and everyone who participated!

Kirk is one of the oldest members of TheNextBigWriter (I can still remember his first post, The Adventures of Addie Boyd).   Kirk placed second in last year’s Strongest Start Novel Competition for the start of his sexy swashbuckler, The Adventures of Kate Darling

The ones we know of so far are:

• Chris Delyani (TNBW name Cecil Roebuck) for The Love Thing
• Jeni Decker for Far From Happy
• Sabrina Dalton for The Girl in the Box

Congratulations!

For those who didn’t place in the competition or don’t have a finished manuscript, TheNextBigWriter is running the $3,500 Strongest Start Novel Competition to help you get your manuscript in shape.

We’re pleased to announce the official start of the Strongest Start Novel Competition 2009.  Like last year, the Competition is designed to motivate writers to produce (if you haven’t already) the strongest three opening chapters.  We hope the Competition will serve as a catalyst to get writers to work together to craft openings that will compel agents, publishers, and readers to keep reading.

This year, we’re pleased to announce that BookSurge has agreed to provide several of the prizes for the competition, including a full publishing package to the winner valued at $2,400.  TheNextBigWriter will also be providing the winner with $500 in cash

Runner-up prizes include cash as well as an editorial evaluation of your manuscript from BookSurge.

Full information on the competition can be found by clicking on the link below.

http://www.thenextbigwriter.com/competi … start.html

You can see all TheNextBigWriter entries at:
http://www.thenextbigwriter.com/library … tart_three

Books and novels already posted on TheNextBigWriter can be entered into the competition as long as the first three chapters were posted after April 16, 2008.  You can still re-enter if you posted before this date but you’ll have to repost your first three chapters or post them again.

Any questions you have can be posted in the Strongest Start Forum.

In addition, like last year we also created the forum to provide a place for writers to discuss and share ideas on the art of crafting a compelling opening.

I’m also linking to last year’s forum to serve as an additional resource.  View last year’s forum.

We look forward to receiving your submissions.  Thank you and good luck to all!

Get more details on the writing competition.

Good luck to all who decide to enter!

To date, we’ve already seen over 1,000 eBooks created on Booksie.  This is the first step in a much broader vision to create a new type of publishing platform for writers and readers.  Stay tuned…

Learn more about the Booksie eBook Generator.

We’re pleased to announce the winners of the Celebrity Vampire Writing Competition.  All of the stories submitted were juicy warm-ups for Halloween.  The winners are:

• “Not In My Neighborhood” by Phoebe Miller
• “That’s Entertainment” by Kat Nove
• “The Night is Full of Stars” by dracognan

Hopefully everyone had fun with the contest.  We’ll be announcing a new writing competition shortly.

For those of you unfamiliar with the book, Static Mayhem incorporates elements of fairy tales, science fiction, and fantasy to tell the coming-of-age story of late-bloomer Harrison Cody, who grows from a disinterested slacker into a heroic father of two orphaned children. Accompanied by a wise-cracking pixie, Harrison overcomes his own inner obstacles amid baffling future technology, malignant magical entities, and a trip into Faerie, in his quest to find the rest of the human survivors of a strange cataclysmic event which has altered the very fabric of reality.

As the winner of the competition Mr. Aubry will receive a full manuscript critique and edit from the competition sponsor, iUniverse valued at $2,000, $100 in cash, and a free one year membership extension to TheNextBigWriter.

In addition to Static Mayhem, the other winners are:

Second Place:

The Adventures of Kate Darling by Kirk Ort – Condemned to a life of indentured servitude, young Kate Darling is bound for the American colonies aboard a merchant vessel commanded by the brutal and lecherous Nigel Terwilliger. When the ship is captured by pirates, Kate sees her chance to trade years of sorrow and cruelty for a life filled with adventure and romance.

Third Place:

Feed the Meter by Ben Duiverman – Frank Donnelly is a lucky guy—new house, job promotion, a loving fiancée—but the bottom drops out when the city installs parking meters on his street, reviving his long-dead grandfather’s scary stories about one-eyed monsters operating in cahoots with Zeus, god of lightning, and how these creatures now roam the earth disguised as parking meters, hunting down little boys, hell-bent on destroying their souls.

Congratulations to all!

The Strongest Start Novel Competition is the only “work-in-progress” online novel competition that we are aware of. It allows writers to submit books-in-progress and edit their entries as they receive feedback from the community. The Competition’s goal is to provide you, the writer, with the feedback and motivation you need to edit and improve your opening chapters and ultimately finish your book. This year, the submitted entries received over 1,500 reviews from other writers and readers.

We want to thank all writers for participating and the judges for providing their time. We also want to thank the competition sponsor iUniverse.

For more on the competition as well as future updates on the 2009 competition, check out the Strongest Start Novel Competition page.

Joe’s site led me to another Blog called, appropriately enough, Kindle Formatting. Here’s what I learned. You need to convert your document to html (both TheNextBigWriter and Booksie do that for you), and then use a free program called MobiPocket v4.2 Creator to convert it into a PRC file. Once that is done, it’s ready to be uploaded to Amazon for distribution on the Kindle. You can read Kindle Formatting for more detailed instructions.

Once you have your content in the .prc format, getting your book or article on to Amazon is easy. Go to the link below, set up your account, and go.

http://dtp.amazon.com/mn/signin

So if you want to test out distributing a short story, poem, article, or even your book on Amazon, it’s not hard to do.

If anyone has uploaded their writing for Kindle distribution, let us know how it’s going.