curiousPardon me while I flail.
Also pardon me while I open the floor to questions. See, I want to give away a few galleys (and I'll have a longer post about why I have so many, and what's being done with most of them, a little later), and that means I need contests. Suggest things! What do you think would make a good contest? "One that I can win" is not a good answer, by the by.
I leave you with Sonnet 122, because I find structured poetry deeply soothing:
Thy gift, thy tables, are within my brain
Full character'd with lasting memory,
Which shall above that idle rank remain,
Beyond all date; even to eternity:
Or, at the least, so long as brain and heart
Have faculty by nature to subsist;
Till each to raz'd oblivion yield his part
Of thee, thy record never can be miss'd.
That poor retention could not so much hold,
Nor need I tallies thy dear love to score;
Therefore to give them from me was I bold,
To trust those tables that receive thee more:
To keep an adjunct to remember thee
Were to import forgetfulness in me.
—William Shakespeare.
Whew.
May 1 2009, 18:05:50 UTC 8 years ago
Flash fiction contests are also cool, perhaps provoked by an enigmatic question or sentence. This also gives you more opportunities to connect them thematically to your forthcoming books. Something like "What would you face, what difficulties would you surmount, what adventure would you win through, to purchase a copy of Rosemary and Rue?" where the more fantastic a flashfic is the better. Or, "Picking up the newspaper, I saw the Zombie apocalypse had already consumed the Northeast..." etc.
Of course, the difficult thing here is in judging such contests. As you've said, you're swamped with a crazy amount of things to do in the next couple of months. You might want to delegate judging, have a panel who picks finalists and then you pick the winner.
May 2 2009, 17:36:51 UTC 8 years ago