I submitted that story I wrote yesterday to a few magazines today. It’s about a freelance writer who gets fed up with pushing AI generated articles, titled ‘Headlines.’ I spent some time polishing, but this is still the fastest I’ve ever gone from a blank page to submitting a story (outside of a competition). I don’t think I can make it go that fast every time, but I can sure shoot for it now that I know it’s possible. I’m sure this is great practice for any future competitions I join too.

Speaking of, I signed up for another Writing Battle taking place in April. I’m also waiting to hear back from the second Writing Battle, which I’ll get the results of in just a couple of days. I only had three days to write that story, and the result I ended up with was not particularly good, so I’m not expecting much, but who knows? Maybe everybody else had a worse day than I did.

I also got some results back from Twisted Tournament, a flash fiction competition I entered a few weeks ago. I didn’t win any prizes, but one of the three stories I wrote did end up ranking pretty highly. The scoring system is complicated, an average score out of ten based on how I was ranked in groups of seven stories by several peer judges, but the number looks nice. I got a 9.46 out of 10, and ranked fifth for that round. Out of how many people you ask? I’d love to tell you, but I have no clue. I can’t find the total entrants anywhere, and I can only view the top thirty stories. So I’ll just say it was in the thousands. Tens of thousands. Millions, perhaps.

Unfortunately, I didn’t end up ranking in the top thirty overall. I was held back by my first round story of 500 words that only got a 6.4/10. The third round I got a respectable 8.64/10 to make an average score of 8.3. Everybody who placed had three scores of at least 7.75 or better (emphasis on better), so looks like I’ve got some work to do. I’m not sure when I’ll enter this tournament again, but when I do, I’ll be going for gold.

That’s about all the writing I’ve been up to since my last update. Tomorrow I’ll have my review ready for ‘The Hidden Girl and Other Stories,’ and on Monday I’ll announce the results of the second Writing Battle. Then I’ll start on the rest of the book haul and probably some new competitions or submissions too. Lots to look forward to.

Also, about the new blog site. I’m still working on it. Email integration has proven to be a huge annoyance with how the rest of my setup works. I gave this Jekyl template system a couple of months, and while it’s really nice for a simple personal site, I think I’ll have to find something else for what I want to do. The problem is the hosting service. Using GitHub as a free platform is great, but a lot of third party services that make stuff like sending newsletters and regular emails easy won’t accept a subdomain as the sender, which is why I haven’t gotten it working yet. I could continue to grind on it and try to brute force a solution, but I think I’m going to give up and try a different approach. I may end up moving to a new domain in the near future, or even scrapping the whole project to start from a different point. I’ll continue to update the GitHub page and will probably leave it up as a personal site, but yeah. The future of the blog is a little uncertain at the moment, but I’ll figure it out.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley