Just thought I’d share these with you good people - a couple of opportunities to make a splash with some flash, so to speak.

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First off, PlotMedic Sarah Ellender clued me in to the Waterstones “What’s Your Story” competition, wherein you have to write a story of any kind that “fits on a postcard” - which, if you enter online, is conveniently defined as 600 words maximum.

The national winners get a free Arvon writing course, and the stories will be featured alongside the big-name writers in an anthology of similar works - which is a prize money can’t buy, AMIRITE? So, go flex your flash muscles. I can’t find a closing date, but best to assume it’s sooner rather than later.

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So, 600 words is too long for you, eh? How about … 140 characters, no more, no less? That’s the challenge over at Copyblogger in their Twitter Writing Contest, in which you can win an iPod Nano. Not quite so prestigious a prize as the Waterstones gig, perhaps, and the deadline is this Friday … oh, and you need to have a Twitter account to post it, natch.

But y’know, exposure is exposure … and I’m betting they don’t get many sf entries. So go show the copywriters how the speculative crew mix it downtown, y’hear?

Have fun!

I’m sure there’s a good few of you reading VCTB who don’t get sent more books than you have time to read*, and who in fact would like more books, preferably without paying for them. For those people, I shall pass on some news from the UK SF Book News Network.

UK genre publisher Orbit are celebrating the release of the latest Kelley Armstrong book (No Humans Involved), by offering you the chance to win every book that they publish in the next twelve months - which will be about sixty titles.

All you have to do is email orbit[AT]littlebrown[dot]co[dot]uk with the answer to the following question:

How many full-length novels has Kelley Armstrong written set in the Otherworld?

The answer should be easy enough to track down. Answers to be in by Thursday 31st May. Good luck!

[* I'm not complaining. But donations toward buying my own home, or simply renting a lock-up somewhere, would be gratefully received.]

It looks like Second Life, home of the weird, just got a little bit weirder. The PR agency Centric have just found their island build taken over by a rogue corporation from another timeline that has been trying to develop an alien world into a human colony. No one seems entirely sure what that means, but Winfinity, the temporally displaced company in question, is offering a bounty of L$100k to the person who goes in, scopes the scene and brings back the best report of what’s going on. I’ve been threatening to get acquainted with SL for months now - I think I just found my motivation. Any regular visitors to the metaverse care to share some tips of good places to visit?

Gareth L. Powell is offering you the chance to win a signed original manuscript of an as-yet-unwritten story - all you have to do is pick the name and nationality of the heroine. It had better be a name that fits a tough determined lady, knowing Gareth’s stories …

Looks like we have a winner. Continue reading “Glorifying Terrorism competition results”

So I ran a competition to win my spare copy of the Glorifying Terrorism anthology. I think it’s fair to say that I had less entrants than I expected. Continue reading “The Glorifying Terrorism Drabbles - the people’s choice”

Roll up, roll up, for VCTB’s first ever competition giveaway! As regular readers may have noted, I ended up with two copies of the just-released Glorifying Terrorism anthology from Rackstraw Press - one I bought for myself, and one that I got sent as a review copy. So, I thought - why not give one away to my readers? Continue reading “Competition: win a copy of the Glorifying Terrorism anthology!”