19th Free "Dear Lucky Agent" Contest

A FREE writing contest?!? Yeah, you read that right! Totally free to enter.

When I read about it on Twitter the other day, I was like..."Whoa...gotta enter." Then, I found out they were taking YA fiction I said, "Oh snap! That's my stuff right there!" So, naturally, I knew I would enter.

Today, I sent off my submission and now I'm freaking out.

I've had this YA-fantasy novel in my head since 2011 and just finished it yesterday. Over the past four years, I've re-written the entire manuscript, switched MCs, changed the format a few times, lost the book due to my ignorance as it relates to where to download Firefox from; I've shelved the manuscript only to lick it up and re-shelve it again to finally picking it up and finishing it.

Now, why am I freaking out, you ask?

I've never submitted to a contest before. Ever. I've been writing since I was 8 or 9, and I've only ever submitted writing twice, and that was to my high school's literary magazine. This "Dear Lucky Agent" contest is the biggest thing I've done to date and it makes me super nervous. There have been people writing for much longer than I have; there are probably people entering that have years of experience developing their craft while I'm just stumbling back into it, but I love what I do and I want the world to share in that with me.

I think that's the goal for most, if not all, fiction writers--to sell their mind to the masses; to tell you what they're thinking about when they're staring out of the coffee shop window when they seem unreachable, as if they're on another planet. They want you to see their characters and how they grow; they want you to hate their villains and love their protagonist through all his/her flaws. They want you to smile when you read something happy in their book; they want you to cry, get angry, get jealous...they want you to turn the pages as if the paper could provide you with your very next breath.

I know that's what I want.