The Word Cloud

Useful online guide to most of the literary competitions you've ever heard of - and quite a few you won't have.

http://www.writingcalendar.com/index.htm

Thanks for putting this up.

Yeah, thanks Debbi; good site.

Fandabbydoobilous, Debster, what excuses can be dreamt up now, for not entering? One can see one will have to try extra hard. x

Fab, I've been looking for something like this. Mucho thanxo.

Now at least I know there will be some stiff competition out there if you are all entering. :) You fab lot.......x

Bren, thanks for resurrecting this thread - I knew there was a place I wanted to post a very interesting blog post about entering competitions, with comments by the likes of Tania Hershmann who edits The Short Review, and was Highly Commmended in the Orange for her first collection

http://sarah-crawl-space.blogspot.com/2010/02/whats-your-strategy.html

Emma

Thanks - thought provoking.
I'd still like to know the credentials of the sifters, though - can anyone apply to be a sifter? Do they ask the Security Guard's Nan because she's handy and willing to make up the numbers? Fair enough, if the Nan is Doris Lessing, but how random is it? If they need, say, twenty sifters, do they amble down the job centre and if they can read, they've got the job? Could I be a sifter?

It was a serious question - could I be a sifter?
For the larger comps like Bridport, it makes the judge irrelevant for all but the final placings, if they never get to see more than 50 of the thousands entered, so all those winning strategies go out of the window. A 1 in 50 chance is quite good, and I'd be happy enough to be on the short-list - there's kudos there already, for the purposes of the CV. Yet to get on that short-list, you have to impress hordes of invisible people before you're up before the beak.
I understand that if a single person had to read everything, the comp could only be run every 10 years, and if you please two sifters plus the judge, then that's good. But it does mean that the real hurdle is to get the approval of the sifters, not the judge, as the odds are 1 in thousands at that stage. This is why I'd like an idea of who they are and how they themselves are selected.
Anyone know?

There's nothing to stop you asking - tho' Bridport needs you to be local, from the sheer business of carting the stuff around. The main criterion, I should imagine, would be that you're a keen and knowledgeable reader of the kind of think they're looking for. Although BritWriters, I know, recruited chiefly among published writers. A friend of mine - an actress, at that time - started as a sifter because a friend of hers recruited her, read 700 stories (do you really want to read 700 stories, 99% of them dire?) realised she did know good from bad as a reader and also began to think 'I can do better than most of those,' and is now doing very well indeed, both writing and teaching writing. I've got money on her getting either her novel or her collection published in the next couple of years.

Emma

Thank you Emma, that's very reassuring - and rather interesting, too. Hmmm.