Agathon wrote:Hello everyone! I've been writing a while, 3-4 years. I'm old, got into writing late, have never wanted to write a novel. Fumbling along getting both good advice and bad. Anyway Q2 was my first submission to any publisher ever. Received an Honorable Mention. In the meantime, sold a story (token payment) to the 2020 NIWA Anthology, "Escape". I guess the practicing has paid off. Submitted to Q3 also. Still have a day job and maybe someday I'll take the Bradbury challenge but for now I write a couple of stories a month. I type and think slow. Anyway, how many HM's do they hand out in a quarter?
Agathon,
Grats on the HM!
I also received an HM on my first submission anywhere ever (here). Pretty cool.
If you look at the first post (page 1) from the past maybe two years of Discussion: threads, I've changed the original post with a link to the winners and HM's etc for that quarter. You can get an idea of how things look. However, the number of HMs is usually a percentage of the overall entries.
2000 entries, maybe 150 hms.
1000 entries, maybe 80 hms.
There's been a sort of debate, or a conception in regards to the contest becoming more competitive. It's been suggested we must all up our game because there are more entries and that stories are getting "better". While I won't, or can't dispute that, I'd argue that the scales of elevation are balanced. We
are upping our game.
What I mean is, if "they" are getting better at writing and submitting better entries, then so are "we". Not only because we share info here, and meet individuals or groups for critiques, but because of the overall amount of shared information available to us all.
Write. Submit. Repeat.
