Why Didn’t I Win?

Eddie doesn’t write romance stories. That’s the rule. The rule shall not be broken. 

With that said, I wrote a sappy story. It wasn’t intentional. I didn’t go out and say “Hey, let’s write a romance story.” 

There was a contest on a writer’s forum. I won’t name the forum because, in my opinion, there are some very odd people on those forums. The forum has a weekly writing contest where the subject is a single word or phrase provided by the previous winner. 

The week I entered the word was “exquisite”. Once I read the word the entire story flashed in front of me. It’s funny how that happens. I assume it happens to everyone. A complete memory embedded in your mind. 

The trick is getting it on paper. 

So I wrote it out, had it read by my wife and mother-in-law (aka: the Cruise Director and My Drinking Buddy), had it reviewed by The Teacher for grammar issues (thank you so much L!), and away it went. 

Four other stories were submitted. And this was when I discovered that the other aspiring writers are… odd. 

One story was about a magic ring. The concept was good, but it needed a lot of work and was difficult to read. 

One story was about a soldier in a desert who was carrying something exquisite, but it suffered from the same problem my story did (we’ll touch on that later). 

One story was about a boy who got insulted by a girl at a camp and essentially stalked her just to see her nude body. This was when I started to realize that there was something wrong with the people who were submitting these stories. 

The last story was about a teenage boy who sits in his room all day and plays video games and masturbates. He takes some really good drugs, stares at a van Gogh and then hangs himself. This is the story that actually won the contest. It is also the story that I found the most disturbing, not just because it won, but because the most people voted for it. That spoke volumes about the other authors on the forum. 

I personally liked the soldier in the desert story. But it was missing something. And what it was missing taught me a lot. 

The question is this – can you find what is missing in my story? Read it and think about it. Tomorrow I’ll let you in the secret I learned. 

To read Exquisite Loss, clicky clicky here.