About once every couple of months (or thereabouts), I sit down at my computer and spend a few hours submitting for competitions.
Usually I do random searches of local or national competitions and they could be anything. Health and beauty products, cash, home accessories, fashion, garden, cars, travel, anything really.
As I don’t play lotto, I find competitions like this are more likely to be won because there’s less people playing them.
Over the years, I have won many different things. Everything from travel, bags, books, clothes, wines, beers, a scooter, a child’s racing car (this was awesome and donated to a child’s charity), money, food experiences and so much more.
I think I got the bug many years ago when I helped my parents submit for a competition to win a box of wine. It took a lot of time and effort to do this (I had to fill out paper dockets with my details and send them in) but we won the wine and it felt good winning something.
I know to many people that competition entries are really not worth the time and effort however, I don’t mind it. I like to tell my stories in 25 words or less and make them as creative as possible which means that often I get lovely packages in the mail or phone calls telling me that they loved my response.
Recently, I’ve started exploring Fiction Competitions that call for people to submit their stories (they can be as short as 500 words to up to 3000 words). These of course mean you actually have to write something down and submit it to writing competitions around the world.
So again today, I submitted a story for the Big Issue for their Open Stories section. If I get published, it’ll be $500 which is nothing to be sneezed at. At the moment, any win from any competition would be welcome especially as I’m trying to count my pennies at the moment.
I figure if I have the time – and the short stories – I may as well submit them and see what happens.
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