Honoured

Being on vacation not only means no blogging, it means almost no twitter or message boards or chat. So when my email reported that someone mentioned me in a tweet yesterday, after nearly two weeks of radio silence on my part, I was surprised. I opened the email and saw this tweet:

Ah yes, the Pod and Planet Fiction Contest that I wrote "Borrowed Time" for in December had its results in. I quickly navigated to the linked forum post and scanned the results only to be floored by what I saw:

Grand Prize, Kirith Kodachi. I was floored. And extremely happy.

I've written three entries to fiction contests now, the above piece, last year's entry in the P&P contest called "The Life of Nina Cruse" which failed to place (possibly due to lore violations), and the piece called "The Rifter" which won the Inspired by Images of EVE 3 contest back in 2011. Of the three, I feel Nina Cruse is the strongest one I've written despite the liberties I unintentionally took with the lore. The other two are simply bad things happening to average people in an uncaring universe, but Nina's story is actually a tragedy in that she could have avoided her doom by making different choices and accepting certain realities instead of railing against them. Regardless, I'm proud of all three pieces so please read them if you have not before.

Another thing: I swear I don't know why I keep writing sad endings for my characters. I'm not this depraved in real life, honest. I promise my next fiction entry will have a less doomed main character. (I'm not promising happy ending though.)

A huge shout out and thanks to Telegram Sam and the judges for their hard work in setting this up and judging all the excellent entries!

Now, what to spend 6 billion ISK on...