At least, that’s what I thought when I saw my entry to MagicOxygen’s short story competition hadn’t made the shortlist.
Trying to be optimistic, I decided to look on this not as a failure, but as an opportunity to find another home for that particular story. It might do better in a different competition. Perhaps a paying magazine will accept it. Who knows, one day it could even catch the eye of a top agent or publisher!
And then I noticed an even brighter silver lining.
One of the things that persuaded me to pay the £5 entry fee to the competition was that Magic Oxygen pledged to plant a tree in a Word Forest in Kenya for every entrant.
Look, they’ve sent me the GPS coordinates so I can see where my tree will grow.
View Larger Map
So now I still have a completed story ready for submission –
and a tree in Africa!
I plan to go and visit it When I am Rich.
