You win some, you lose some …

Not a good start to 2015.

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.

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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.