My friends at Writers of the Future let me know they've created a whole new website. If you're a science fiction and fantasy writer, this is the competition you want to enter.
I spent some time on the new site because it has something of particular interest to me that the old site didn't have - a complete list of every author whose writing has appeared in the Writers of the Future anthology broken down by year and where they placed in the competition. I've been wanting to go through and look at the names of all the previous Published Finalists because of something that was said to me when I was at the Writer of the Future workshop in Los Angeles last spring.
You see, I was being interviewed by Joe Davis of KSL Newsradio and he said, "Being a Published Finalist is a unique kind of honor. You are now on a short list of authors that includes Ken Liu and Nnedi Okorafor. What do you think of that?"
Now, for those of you who don't know, both Liu and Okorafor have won all three of the biggest awards in science fiction and fantasy: the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Hugo award. They are amazing talents who write brilliant fiction.
So, Joe asked me how did I feel about being on a short list of authors that included Liu and Okorafor? I was a little too stunned to think, so I just said, "I hadn't thought of it that way... and now that you say it, my mind is refusing to accept that it's real."