Near Misses: My Honorable Mentions from the Writers of the Future Contest
One of my first steps as a would-be author was to test my mettle against the competition in L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of the Future Contest, hoping to prove I was good enough to place in the top three. I never succeeded. The anthology never went out with my name on it. But four times, I was good enough to get an honorable mention. And that’s an accomplishment I can still be proud of. And I figured these four stories deserved their moment in the sun. So, for the first time anywhere, I’m presenting them to the public. It’s a motley assortment, ranging from Greece to England to France to Appalachia, spanning from the Bronze Age to the 1930s, filled with devil dogs, lions, heroes, doctors, pookas, peasants, chevaliers, and dragons. The one thing they have in common is they’re little gems that were almost good enough to win Writers of the Future. They are all… Near Misses.