Clams, Gs, Smackaroos, etc.

Today I turned in my entry for the Edward J Montaine writing award. It's a thing Miami does every year to recognize excellence in English. I hope they don't hold it against me that I'm not an English major. I was for about 3 weeks... does that count?

My professor from my last creative writing class brought the awards to my attention and said I should enter. So I did. I guess at some point in the future I'll find out how it went. If I don't ever find out, I guess that means I didn't win.

It is kind of odd though, how this whole thing works. There are different awards for Seniors and Juniors, which makes sense I guess. The weird part is that all entries from all categories are judged for the same three or four spots. So non-fiction essays are compared to journalism pieces are compared to poetry are compared to fiction. I guess it's easier to only hand out over-all first, second and third than it is to give multiple awards for each genre. It's a good thing, though, because spreading the awards around too much would water down the $3,000 first place finish for Juniors.

If you had the same reaction to that figure that I did, go wash your mouth out with soap. It's no joke, either. First place is $3,000, second place weighs in at over $1k and third is still a hefty $500. Not that the money is the most important part of applying to be recognized by Miami and its panel of outside judges as a great writer, but it sure does get the imagination going.

I think whoever wins could officially consider themselves as a paid writer, which is the Holy Grail for writers. It would probably be the first time that person would ever earn money writing. Maybe I'm not as romantic as my starving-artist brethren, but damn, that's a lot of money. Needless to say, I'm not too egotistical to sell out.

Semester before last I was in a creative non-fiction class with a girl who wrote some of the best things I've ever read. She wrote stories from her life like they were a novel. And not any novel, a good one. She wasn't flamboyant or verbose, which a lot of people seem to strive for these days. She was honest, almost painfully so, and her writing made me feel both inspired and hopeless. She won last year's Senior award of $5,000. She won with a journalism piece. I hope no one that good is submitting this year.