Cheated!

There's really no other way to put it.  I was scrambling to get my final edits in for the Toronto Star Short Story contest, and in fact I made some of the edits on transit on the way back from Paradise (where I had seen Wong Kar-Wai's 2046*).  Clearly I should have done it the night before, but I had other things going on.  Of course, we were stuck on the 72 bus for a bit while the bus driver took a break!  I managed to get the last edits done at 11:50, but then my laptop acted up, so I sent it to the desktop and then logged in to upload the story. 

It was 11:56, but the server said that the contest had ended, even though the deadline was midnight!  I even took a screenshot (the time is in the lower right corner), as I was so frustrated.

It's not like I thought I had a chance of winning, but I had wanted to prove that I could get this material in shape and sent off.  One thing that is interesting (to me) is that the fact that I write almost nothing but playlets (and blog posts) is that my writing now consists of almost nothing but dialogue and stage directions.  Something I will have to work on if I ever move back to other forms of creative writing.  I guess now that it is done, I should see if White Wall Review or anything else is taking very short fiction and ship it off there, so it isn't a complete waste of time (when I need to finish my Fringe edits!).

 

* I'm glad I saw 2046, but I don't like it anywhere near as much as In the Mood for Love.  I guess I just don't like the main character turning into such a cad whereas he was a much more sympathetic character in Mood for Love.  Perhaps the events in that movie tainted him, but he had at least one and perhaps two chances at love and he threw them away for no good reason.  And the sci-fi novel that he was writing based on his experiences was naff, based on what was shot for 2046.