New Weird Contest Winners!
Well, eighty-plus entries later, we have a some winners and honorable mentions in our New Weird contest. (You can order the antho here.) We had to make a few very difficult decisions because so many people submitted so many cool stories. Our admittedly unscientific process was for Ann to read them and narrow it down, and then from the semi-finalists, I chose the three winners and the three HMs. So, the envelope please…
Winners
Divers Hands – The Pied Piper of the Parking Garage (Click here to read)
Lane Bowen – A Tale of Pigs, Hatchets, and Babies (Click here to read)
Nadine Wilson – Santa Land! (Click here to read)
These are in alphabetical order–we decided against awarding first, second, and third place since all three were so great.
All of three of these semi-anonymous people (email me at vanderworld at hotmail.com with your full name and I’ll add it in) have won one copy of each anthology we edit between now and 2010, personalized. That includes The New Weird, Steampunk, The Leonardo Variations (Clarion charity anthology), Fast Ships/Black Sails (pirates), Best American Fantasy 2, Best Horror 2009, Last Drink Bird Head, Mapping the Beast: The Best of Leviathan, and various other anthologies currently in the planning stages. We’re also throwing in the first two issues of Weird Tales with Ann as fiction editor and the following additional books: a first edition Shriek hardcover, a copy of the forthcoming Predator novel, a Situation (PS Publishing), and copies of Veniss Underground, City of Saints, and Secret Life
Honorable Mentions
Catherine Cheek – Speaking Cat
Matt Betts – Big Horse/Dog
Spencer Pate – Cricket Cookies
All three will receive a copy of The New Weird, personalized by us. (Just email us at vanderworld at hotmail.com to give us your mailing address.) You can read their entries along with all of the others submitted here.
P.S. If anyone posts a brilliant piece between now (11:54 and midnight), we’ll just add another winner. Just so much to do tomorrow, I needed to get a head-start…
15 comments on “New Weird Contest Winners!”
Congrats to everyone!
Congratulations, as there were so many worthy entries.
Awesome contest and even better reading. Congratulations to the winners and all who entered!
Yes, yes, congratulations you winners. I’m only slightly envious. Okay, I’m seething with jealousy, but that’s only because I really wanted those books.
But you deserve them, too, I suppose. =D
Just offering my congrats as well. Nice work!
Those blasted kittens! My inimical design foiled by kittens! The cruel injustice of it all!
Haruuumph
Oh, and very nice job, winners. Major kudos and stuff. Really. I generally concur with the results, excepting the case of my own meticulously factual little piece, of course. ;)
Perhaps Ann and Jeff will host another contest in the not-too-remote future. Although this time I suggest the prize be someone’s soul. That sounds like a jolly good trophy.
Wilhelm Vondergeist
I realized I had definitely NOT won this one when I read the post that still haunts me, by Larry, about Kirk and dead birds, complete with pictures.
I think more than a few of these entries deserve a special place, somewhere.
Congrats to all the winners!
I like to think that the Shatner was more terrifying than weird. I still use that cardboard cutout to terrorize my sister’s Yorkie when she brings it over! But many of the others truly were strange and out there and I’m just glad we all got to read those.
I rather like Herr Vondergeist’s proposal for a future contest. I could use the spare soul to replace the one I lost to Tad Williams
Tad Williams seems frighteningly prolific. I’m barely recovering from Terry Goodkind’s saga of uber-inordinate length. The first book rocked, but seriously, way too many words.
Nadine–I was thinking the runner-up should have to forfeit his soul. Would encourage more kick-ass writing. =D
Tad’s wonderfully prolific, and the joy of it is that it’s not all one huge, ongoing saga. He does wonderful trilogies. Highly, highly recommended stuff.
I like your addendum, Timblynod. Vigorously seconded!
I know the contest is already over, but I had to share this bizarre experience from yesterday. My mind is still spinning. I can’t help but wondering if there really is an invisible world.
There’s something fishy transpiring not too far from where I live. Get this:
Yesterday I decided to take off on foot and explore some of the surrounding woodland areas, when I came across something truly…weird. As a kid I’d already discovered all the nearby cool places–the small isolated ponds most suitable for fishing, the shady, secluded copses excellent for passionate rendezvous (which I never had the fortune of experiencing there. Wistful sigh), and a few caves the lead down a long way and end in dark caverns littered with beer cans and guano.
To get to all these places, one must usually evade a couple rabid dogs, dodge a cranky old man shouting obscenities and waving some sort of shot gun, and keep a wary eye out for snakes, spiders, and other vermin with pointy things. No sweat, really.
Only yesterday I decided to venture out a little farther than normal. I was tired of being cramped indoors through the winter. So I took my handy walking stick, chose a direction at random, and began walking.
At some point about an hour later I emerged from the scrubby oakwood onto a small grassy meadow. It was dotted with a few oaks, and completely closed off from the rest of the world by the surrounding wood.
In the center of the meadow I spotted something small and red. It seemed shaped wrong for a tree or a bush.
I moved closer.
It wasn’t a tree or a bush. It was a wooden stake driven into the ground with a piece of red plastic in the shape of a square nailed to it.
It was a sign, and here is what is said:
“Now Hiring.â€Â
That’s brilliant.
Later I went back with a camera, but the sign was gone.
I can only assume that whoever/whatever was hiring found the right applicant.
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