Yesterday was a bit of a landmark for me as it marked the first time I’ve ever submitted one of my short stories to a writing contest. I decided to go with an updated version of Years Apart as that has been the most popular story on the website so far. While I am proud of all the stories that I write, Years Apart has always been an important work since I originally conceived of the idea years ago.

The contest I entered is one of the more prestigious and well known science fiction and fantasy contests in the world, The L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future contest. L. Ron Hubbard, most commonly known for being the creator of Scientology, also had a very healthy library of science fiction novels to his name. Among those is the classic Battlefield Earth, an absolute epic of a story of human resilience and galactic politics. Just avoid the abysmal John Travolta movie adaptation; it is unbelievably bad in every single way.

One of my biggest struggles as a writer is accepting critique. When I was eighteen, I wrote my first novella. Clocking in at about 100 pages, it was a pretty standard sci-fi romp, heavily influenced by much of the sci-fi of the 1990’s, such as the film Pitch Black and the television show Space: Above and Beyond. It was also really, really bad. Terrible pacing, laughable dialogue, no character development and loaded with every sci-fi cliche you can imagine. However, 18 year old me thought it was the next great sci-fi masterpiece and immediately mailed a copy of it Tor books for publication consideration. Unsurprisingly, I never heard back from them. Unable to handle rejection or criticism, I deleted every single copy of the novella from existence, even going so far as to set fire to the one print out I had of it.

It would be roughly a decade before I really started writing again. When I did start writing again, it was as a personal outlet for me to express myself, not for other people to read. I had a number of novel concepts and short stories that I started that maybe got a few dozen pages into, or in one case, roughly two hundred pages into, with no intention of them ever being read by another person. After all, no one can tell you something is bad if they never have a chance to see it, right?

It wasn’t until my first writing workshop at Southern New Hampshire University that I felt comfortable enough to open up with my writing and let other people read it. The class would share short stories and then proofread and edit them for revision a few times over before submitting a final draft. The first time I posted one of my stories up on the board for people to look at I was absolutely terrified. I kept imagining that people would tell me its absolute trash or that my writing style was complete garbage. I love writing, and I was so afraid that any criticism would scare me away from it again.

So you can imagine my relief when my peers and professor alike really enjoyed my short story. They provided me with wonderful feedback that I integrated into each new revision before submitting a final draft. There was very real criticism in there about my pacing and spending too much time on minute details, but it was always delivered in a way that made me want to keep writing. For the first time in my writing career, I had accepted feedback and it only strengthened my desire to write. The best part, that story for that workshop was Years Apart.

When it came to deciding which story to submit to Writers of the Future, it was only fitting that it was the story that really opened my eyes to the joys of collaborating and that us writers are all in this together. I doubt that I will win the contest, as awesome as that would be. For me, the second I hit that submit button knowing that professional authors like Orson Scott Card and and Larry Niven would possibly be reading my story, I had already won.

Take a few minutes and check out both versions of Years Apart. You can find the original and the contest versions on my short stories page or by clicking the links here. Let me know what you think! Which version did you prefer and why?