A Good Place to Finish

The ProWritingAid Novel Beginnings contest has named its winner, and it is not me. And that’s okay. I want to tell you about it anyway, because the story is better than the scoreboard.

Start with the number. Fourteen thousand five hundred and seventy writers entered. From that field the readers chose a longlist of 183, then narrowed it again to ten. Blood Wing was one of the ten.

I spent a career reading things closely for a living, and I still find it hard to make that number sit still in my head. Ten out of more than fourteen thousand. The other nine are not names I will forget. Literary horror, mythological fantasy, two works of historical fiction, a psychological thriller, crime, romance. And a hardboiled mystery about a dead janitor and the men who decided he did not matter.

The winner is Denise Wilkerson, for a historical novel called Persistence of the Kijimuna. The judges gave it the highest combined score, and from everything said about it, the recognition is earned. Congratulations to her, and to the eight other finalists who kept very good company through a long spring.

I came away with more than a line for the bio. Finalists receive editorial feedback from a working commissioning editor, the kind of read most writers wait years to get, and I intend to use every word of it. I am grateful to ProWritingAid, to Hayley and her team of readers, and to the judges who gave an excerpt from a short, strange book about 1951 Long Beach a fair hearing in a crowded room.

Here is the part I keep coming back to. Blood Wing is novella length. It does not run long, it does not waste your time, and it ends where it has to end, which is not always where you would want it to. A contest reader somewhere read those first pages and asked to turn to the next one. That is the whole job.

The book is coming to readers soon. I will have more to say about that soon.

Until then, thank you for following along.

Daniel P. Douglas

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