Great Man Cops Spooky Samhain Second Prize

The call was from a magazine I’m unfamiliar with, OKLAHOMA PAGAN QUARTERLY, but seemed straightforward enough.  Do you have a scary story to share?  Fiction, fact, or otherwise, share your prose with us and you, too, can win up to $100 and get your story printed.  Enter your submission today!  Contest will be judged by a panel of three impartial judges, all of whom have a vested interest in the unknown.  Scare us, terrify us, and thrill us!  I could do that!

On closer inspection, the competition had three divisions, of which I selected number 2:  ‘Spooky Semi-True Stories’ are maybe tall tales, maybe not.  They’re more fantastic stories that the reader may not want to know are real or not.  Consider a well-crafted story about a shopping mall that may or may not have undergone a quarantine that the local [image error]news covered up.  The point here is that the reader questions whether the story could have happened or not.   Word length for this choice (they varied) was three to six thousand and, as it happened, I had a 3600-word tale of guillotines and the French Revolution and happenings just after, originally published in THE STRAND MAGAZINE, Spring-Summer 1999, which if they took reprints might just fill the bill.

They did and it did.  So Saturday’s email, which betwixt writers group meetings and the Bloomington Writers Guild (a separate organization) I only got to lateish that night, brought the word from Editor Belwoeth Harbright that “The Great Man” had won second prize!  Your prize is 50 dollars US payable through Paypal or Venmo, contingent upon signing a first-print-run contract for your story with Oklahoma Pagan Quarterly.  You are also entitled to a Physical Contributor’s Copy of our magazine.  Please send us an email back ASAP to let us know how you’d prefer payment, preferably with an author’s photo, and we’ll send you a contract upon your approval via Adobe Sign today.

And so, this afternoon, I have done.