Cosmos Prize winners announcement, and link to my story

The First Fandom Experience website has now* announced the results of the Cosmos Prize contest, the one in which I won second place.

(*now = earlier, but I've been too preoccupied with my other life to write about it before now.)

The announcement can be found here: https://firstfandomexperience.org/the...

Here's an archived version if that page is down in the future when people come here looking for a record of the beginnings of my legendary career: https://web.archive.org/web/202005072...



What the FFE people lack in getting names right, they make up for in praise:

We thank all of the writers for their incredible work on this contest. We asked a lot of them — to read the entirety of Cosmos, to re-imagine a cohesive conclusion to a wild story, to upstage the work of Edward [Edmond] Hamilton — and they delivered. The writing we received was a show of force, a joy to read, and did justice to the spirit of the contest. New technologies were invented, new heroes were born, and the Solar System was saved anew. Thank you for your time and contributions to the 2020 Cosmos Prize.

We chose the winning entries based on how creatively and thoroughly they digested the first sixteen chapters of Cosmos into a new and satisfying ending. Without spoiling anything, the winning entry tied together various threads of plot and character development, invented a new game-changing technology based on ideas previously established in the serial, and read like it could have been published in the pages of Science Fiction Digest.

My entry was not the winning one, of course, but second. Of those things mentioned, I think mine was mainly accomplished in the first one, tying together plot threads. In fact, here's the feedback they gave me personally:

We felt your submission did a great job of building a new and compelling conclusion to Cosmos that was consistent with the characters and plot established in the first sixteen chapters. The development of the plot arc with Nardony [Narodny] and Stone was captivating, and you set a pace that kept us engaged throughout both chapters. The retrieval of Mea-Quinn's [Mea-Quin’s] lost strategy to beat Ay-Artz, and the way you had the characters struggle right to the end of their own genius and innovation, was thrilling to read.

We also appreciated your deep synthesis of the plot events established in Cosmos to create your new ending. Your entry brought together many interesting loose threads from previous chapters in a satisfying way. We also respect the ambition of writing two chapters, which added depth to the conclusion of this epic saga.

I don't disagree. So without further ado, here is the text of my entry as published on their site:

https://firstfandomexperience.org/the...

Archived: https://web.archive.org/web/202005230...

Notice that some of the paragraph formatting is messed up, as that may be a bit confusing. But then again, all the names are correct. Except for "Parlece", because nobody knows which it's supposed to be. And okay yes, I think I typoed "Narodny" once.

Make sure to read the original Cosmos , found here, as well to see how cleverly I made use of it. No? Oh, well.

Weirdly, yet delightfully, I think I will soon have another announcement of the "getting published" sort coming up as well.