Mormon Lit Blitz Semifinalist

A month or two ago, I went into a rather unusual productivity spike for me. The deadline for submitting to the Mormon Lit Blitz was approaching, and I really wanted to submit. Most years, I struggle to come up with even one idea for this competition, even though I love it—and even if I do get an idea, I struggle (more than just the usual) with how to put it into words. This year, I had about six ideas, and I found myself actually pulling some of them together and getting them into words.

The results: One story that started out as a tale of midwives and took a slight turn, requiring a lot of editing and revision to bring it a place that (to be honest) I’m still not entirely happy with. One story that popped into my head, almost fully formed based on a prompt from an episode of Writing Excuses. One poem. You read that right—a poem.

Pieces for the Lit Blitz are always excruciatingly difficult for me to have beta readers for. As I mention in this previous post, I can’t even let my husband read them—and he beta reads everything for me and is an incredible help. But somehow it’s too weird.

To make a long story short: I submitted all three pieces (three are allowed), and two of them were selected as semifinalists (interestingly, the two that I thought were weaker, but sometimes you just don’t know what’s going to work). However, when the finalist list came out, both were dropped. This honestly doesn’t surprise me. I pretty much expected it; they’re just not as good as I would have liked them to be (though they are the best I could make them for now). So while it was a bit sad, like I said, not surprising.

And then came the next tricky bit. Would I share them now? The nature of the Lit Blitz is such that my writing for it really won’t fit in any other market. There’s no point in keeping them locked up because they’re never going to sell anywhere else. It’s Lit Blitz or Bust! But if I couldn’t share them with my husband, how could I do it here? Well, to make another long story short, I’m just gonna do it. I’m going to post one now (for reasons you’ll see when you read it), and then I’ll take a break because the actual finalists for the Mormon Lit Blitz are going up, and I want to just pay attention to them. Then I’ll post the others later, provided I still have the courage.

Regardless of my pieces, though, I hope that some of you will take the time to read the finalists when they come out. So many of the stories are wonderful every year, and though many speak specifically to an LDS audience, a lot of them also transcend that border and speak to human experience in general.