A Contest for Literatrix

I stumbled on this contest by visiting the Randex, and I quite frankly can't think of anything better-suited to my personal interests, so I emailed the contest sponsor immediately. It really is funny what you find if you look around.

I'm not absolutely certain that my current novel is what they're looking for: I will know more when I get a response. However, I'm sure that there are a number of authors out there working on books that involve freedom on some fundamental level, and any author can certainly use some money and extra incentive to get cracking!

My novel is thematically more about volition than freedom, but the functioning of man's volitional consciousness is the underlying reason why freedom (especially of the political sort) is of such absolute importance. So I think I will probably qualify for this contest, and I urge anyone else that is working on a similar novel to do so as well.

What I don't urge, however, is that you attempt to write a novel for this purpose if you weren't already in the process of doing so. Nothing will turn your writing into miserable hacky second-hand dreck than trying to write to someone else's theme. Writing depends on integration of conscious thought with subconscious automatizations, it doesn't work if you try to ignore what's going on in your subconscious and keep everything on a conscious level. In order to fulfil someone else's desires, that is pretty much what you have to do.

I don't know if the contest operator is an Objectivist, and I suppose it's not really that important unless he intends to exert editorial control. Even then, it's still probably not that important because the kind of fiction I write is not about listing a bunch of explicit ideas, but about leading the reader to make the kind of conclusion I want . . . in other words, "show, don't tell". Here's to freedom!