This was in my inbox today – do you have a story you could enter?

The deadline for the fifteenth annual Zoetrope: All-Story Short Fiction Contest is Monday, October 3. Enter now at www.all-story.com/contests.cgi. 

GUEST JUDGE:
National Book Award-finalist Jim Shepard will award the prizes.

PRIZES:
First prize is $1,000; second prize $500; and third prize $250.

LITERARY AGENCIES:
The three prizewinners and seven honorable mentions will be considered for representation by William Morris Endeavor, ICM, Regal Literary, the Elaine Markson Literary Agency, Inkwell Management, Sterling Lord Literistic, Aitken Alexander Associates, Barer Literary, the Gernert Company, and the Georges Borchardt Literary Agency.

DATES:
All entries must be complete by October 3, 2011. Results will be announced at the website December 15, 2011, and in the Spring 2012 issue of Zoetrope: All-Story; and the winning story will be published as a special online supplement to that Spring 2012 issue.

Complete contest guidelines are available at the website. Please read them before submitting.

Please e-mail us at contests@all-story.com with further questions. We look forward to reading your work.

Best of luck,
The editors at Zoetrope: All-Story

The book 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think by Laura Vanderkam is a challenging read for any writer. It’s challenging because it asks you to honestly assess how you spend your time, even suggesting you log your hours for 168 hours – the number of hours there are in a week. Then it reveals that, actually, you’re spending lots of the time when you could be writing doing other things. When you truthfully look at what those things are, you might find that there is more time for writing than you previously thought.

Check out Laura’s website: here

I saw this and wondered if it might be a good venue for some of you writing stories between 5,000-30,000 words long.  It certainly opens up complicated questions about eBooks and publishing, but at least take a look: here  Perhaps you’ve got nothing of that length yet – if not, then try writing something with that type of word-count, just for fun.