Sponsored by a sister. I did my best to tag other Muslim writers, because siblinghood. :)

I entered Ancilla in the Romance category, and Excavations in Poetry.

UPDATE (6/24/2024) - Ancilla took 2nd place in Romance. 

That's the first time I've ever been told my prose isn't purple enough. It's not the first time I've been told I take too long to get to the point, or that I have long paragraphs and could I please keep things to a mere sentence or two for the sake of people who read their fiction on smartphones and only have five or ten minutes before they move on to something else. 

The illustrations, like The World's Longest Prologue Ever Except maybe for something Written By Marcel Proust, are love-or-hate. Nobody feels neutral about them. 

Go figure. 

UPDATE (9/2/24) - Excavations came in third, behind Alpha_She_Wolf's The Burdens She Carries (first place) and a book of poetry a nemesis wrote (second place). Not a bad outcome. Actually, quite an amusing outcome, all things considered.

Also amusing: the feedback I got from LASOPHIE, the judge who had informed me in the contest results of Frosty Flavours that Ancilla had not been allowed to compete because it was too literary/out-of-the-contest-league or whatever.  I seem to have received a variant of the same judgment for my poetry:

I'm too literary. 

LOL.

You know, that is a massive compliment, and I am even happier about that than I am about getting a gorgeous award graphic (which is no small thing - I like graphics) or about an ex-friend being given a lower score than someone I heard she absolutely detests (Alpha_She_Wolf, the Wattpadian formerly known as The_Tourtured_Poet). 

Write more accessibly and dumb down my work? No, no. I want to be part of the literary canon. A hundred years after I die, if some undergraduate takes Intro to Modern Poetry and sees my work in the Norton Anthology, I will look on from wherever I am in the afterlife, and do a jig.

Oh. The graphics: