At last, the silence can be broken.
My success I was crowing about earlier?
Took me six tries to hit the jackpot.
Joy!
Of course, mutual kudos to fellow winners: Brent Knowles and Adam Colston.
Yay us!
And for Jakob Drud, Geir Lanesskog, Dwayne Minton, Robert Pritchard and Tom Waters, keeping at it, people. Brent Knowles had to enter the contest like 19 times before he scored a 1st Place win. Both Brent and I were Finalists who didn’t publish, before we became Finalists again, and won. You just have to get back up off the mat and try again. Besides, being a Finalist is still excellent because you get a shot at being a published Finalist. Depending on how thick the volume is — due to the 12 winners — there may be room for multiple published Finalist stories, which is almost as good as winning because then you can still go to the workshop and you can keep entering until you finally win.
Brad R. Torgersen 
Congrats, Brad! I know you worked for it.
So, any tips for those of us still in the running?
Beautiful, just beautiful.
Enjoy the moment, you’ve earned it.
Congrats Brad! See you next summer.
Yay! Congratulations Brad 🙂
Big congratulations Brad. Well done and thoroughly deserved.
Adam
I put up a fairly huge thingy on the WOTF forum, but I will probably will do up something similar here at the blog, now that it’s out in the open about my win. Not sure if anyone wants advice from a 3rd Place winner, but some folks might be interested.
Thanks Robert! I feel like I earned it too. WOO!
Thanks Brent, Jason and Adam. Nice to be part of the 26th crew.
The wait is over. Congratulations, Brad!
Yay. Go you!
Brad,
Congrats. I wish I could be joining you, but it looks like I’ll have to wait a little longer 🙂 I wish you success with your future writing endeavors.
Dwayne
Congrats, Brad. Uber Jealous! good work you.
Will you keep entering or move onto bigger and better things?
Dwayne, hang tough. I know what it’s like to be a Finalist and not place. Hopefully you have something in for Q4, yes? Maybe that’s the one that gets you over the top? Just make sure you always have something in the queue. Having gotten to Finalist once, I am sure you can get there again. Just like Brent and I. It can be done!
John, unfortunately, once you place with the contest, you’re done entering. My 3rd quarter 3rd Place win disqualifies me from all future entry. However, I’m going to switch over and begin sending stuff to illustrators of the Future, so we’ll see how that goes. I anticipate it’ll be a much tougher climb, trying to get to Finalist and winning with that side of the house. We’ll just have to see.
Congratulations on finally climbing that mountain. You get double cool points for using Spongebob Squarepants 😉
SpongeBob is the man! And thanks.
Amazing, what using an image will do.
I am currently scoring 100 hits a day, off search engine image searches for “spongebob.”
Hope at least a few of these people are SF&F fans who will remember my name, or my having won! 🙂