Our First Writing Competition - and you don't have to win it!

A bit of a departure today...

I was looking through some of my old material when I came across a piece I'd started writing a few years ago. It's the opening for a short story or novel and I think it's quite promising. I had probably been reading some HG Wells.

The problem is, I have no idea where I was going with it. So today I had a thought:

You might know we have a publishing arm, called Cinnamon Edge Publishing. We publish our own books and help other people publish theirs, as well as showing people how it's done.

So here's what I've decided to do. I'll give you the story opening and you can do whatever you want with it. All you have to do is develop it into a story of your own - wherever it takes you - and send me the result.

I'll then publish the best stories to a global audience on Amazon, via Cinnamon Edge Publishing. The more stories I have to publish, the better. The best part is, we'll be publishing them through Amazon.com, so it's almost certain that your story will make you some money, too.

Imagine - you a globally-published author and actually being paid...

You can change my opening if you want to, as long as it's still recognisable. To be published on its own, your story needs to be at least 30 pages (around 10,000 words) long, or hopefully more, although shorter stories might qualify for an anthology and a share of the profits from those sales, so do send those in, too. Or you could write several short stories that add up to 30 pages or more to make up your own collection.

Here's your opening:

You can imagine the potential.  Well, you can, but the government has a whole different sent of imaginings, a whole different way of imagining altogether – as you might expect.

I mean, imagine the potential for changing history, once the flexi-time device got into their hands, as it was bound to do.  They could change election results, stop revolutions and coups, prevent assassinations…

Strange then, that nothing much seems to have been changed.  JFK still died, and Bobby and Martin Luther King.  Hitler still lost the war, Yugoslavia still fragmented, etc, etc, etc.  Darfur still happened, Zimbabwe – all the bad stuff.

Only those pesky notes might not seem to fit, and less and less every time we Historians reassess them, but I’m sure we’ll explain that away, too.  Once we can sit down with the Temperologists and thrash out our differences (which, after all, are differences of interpretations of events, not different recordings of them), I’m sure those troublesome notes – the scribblings of a madman in my opinion – will be explained away, too. 

What he described could never really work in the modern world. That’s the thing least likely to have been changed, in my opinion.

Really, I can just see it: the chaos, the anarchy, if we ever really allowed the Ordinaries, the barbaric people to actually vote for their party of choice!

[ends]

As I say, you can change it - I'm sure you can improve it - but I'd like all the entries to be recognisably based on my opening. I won't have time to edit or proof-read your story, so you'll have a better chance of being published if it's up to scratch already. Please use a Word doc or equivalent, or (at a pinch) a .txt file.

Email your entries to me here.

Terms: the profit per book will depend on the price we set, which will partly depend on how long the book is, but the price will normally be $2.99 or more and your share will be a full 30% of the cover price for each book sold.  

Good luck!

Remember, if you have a book already written, in almost any genre, and you want to see it published, we might be able to help. Contact Cinnamon Edge Publishing directly in that case.  

Roy