Winner of International NYC Midnight Rhyming Story Challenge (2022)
I am honored to have been proclaimed the winner of NYC Midnight's first-ever Rhyming Story Challenge (2022).
It was a joy and a privilege to join such a wonderful community of international writers who each created unique, beautiful, funny, endearing, terrifying, mythical, and fascinating stories of all kinds.
An enormous thank you to my fellow writers, and to the judges who offered tremendous feedback throughout the competition. (In particular to the first round of judges, who correctly and kindly helped me realize my rhythm was garbage, my rhyme scheme was boring, and my ending was...not really an ending...)
An enormous thank you to my fellow writers, and to the judges who offered tremendous feedback throughout the competition. (In particular to the first round of judges, who correctly and kindly helped me realize my rhythm was garbage, my rhyme scheme was boring, and my ending was...not really an ending...)
"Fun" Fact
I wrote "Love Languages" while living in a temporary accommodation with rented furniture after a burst sprinkler pipe washed out my house while I was 5 hours away visiting family for the end-of-December holidays.
The pipe was in the ceiling of the top floor, and although a neighbor notified me as soon as she saw the "waterfall" coming out the side of my house, all three floors were well-saturated by the time I could help someone get inside to shut the water off.
Luckily, everything that was sentimentally irreplaceable was in the only two parts of the house that weren't flooded out, and I had great home insurance coverage.
As such, my story was written in an unfamiliar place, sitting on unfamiliar furniture, with a dog who fears anything "unfamiliar," and with a mother who had postponed a sorely-needed total ankle replacement to drop everything and jump in the car with me as soon as we realized something was very wrong.
My mother quite literally had nothing but the clothes on her back. We thought she'd be here for a week or two. Fast forward nearly five months, and we'd spent so much time together we'd finish each other's....
I suppose the best thing to happen to a writer is to get a good story, so I'm grateful for the heckuva story that came out of this burst pipe, the natural hiccups that come along with a near-total house interior build-back, and this amazing competition coming right in the middle of everything! Ah, the plot twists of life.
The pipe was in the ceiling of the top floor, and although a neighbor notified me as soon as she saw the "waterfall" coming out the side of my house, all three floors were well-saturated by the time I could help someone get inside to shut the water off.
Luckily, everything that was sentimentally irreplaceable was in the only two parts of the house that weren't flooded out, and I had great home insurance coverage.
As such, my story was written in an unfamiliar place, sitting on unfamiliar furniture, with a dog who fears anything "unfamiliar," and with a mother who had postponed a sorely-needed total ankle replacement to drop everything and jump in the car with me as soon as we realized something was very wrong.
My mother quite literally had nothing but the clothes on her back. We thought she'd be here for a week or two. Fast forward nearly five months, and we'd spent so much time together we'd finish each other's....
I suppose the best thing to happen to a writer is to get a good story, so I'm grateful for the heckuva story that came out of this burst pipe, the natural hiccups that come along with a near-total house interior build-back, and this amazing competition coming right in the middle of everything! Ah, the plot twists of life.
Want to connect, nerd out about writing, share strategies and fears, or just chat? Drop me a line on my "Contact Me" page!
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