Around six weeks ago, my dad took me for a quick visit to the library. I saw a poster advertising a writing competition, and breezed through the writing on it. I wasn't sure whether it was open to children or to adults, but I thought I might have seen something saying that it was open to people under nineteen. Soon after I read the poster, I made a mental note to ask my dad to come see the poster and tell me whether I was able to enter. I didn't feel like checking for my self, because I wanted to focus on choosing books. My dad had dropped me off at the library, so I couldn't ask him about it straight away. When my dad did come back, I forgot to ask him to look up the competition. I only remembered later on, I quickly asked my mum to take me to the library to find out more about the competition. The reason I quickly asked her was because I'd also remembered that the poster had said the closing date was very soon, so if I wanted to enter, I would have to find out everything very soon so that I could start writing as soon as possible.
My mum took me to the library, and we found out that the competition was open to people of my age group. We took a few pictures of the poster with her phone so that we wouldn't have to remember everything.
Soon after that, I got started writing. When we went onto the website, it said that the competition entry deadline was being postponed, so I had more time to write. On the website, I also read the stories of the past winners. In my opinion, those stories were really good, so I thought that I didn't have a very high chance of winning. Despite that, I decided to carry on writing, because I don't think that competitions are all about winning; it's nice just to participate.
After a while, I'd finished my story, so I just had type it up. Now the editing needed to be done. There was a serious lot of editing to do, because my story had gone extremely far past the maximum number of words that the competition allowed. I thought that it wouldn't be possible to get my story finished in time because we had to go to someone's house. Also, there were only a few hours left to submit it. My mum let me take a computer with, though, and the people we visited helped me so much with the editing and choosing a title. I'm really glad they helped, because I don't think I would've been able to send in my story in time if they hadn't.
I submitted my story just before midnight.
The next time I went onto my email, I saw that I'd got an email from the competition people thanking me for sending my story in.
A few days later, we visited the people who helped me narrow down the words for my story. They asked me how it went, and I told them that I didn't think I'd won because I hadn't got an email or letter saying saying so, but that I'd sent my story in successfully.
Soon later, I got an email saying that I was one of the six competition winners. I'm very happy because the person sending the email said that the standards of the hundreds of competition entries were quite high.
In a few weeks I'll be going to collect the six books that I won, and I'll also be meeting a few authors including Jaqueline Wilson.
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