I’m writing a new story on wattpad, and decided to enter one of the little contests under Paranormal. The hard part about getting reads on wattpad anymore is the forum is gone, so to promote a story, one must apply for contests and do something called read for reads.
Read for reads scare me a little, because most of the writers on wattpad feel that their way to write is the only way, and if you don’t write like that you are wrong.
So, I applied for a contest and won in the horror genre. With three chapters posted. Three, edited to a point, chapters.
Edited to a point, means that it isn’t in the final phase, and there will be sentence rearrangement, additions and subtractions made to the final product before I publish on amazon.
The judge loved everything about it but- my spelling and grammar.
I’ve learned over the years that the spelling of words is different all over the world. Americans spell color without the ‘u’ and other places spell it colour. Some places will not use ‘ed’, and instead put a ‘t’ on the end of the word for past tense. The only word I correct for someone in that instance is smelled, because smelt is melting metal and has nothing to do with how something smells.
Now, I’ve said this before- commas are the bane of my existence. I do use grammarly in the sense that the program points out a situation in a sentence for me and I will then re-read it to make sure it’s correct, or, I’ll make changes.
Can’t argue with the ‘grammar’ portion of the assessment, but the spelling, I did argue with. Especially when informed I had several -misspelt- words. To me, misspelt is well, misspelled.
I am thrilled that I won, don’t get me wrong. Their assessment blew me away. I was honored and never thought I’d even be considered, but I put the story out there anyway.
There are some awesome stories on wattpad. Awesome. Publish-worthy. But, there are some with way too many reads, votes, and comments, and they are terrible.
Swimming in a sea of romance and smut on the site, not living up to the new regime of sex before plot, I really didn’t expect anything. When I write a smut scene, it comes much further in the book, and for this one at least, the reader won’t even know for a while who the love interest is.
I also have an MC with no POV(imagine that.😊)
As usual, I do have multiple POVs.
So, winning an award for it? Huge to me. Having someone else say- hey, I love this! Makes me happy.
All you readers out there, please let authors know you like their stuff. We need reviews to know that someone is paying attention.
Susanna Evans 