Not Everyone Can Win a Pulitzer

I am part of an online community where people post their creative endeavors (such as drawings, photographs and crafts).

Recently, an aspiring novelist posted that she wrote a book, and was looking for an illustrator. She planned to select an artist by running a contest where entrants submitted drawings of her characters based on rather bare descriptions such as "boy, 14, kinda short." Everyone was allowed 6 short days to draw 4 characters and to provide sample storyboards.

The "prize" for the contest was the privilege of illustrating the writer's book, and "publication" in a magazine no one had ever heard of.

Understandably, the artists were miffed that she was asking for someone to give away a substantial amount of work for free. They were even more annoyed when it was revealed that the "magazine" was really a personal webpage desperately trying to be a webzine. Furthermore, someone pointed out the the webpage was soliciting donations for upkeep costs, even though it was hosted on a free server like Geocities.

What really took the cake was that she posted a sample of her story that can only be described as incredibly atrocious. It made little sense, was misspelled and mis-punctuated, had cavernous gaps in logic and displayed a parade of characters that could only be differentiated because they had different names. She obviously didn't bother using spell-check at all. One of the moderators even asked the poster if this was a joke, since it looked like it was written by an illiterate monkey on crack.

The nice people told her to collaborate with a friend if she couldn't afford an artist, while everyone else told her to take her contest and shove it. The post was deleted and we all proceeded along our merry way.

However, rather than slinking away quietly, she insured the community would not forget her. Several days later she made a new post that I've paraphrased (made coherent) here:

"I apologize to the community! A couple days ago my friend played a cruel joke on me and posted an awful script that I didn't write! And also, all of you making fun of my site and saying I'm begging for money, it's hard work making scans of manga! But my friend hacked into my account and made that post! It wasn't me! I wouldn't write like that! See, to prove it wasn't me, here's a sample of my real writing!"

It was followed by a paragraph a bit better than her last endeavor:

"T'was at last striking midnight, the fourth night of Izumi's ceasing paitence. She lived here, in Japan all her life. Daughter of a fine a foriegn woman and an aristocrat. Yet not even a drop of the delicous warm liquid she desired. Red as pure wine and yet tastier than ever be imagine. Because it is the liquid the run through every mortal's body. No matter what species, making every mortal prey. Blood, sweet Blood."

No one believed her back-pedaling, and told her this post wasn't doing her any favors. They advised her to shut up and lay low. She then started insisting, "I showed my teacher and she was like oh my god this is the best story ever and she was going to call a bunch of publishers until I told her not to but because of this story I got extra credit in my class and I have the top score now and you really have to believe me and I need strangers on the internet to validate my existence and make me feel better because it turns out I'm only 13 but I really believe all dreams come true and I'm going to be really famous!"

Kid, you need a dose of reality. The fact that you're 13 explains some things, but is no excuse. I found a story my sister wrote when she was 8, and it showed much better character development, plot, grammar and spelling than yours.