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AWW News

The Good Read Novel Competition announces its 2012 winner!

CONGRATULATIONS to winner Carmen Estevez Phelan, of Madrid, Spain, author of Checkout Girl Harassed by Love Struck Customer!

We are pleased to announce that, from among the MANY EXCELLENT entries we received in this contest year, our winner has been chosen. Carmen Estévez Phelan of Madrid, Spain, has taken the Good Read prize with her charming first novel, Checkout Girl Harassed by Love Struck Customer. Daughter of a Spanish father and an Irish mother, Carmen was raised in Ohio, USA. After encounters with varied cultures and a career as a classroom teacher, she has created fictionalized vignettes of some amazingly real-life characters, including the attractive, ambitious Annabel, a grocery clerk who is repeatedly visited by a mysterious but determined young admirer. The novel deftly spans the brink between their separate but equally amusing lives; and the uncertain outcome of their star-crossed relationship excites our interest from the first page:

For the last month Annabel has been quietly and kindly dealing with a young man who has been coming to her register on a daily basis. Edwin (she had checked his name on his debit card.) has been making purchases, one at a time, every day since he first set eyes on the lovely Annabel. At first it was a Snickers Bar and when Annabel asked, as all salespeople usually do, “Anything else?” Edwin answered very softly, “Only you.”

View past winners on ourWinners page, and see the Success Stories page for publishing news from our entrants and editors.

The Good Read Novel Competition enters a new year

At A Woman's Write, we want to give new or as yet unrecognized writers a chance to have their work read and analyzed, along an a opportunity to win a significant cash prize to assist in furthering their creative ambitions.

Here's how it works:

Submit the first 75 pages of your unpublished novel to our Good Read competition, along with a $40 fee. Within a few weeks you will receive a thorough, thoughtful critique with editing comments and corrections. You will be given an opinion about character and plot development.

You then have the option to resubmit the entire novel, having applied changes based on our comments and suggestions. This resubmission will be accompanied by a $20 reading fee and represents your final entry into the competition.

Entries submitted initially for critique will be judged if not resubmitted. Resubmissions will be judged as the final entry in place of the original entry, with no exceptions.

This lower fee scale including critique will, we hope, serve as a motivation to all writers in these economically pressing times to send their work for a professional analysis, with the further incentive to make an effort to improve the work -- and the possibility of winning $500.

The Good Read competition runs yearly from January 1 until November 30. December will be a closed month in which judging will take place after all entries have been read and critiqued. A winner will be announced on January 1.

We have been rewarded many times over by our entrants who write and thank us for our incisive and helpful comments and edits. Some of our authors have gone on to win other awards and to get published. This makes us believe that at A Woman's Write, we are doing something right for women.

Please read the rules thoroughly, and send us your entry to the Good Read novel competition.

If you have a memoir or other non-fiction prose work you would like to have us read, please follow the instructions for entering the Good Read fiction competition (send the first 75 pages, a short but thorough synopsis and a cover letter) and pay that fee. Your accompanying letter will inform us that it is non-fiction, not for the competition. You will receive a thoughtful developmental critique and ten pages of line editing to highlight errors of grammar, punctuation and point of view, if any.