My AuthorQuest Submission: Outcasts of the Dark Crystal

While my arm continues to heal and I continue to type very poorly, I thought I’d share a treat.

The results of the Dark Crystal AuthorQuest contest were released last week. Judges picked five finalists and twenty-five editors’ picks from a pool of 500 submissions.

My submission, Outcasts of the Dark Crystal . . . wasn’t picked.

It’s hard not to engage in rejectomancy, especially for an unusual contest such as this. Was my writing simply below par? Did I not use the extended canon invented for the contest enough, or did I rely on it too much? Did my gender-fluid protagonist turn off some readers? I can speculate, but it doesn’t matter. I wrote the best Dark Crystal prequel I could, and they didn’t pick it.

Well, I’ve decided to share my submission with you, Dear Reader. I wrote a boilerplate book proposal, with three chapters and a short synopsis of the plot. (And that’s all I wrote – I didn’t write an entire book for this!) The formatting should be familiar to other writers, but non-writers can easily follow along.

Download it here. All characters, settings, etc. are © Jim Henson Company, per contest rules. Happy reading!