Winged Publications presents its fourth annual contest–Taking Flight!! FICTION ONLY (Indie published okay to submit)

Any genre! Only clean or inspirational, please.
If fewer than five submitted in a category, your book will be placed in the next, closest genre.

Entry fee $15 for Taking Flight Writing Contest 2022

First prize winner receives a book contract

Second prize winner receives a critique of synopsis and first three chapters

Third prize is a critique of a synopsis

*Book contract entails the publication of winning title under the standard contracts held by Winged Publications. Grand prize winner will be provided with details upon announcement.

Submissions will be received from March 15 31, 2022 until May 30, 2022.

Semi-Finalists chosen by July 30, 2022 and will have two weeks to input suggestions by judges in order to enter the final stage.

Finalists announced the end of August and winners announced September 30, 2022.

Judges will be multi-published and award-winning authors with final judge being the acquisitions editor. Send your synopsis and first three chapters to wingedpublications@gmail.com putting Taking Flight Contest 2022 in the subject line. You will then be emailed the link to pay the submission fee (If enough entrants.) Your entry will not be valid until fee is paid. Indie published authors welcome to submit.

What if you deliver packages for a company that guarantees client confidentiality? What if you realize a murder is in the planning stage? What do you do? Read this three-episode short story to learn what happens when that scenario plays out in a near future society.

Yes, it really could happen and probably will some day in the near future.

THE GUY IN THE CABIN NEXT TO MINE

http://www.Amazon.com/dp/B09V8D8LZM

Live on Kindle Vella.

6 episodes and the first 3 are free so check it out for free and decide if you want to find out how it ends. (Hint: you’ll want to know.)

How do you react after you’ve run away to the wilderness to recover from a bad marriage and guys in general and you find the sexiest man alive in the cabin next to yours? Do you ignore him?

Living in the wilderness has challenges and he’s a nice guy who is willing to help with all the physically challenging things you need done. Like cutting a winter’s worth of firewood. But cutting wood is hard work. Why is he so willing to help?

Does he have a hidden agenda?

http://www.Amazon.com/dp/B09TS4KXJ

On Kindle Vella Tuesday March 15. Four episodes and the first three are free and the last episode are just a few tokens.

This is what it’s about:

How do you save an Earth threatened by a rogue asteroid heading straight towards it? You push it out of the way while it’s still in the asteroid belt so it’ll not come even close, that’s what you do. Should be simple. Except nothing is ever simple and when things go wrong in the desolate regions of the solar system, there’s no one around to help. No one to repair what breaks.

http://www.Amazon.com/dp/B09THCSDM6

My latest foray into horror, a genre I don’t normally do. But I do once in a while. No guts, no gore, no blood spurting everywhere, no monsters. So what makes it horror? Hint: don’t read it just before you go to bed.

So here’s a little about A Little Night Music:

What do you do if your relatives insist you’re the only person who can make your mother happy? What if you do your best and she remains sad?

Do you give up your future — your life — for her?

This short (4 episodes) horror story explores a different take on mother-daughter relationships. And lakes. And music in the middle of the night. Is it beautiful? Or deadly?

It’s on Kindle Vella, so the first three episodes are free. Plenty enough to decide whether to pay the few pennies to find out what the horror part is all about. Or not. But it’s nice to sleep at night.

by John Sandford  and Ctein 

 htttp://Amazon.com/dp/B00USMCJX6

I love science fiction and if it has scientific mumbo jumbo that I might or might understand, so much the better. So I loved The Saturn Run and was impressed that its science is actually plausible. Here’s a bit about it right from the Amazon blurb and when you’ve read that, if you too like science fiction, check it out.

The year is 2066. A Caltech intern inadvertently notices an anomaly from a space telescope—something is approaching Saturn, and decelerating. Space objects don’t decelerate. Spaceships do.
 
Whatever built that ship is at least one hundred years ahead in hard and soft technology, and whoever can get their hands on it exclusively and bring it back will have an advantage so large, no other nation can compete.
 
The race is on, and a remarkable adventure begins. What happens is nothing like you expect—and everything you could want from one of the world’s greatest masters of suspense.

Thanks for liking my recent post on Facebook, etc, regarding my latest Kindle Vella story, A New Home .
I wasn’t sure how Kindle Vella would turn out when Amazon sent out an invitation for me to join. Along with a few million other authors, I’m sure. But I’m a curious type so I joined, more to see how it would evolve than because I thought it would bring me more readers.
In that belief, I’ve been right. Vella doesn’t bring readers but it does provide an additional forum for stories and, for me at least and I think for other authors as well, it’s a wonderful ‘first’ place to publish a story and, thus, find out how readers react to it before putting it in a more normal book form that’s pretty final.
So I’m glad I’m part of the Vella roll-out.

http://www.Amazon.com/dp/B09R6JBLYZ

Remember Kindle Vella? The stories that are being told one episode at a time? Vella will be a game-changer for online reads and The Space Between Stars trilogy fits well in this format. Each episode short enough to read quickly and filled with enough action and suspense to make you want to read the next episode. And the next. And the next. And so on.

It’s clean sci-fi with a strong paranormal element, a sci-fi story line with a twist, and a romance or two because love makes any story better.

The first three episodes of all Vella stories are free so you can check this one out without committing to anything except a few minutes of your time.

So pop over and read about the colonists who crossed space and committed to a life in a starship — unless they are very long-lived, which at least one of them is — so their progeny could settle a new planet.

The colonists have finally arrived at their new home, the planet Convergence. It’s green and inviting and they’ve finally figured out how to survive the deadly pollen. But nothing is easy, including starting a colony on a new planet.

People die. Then more people die and no one knows what’s causing their deaths. They simply fall over and stop living. Except everything happens for a reason so what’s the reason behind more and more colonists dying?

Follow Anna, the only colonist old enough to have been born on Earth and her daughter Jane, both mind-readers whose abilities turn out to be essential to saving the colonists, and Anna’s foster daughter Callie, headstrong and game for anything as they seek out the killlers — and discover that nothing about their new home world is simple.

THE WOMEN OF FLY-OVER COUNTRY

http://www.Amazon.com/dp/B09MMCJ6HD

This is my latest book, just out and hot off the presses.

It’s a little different than any book I’ve written so far.

It’s an anthology of clean, contemporary women’s stories, all told from a Christian viewpoint though they don’t’ actually fit the ‘Christian’ genre.

I truly enjoyed writing this book because it took me back to my short-story roots. I started writing short stories for women’s magazines many, many years ago. The kind of stories that could be true, even though, of course, they are made-up.

They all take place in fly-over country. You know where I mean. That place in the middle of the USA that people from the coasts fly over when going from one coast to the other. The part of our country they don’t notice because they are napping or reading or talking with their seatmates.

Do they even know we exist?

We do and we love our prairies and cities and small towns and wilderness. Our lakes and rivers and farms and a pace of life that varies from slow-as-a-Missouri-mule to frantic.

The women in these stories – the women of the Midwest — are true-to-life and proud and the situations they find themselves in are the kind that can and do happen any and every day here in fly-over country.

Ask anyone from the Midwest. They’ll tell you.

So check out these stories of Fly-Over Country.

They are about Midwestern women and the men in their lives. And the dogs and cats and horses that are also in their lives. (Here in the Midwest our lives are truly full of all kinds of things, including animals!) And the things that happen to them day in and day out and just occasionally. The things they cry about and the things they celebrate.

Get your copy and read it cover to cover. One story at a time.

You’ll be glad you did.