My Friday Find feature is supposed to be a super-fast article with a link to a web site that will inspire you (I hope!) to explore the wired world with your kids. 

When I ran across Waterstone’s. What’s your story?, I figured that I had the perfect candidate.

Waterstone’s is sponsoring a postcard story competition, ending June 19th,  where all you have to do is upload a creative postcard, preferably with your story. 

Or, you can decorate a card, any way you like, using their card generator.

Winners receive book vouchers and/or a writing course.  You may also get to have your story printed with such illustrious company as Margaret Atwood or JK Rowling.

Well, I have a story project in the works, so why not upload it? 

Several hours later,  I figured out a way to fit my story into the card template and upload it into the gallery.

After all that effort, I finally looked at all the cards in the gallery.   Mine didn’t look as pretty as the others, but that’s OK, I managed to fit in all the words.

Next, I read the judging criteria.  Nearly at the end of the list, I found:

Does the story ‘fit’ the page, or did it appear to be a longer story
cut down to fit the space available?

Obviously, I should’ve read the judging criteria before embarking on this project.  Still, at least I got to “publish” my story somewhere.  I was proud of my story.  It even has a great ending. 

It was so good, I just had to read it again, squinting to make out the tiny, cramped type.  That’s when I noticed that the end was cut off.

Ahhck!  I definitely won’t win any prizes.

Tomorrow, I’ll let the kids give the story card generator a whirl.  Maybe they’ll be better at this.  Hey, they could hardly be worse.

If you would like to receive free articles from On Living By Learning by email, click this link.  You can also click here to receive updates on a RSS Feed Reader.