so what is with me and contests…

i love sending my entries, whether poems or stories or travel writing stuff. contests give me targets, there is an end date / time and if that’s not there, i never get my ass moving. i had this blog for a year, before i chose to enter it for a contest last october, and that meant i had to update it at a furious speed. and that’s what i did. and that is how i managed to become more regular, get a bunch of people who do read the posts quite regularly and let me know what they think… do contests and deadlines work for you to? 

so far most often i end up with a rejection. some immediately, some months later. but once in a while, there is that positive email that says yes, your article / poem has been chosen and we’d love to publish it! (no story has been chosen as yet, just got two rejection letters on friday, but well… need to work at it)

i am hoping that this is one such time as i would dearly love to go to china and learn the skills from a travel writer… see, experience, breathe through his eyes… after two weeks of delaying, deliberating and discussing what to write but not getting down to writing, i finally wrote four stories. liked only two, rewrote those then reviewed it, rewrote them, bounced it off A, made the changes he suggested and finally sent this off on 19th at 9.30am IST. of course the minute it was up i found a couple of typos, and this is after having read the article a million times, but guess one just gets blind to your own words, probably read it in my head… and the contest shut at 9.30, so i couldn’t edit it anymore! 🙂

i don’t want to even see the other entries from this year. last year, i loved mine, but on reading the winning entry i realised that was way better… this year, i will keep hoping till 10th may, which is the day they declare the results, i might even hope that the winners do not answer the call and it get’s passed on and passed down, till it lands on me!

keeping my fingers crossed till the 10th of may!

p.s. once i said it, got me thinking about the origins of that idiom… so, do you know the origins of fingers crossed?

here goes, pasting the information from the best site i found online…

Charles Panati, in Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things, has a nice article on crossing one’s fingers as a sign of luck or making a wish. He traces it back to pre-Christian times, when the cross was a symbol of unity and benign spirits dwelt at the intersection point. A wish made on a cross was a way of “anchoring” the wish at the intersection of the cross until the wish was fulfilled.

Panati says this superstition was popular among many early European cultures. It originally took two people. A comrade or well-wisher placing his index finger over the index finger of the person making the wish, the two fingers forming a cross. The one person makes the wish, the other empathizes and supports. Over centuries, the custom was simplified, so that a person could wish on his own, by crossing his index and middle fingers to form an X. But traces remain–two people hooking index fingers as a sign of greeting or agreement is still common in some circles today.

Panati comments, “Customs once formal, religious, and ritualistic have a way of evolving with time to become informal, secular, and commonplace.” Thus, friends crossing fingers evolved (Panati says “degenerated”) to crossing one’s own fingers, and ultimately to the stock phrase, “Keep your fingers crossed,” with no actual finger-crossing at all.