Enjoy the winning bait! Judging was very close in TaleBait's Get Hooked Write Away Contest. We received many outstanding entries. Winners will receive $25, $15 or $10 plus a critique of 30 pages of a manuscript. Watch for these tasty hooks to launch new tales on Hooks & Storylines in the coming months.
1st Place - Kendall Furlong
The headline got my attention, an unexplained death at a posh north Dallas wedding gig. But it’s the kick-ass photo I remember; my best friend Tom spread across three columns with a beautiful dame in tears holding his head. A lot of people thought he deserved the agonizing death described in the news and I guess when you come right down to it, that included me. I could never separate my loathing from my friendship with him. But you know, it would have been worth dying just to be in a picture like that. What a send off.
2nd Place - Sean Enfield
Daniel Beam spent the summer of 2005 dead.
3rd Place - Hazel Fipps-Mann
The explosion shattered the windows and threw dishes from the shelves onto the floor where they broke into various odd shapes. Fortunately it also extinguished the propane-fueled fire in the cook stove, thus sparing our little four-room post-WWII home from total annihilation. Pinto beans and bean juice slid down the kitchen walls, while more beans dropped randomly from the ceiling like little hard brown raindrops. The Kelvinator, which stood beside the kitchen stove, displayed its position at the epicenter of the blast, flaunting beans and juice somehow impregnated into the once-white enamel. Mom always had trouble in the kitchen.
Thank you to everyone who entered and to the guest judges, Denise Little and John Tait.
