Golden Nib Winners

Last night Valley Writers, a chapter of the Virginia Writers club, handed out its chapter-level Golden Nib awards.

What's the Golden Nib? It's a writing award from the Virginia Writers Club. Three categories are poetry, non-fiction and fiction. First place winners go to the state contest and compete against winners from other chapters. The winning titles have been left out on purpose. This is a blind-entry contest, so only the winner's name can be posted.

And the winners are:

Poetry:
First Place: Esther Johnson
Second Place: Betsy Ashton for "Friend Surfin'"
Third Place: Wayne White for "Appalachian Senses"

Fiction:
First Place: Wayne White
Second Place: Esther Johnson for "Midge Rides the Green Tortise"
Third Place: Charmaine Davis for "Dance with Dandelions"

Non-Fiction:
First Place: Donna Knox
Second Place: Wayne White for "Where Have All the Commas Gone?"
Third Place: Esther Johnson for "Letting Go of Mom in Thailand"

Congratulations to all the winners, especially to our multiple winners. A huge round of applause to Barbara Stout who volunteered to be the coordinator before she knew what a huge task it was.

On to State.

The Armageddon Chord

I want to give a shout out to a writer in my agent's stable. Jeremy Wagner is the first of Dawn Dowdle's clients to receive a review in Publishers Weekly. In the July 25, 2011 issue, The Armageddon Chord received the following review:

Death metal guitarist Wagner (of bands Broken Hope and Lupara) debuts with a highly entertaining, albeit predictable, blend of heavy metal and hardcore horror. Festus Baustone III, a morally bankrupt billionaire secretly suffering from terminal cancer, hires archeologists to uncover musical hieroglyphs that,if correctly translated, could ignite apocalypse.The dying tycoon then sets out to find a guitarist who can literally "raise Hell on Earth and wipe the world clean." Kirk Vaisto is just finishing up his latest solo album when his agent manipulates him into taking Baustone's offer, and soon the virtuoso rock guitarist finds himself at the center of a conspiracy with the spiritual future of humankind at stake. Electrified by breakneck pacing, a cast of over-the-top characters (a deformed Nazi Egypologist, a self-obsessed frontman, a stigmatic priest, etc.) and memorable lines like "The power of the riff compels you," this triller neatly exploits the considerable shared fanbase of apocalyptic fiction and Apocalyptica.

The book comes out in late August. Hint. Hint.

Way to go, Jeremy. Way to go, Dawn.