In their naïveté the race of men had considered the silence of the cosmos and seen a cradle, rather than a grave. The ships of man had found the truth—raced light and centuries to warn each other, and rally, star by star, a defense. The galaxy was not fallow. It was hunted dry.

You can get the magazine on Analog’s website, and a full list of Alpha graduates’ publications and awards is here.

Haris describes the story as follows: “In the near future, the intricacies of economic competition, political conflict, and mathematical inevitability have clogged Earth orbit with artificial debris, rendering space ‘an impassible frontier.’ Charlie and Kalima are two of a handful of ‘garbage men’ paid by Kradys, Inc. under a U.N. mandate to clear junk out of orbit. When their employer assigns them an unusually hasty mission to dispose of a defunct satellite hovering high above South Asia, the couple begin to suspect that there is far more at stake than next week’s paycheck.”

You can get the magazine on Analog’s website, and a full list of Alpha graduates’ publications and awards is here.

What do you do now?

First off: recover. It can be a really tense wait and all the ignoring it in the world doesn’t help if back-of-brain decides to fixate on it. I’ve refrained from posting this for a while so you can chill a bit. Let yourself feel disappointed or sad. Let yourself feel relieved if that’s what you feel.

Next… well, what next?

Be proud of yourself. Applying to Alpha means that you wrote a story you think is great. That is not a small accomplishment.

Consider what you can do to improve the story and the ones that come after it. “But wait!” you cry, “I didn’t get into Alpha! How can I possibly improve as a writer without this workshop?”

Read. Read books and stories both, especially the ones you want to write like. Read outside your usual subgenres or genres. Read books about writing (I particularly like Lamott’s Bird by Bird). Read essays about writing, worldbuilding, character. Read blogs from your favorite writers, especially if they go into detail about process. Read essays that contradict each other. Read.

Write. Quickly, slowly, a short story, a novel, write. Write something all the way new. Write something related to your past work. Write words that weren’t there before. You can do this. Your application story was not the only story you will ever write.

Examine. What do I mean by this? Read critically. Analyze the places that essays disagree and consider both viewpoints. Read what you’ve written carefully and decide what makes one story better than another for you. When you read a book, no matter what kind, examine its structure, its sentences, its genre conventions– or examine how it makes you feel as you read. Compare stories to each other. Try to figure out the conversations going on via short fiction, or long, or both. Find the connections.

Network. Get in touch with a creative writing group through school or your community. Some schools have terrible creative writing classes, others have great ones– know which one yours has. Talk to other people about what you read and what you think about it. Share your writing with fellow writers. You can do this through Critters, the Online Writers Workshop, the Cicada writing board*, anywhere that you find writers you respect and admire who are willing to help. Comment on blog posts on worldbuilding. Ask questions. Email the people in the 2013 Worry Thread and ask to trade critiques. Find a convention near you with a writer’s workshop. Check in with your Nanowrimo friends and find out what they think. Use the comment threads to share online spaces you’ve found welcoming– that’s networking, too.

Keep going. Do all of these, singly and in combination. Writer’s workshops are often a way to jump-start these habits. Keep reading. Keep writing. Keep thinking. Keep talking.

*I should add, I’m not part of any of these, nor have I ever been. My original writing-and-critiquing stomping grounds are long gone these days.

In the failing light, Aristide chased the last of his new lambs up the hillside, back towards their evening pasture. Some of the other Currin shepherds sang to their sheep. Aristide couldn’t bring himself to perform for an audience that chewed cud. It was too pathetic for someone who had played the greatest stage in Gedda.

You can purchase a copy of the magazine here, and while you’re at it, have a look at the full list of Alpha graduates’ publications and awards.

Take a deep breath. Support each other. Write the next story.

And you haven’t started that, have you?

That’s okay. No really, it is. Okay, so you only have a little more than a week, but we come from a world of procrastinators. I myself am one of them. And if it makes you feel better, I didn’t even know Alpha existed until twenty-four hours before the application deadline, and I managed to get in.

So the good news is, you aren’t doomed. It is possible. Hey, you have a week. That’s plenty of time, right? Whatever you do, don’t say, “I don’t have enough time. I should just not do it,” because Alpha will change your life, and you don’t want to pass up this opportunity.

The bad news is, well, you only have a week, so you’re going to have to make some sacrifices in order to get a good application story out, because even though it’s doable, you really don’t want to be writing your story in twenty-four hours. Trust me.

“So how do I do it?” you ask. “How do I write a story that will be accepted at the last minute?”

It might be tempting to down a two liter bottle of your favorite caffeinated soda, throw yourself at the keyboard, and see what happens. But don’t do that. At least not right now. Don’t worry, that part will come.

First of all, if you’ve ever done NaNoWriMo, you know it’s important to set up a good support network for yourself. So tell anyone and everyone that you’re applying to Alpha. Get them excited about it too. This way, they’ll understand when you’re hiding in your room for hours at a time, bashing your head into the keyboard, demanding large amounts of chocolate, and running around the house screaming with joy when it’s finally all done. The other plus to having people who know what you’re doing is that they’ll help you. Use them to talk about ideas and things you’re stuck on. Get them to read your story when you have a draft.

So, you have an idea, you have a designated group of people to cheer you on. Now do you chug your soda and throw yourself at the keyboard? No. Not yet.

First, I want you to make an outline. Not a super complicated outline. Not even a detailed outline. Make a list of basic events that happen in your story: Protagonist does this, then this happens, then protagonist does this, then this happens, then antagonist does that.

“But I don’t write outlines,” you say. “I just sort of go with it.”

Okay, so normally you don’t make outlines. That’s a perfectly legitimate way to write a story. But in this case, there are a lot of good reasons to use an outline.

Most importantly, when you finish writing the outline, you’ll be able to look at your story as a whole before you’ve written it and avoid any massive restructuring that might be necessary. You can analyze your characters and their motivations. Does it make sense that your protagonist does X? Would it make more sense if they did Y? Is your protagonist being active enough, or are they just responding to the antagonist? What about your antagonist? Are they sufficiently antagonistic for the scope of the story? What about your setting or world and your speculative element? What role do they play in the story? You can look at all of this just in your outline and make changes before you even start writing. Be sure to talk about your outline with your designated writing buddies. They might have other ideas you should consider.

Once you have your outline and a good sense of your story as a whole, now it’s time to stock up on that favorite highly-caffeinated soda and plenty of candy, sit yourself down, and start writing. When you’re writing, be sure to use active, vivid language with strong nouns and verbs. Adjectives and adverbs are fine, but make sure you aren’t using them instead of strong nouns and verbs. Keep a consistent point of view and verb tense, and don’t forget standard manuscript format.

Once you’ve finished your story, assuming you have time, get some sleep and then ask your designated writing buddies to read it over. There’s nothing like another set of eyes on a story, especially if those eyes belong to someone you trust to give you good, honest advice. Don’t underestimate the value of sleep either. It will give you a chance to clear your head and look at your story with fresh eyes.

If you don’t think you have time to do more than a few small edits, though, you might consider just looking through the story again, making some small changes, and sending it off. You don’t want someone to tell you your protagonist’s actions don’t make any sense if you don’t have time to fix it, so sometimes it’s better for your emotional well-being to just not ask. And to be honest, at this point, your emotional well-being is just as important as your story.

So you’ve finished your story. You’ve cleaned it up so it doesn’t look like you bashed your head into the keyboard a couple of times. You’ve run a spell check and cursed Microsoft Word for objecting to each of your names at least twenty times. You’ve put it into standard manuscript format. Now it’s time to take a deep breath and send it in and let the waiting begin.

So the shorthand version of this is: make outline, write story, edit story, send in story. It might seem like a lot to do in just a week, but your application story will be stronger for it.

Good luck. You are not doomed. You can do this.

Now you just need to turn off the internet and go write already!

Jameyanne Fuller attended Alpha in 2011 and 2012.

This year, fourteen Alpha alumni have written and illustrated an anthology containing nine flash stories, which they are offering as a gift in return for donations of any amount. You can donate here.

We could talk about why you should donate–how Alpha is changing many young writers’ lives for the better and helping to develop the next generation of speculative fiction writers–but several of our alumni have already covered that, and very eloquently, in short interviews conducted by Alpha alumni Sarah Brand (2006 & 2007) and Sarah Hollowell (2009 & 2010). You can read the first week of interviews here:

• Rachel Grinti (2002 & 2003)
• Jill Hardy (2004 & 2005)
• Malina Suity (2005 & 2006)
• Rachel Halpern (2007 & 2008)
• Lara Donnelly (2007 & 2008)

Every donation makes a difference, so if you’re able to give at all, whether it’s $5 or $500 or somewhere in between, we are very grateful for your support.

Justine Larbalestier is the author of novels such as Team Human (co-authored with Sarah Rees Brennan), Liar, How to Ditch Your Fairy, and Magic or Madness, the winner of the 2006 Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy. Her nonfiction book The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction, a critical appraisal of gender relations in science fiction from 1926-1973, was nominated for the 2003 Hugo Award for Best Related Work. Also, she edited Daughters of Earth, a scholarly collection of 20th-century feminist science fiction, which was shortlisted for a British Science Fiction Award and won both the Susan Koppelman Award and the William Atheling Jr. Award. She lives in Sydney and sometimes New York City.

This year, we’d like to congratulate Alphan Lara Donnelly, whose story “To the Dogs” won the Dell Award for 2013. The first runner-up is another Alphan, Alexandra Gurel, with “Fantasma Maravilhosas”. Rich Larson, the second runner-up with “Atrophy,” is also an alum of the workshop. The top three spots!

The full list is below. Huge congratulations to all those who placed– and all those who wrote and submitted stories.

Winner: “To the Dogs,” by Lara Donnelly, Wright State University

First Runner-up: “Fantasmas Maravilhosas,” by Alexandra Gurel, Princeton University

Second Runner-up: “Atrophy,” by Rich Larson, University of Alberta

Third Runner-up: “The Changeling,” by Caitlin Higgins, Cornell University

Honorable Mentions:

“The Boundary Wall,” by Rachel Lister, High Point University

“The Boy in the Bell Tower,” by Alissa Hartenbaum, Georgia Tech University

“The Astrologer’s Telling,” by Therese Arkenberg, Carroll University

“Pig and Plume,” by William Tarnell, Vanderbilt University

CORRECTION: I initially listed only Lara Donnelly and Alexandra Gurel as Alphans. Rich Larson also attended the workshop.

Theodora Goss was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States. Although she grew up on the classics of English literature, her writing has been influenced by an Eastern European literary tradition in which the boundaries between realism and the fantastic are often ambiguous. Her publications include the short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting (2006); Interfictions (2007), a short story anthology coedited with Delia Sherman; Voices from Fairyland (2008), a poetry anthology with critical essays and a selection of her own poems; and The Thorn and the Blossom (2012), a novella in a two-sided accordion format. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Locus, Crawford, and Mythopoeic Awards, as well as on the Tiptree Award Honor List, and has won the World Fantasy Award.

Tamora Pierce has been publishing since the mid-eighties. Known for her powerful female heroes and her career as a writer for teens, it might be surprising for some to learn that her first quartet was originally one book written for an adult audience. The advice of her employer Claire Smith, soon to be her agent, led her to re-write The Song of the Lioness into four smaller books for teens, and the rest is literary history. Before she made a living as a writer, Pierce did everything from temp work to reviews of martial arts movies. She met her husband, Tim Liebe, while the two of them were working at a radio production company that wrote comedy and drama for NPR and some big city stations.

With almost thirty books in print, including the anthologies she’s both participated in and written herself, it’s no wonder she has a following all over world; her books have been translated into Japanese, Danish, German, Thai, Swedish, and are forthcoming in Italian. The last book in her Beka Cooper series, Mastiff, was released in November 2011.

Scott Westerfeld has published some eighteen novels (5 adult, 13 young adult), the latest ones being in the Leviathan series, an illustrated steampunk retelling of World War I. He is also known for the Uglies series, set in a future where cosmetic surgery is compulsory at the age of sixteen, making everyone beautiful–whether they like it or not. He was born in Texas and currently lives in Australia, but spends Northern summers in the US. He is married to YA fantasy author Justine Larbalestier.