We're Partying With...

May we have the envelope, please?

The winner of the First Annual (maybe) Disco Mermaid SCBWI Summer Conference Scholarship is…

Wait.

First, we wanna give you a little taste of the judging process…cuz it was insanely difficult and y'all deserve to suffer along with us. Some entries literally brought tears to our eyes. Most made us burst into laughter. A few were formatted creatively (how come we never realized there were thirteen letters in Disco Mermaids?). All were worthy of the Mermaid money…and that’s not an overstatement at all.

Chipping away at the top seven began to appear impossible. It came down to tearing apart each entry, reason by reason. In the end, all three Disco Mermaids agreed that one entry stood out through the entire process. We can’t wait to meet, we can’t wait to hang out with, and we can’t wait to party with…

STEPHANIE BLAKE
a.k.a. Colorado Writer

Of course, we want to meet all of you. So, whether you’ve already signed up for the conference, or if you decide to splurge at the last minute, we’re gonna figure out a time to meet up in the hotel lobby (you know, near the bar). And if you entered this contest…the first drinks are on us!

And now, a collection of our top Thirteen (Funny) Reasons Why people wanted to win:

1. “When I sell my book” has become our retirement plan.
2. I need some better L.A. stories to tell at my 10-year high school reunion next year. “I ran into Pauly Shore at Trader Joe’s once” just isn’t all that impressive.
3. I want to meet my LJ and blogspot writing friends, and see whose pictures are more than ten years old.
4. I lost my virginity in the very hotel of the Los Angeles SCBWI conference--Room 1212 to be exact, and hope to relive the experience.
5. [What if another winner] pocketed your money and spent it on horrible things, like drugs? Then you’d be on the hook for being an accomplice in their drug addiction, leaving you wide open for legal problems, even jail, and I can tell you one thing for certain. If that happened, your first novel would go out-of-print even before its release. You don’t want that to happen, do you, Jay? Well, do you?
6. Surround me with people who don’t think I’m strange when I frantically grab a napkin and write down an idea before it is lost.
7. I want to see if Lisa Yee really brings those Peeps EVERYWHERE.
8. (each reason in this entry was given a different genre) Horror: I woke up to find the words, “Win or die!” written in blood on my bathroom mirror. I’m not ready to die. You hold my still-beating, crimson, dripping heart in your hands.
9. I confess. I need to learn how to write shorter, clearer sentences and do you think if I won your award that the conference would help me understand how to do that?
10. I need the money because I’m as broke as a joke. I used Best Buy computers to type this up but I think the Geek Squad has caught on to me and this may be my last communication unless they’ve taken my picture down at CompUSA.
11. I haven’t been to L.A. in almost five years. -- I’m definitely out of the L.A. loop. My body has gone to hell and my face looks like sh*t. Give me the incentive to lose weight, get a face lift and a fanny tuck. You can do it, you know you can!
12. I can stay at my Grandma’s house. My Great-Grandma lives there, too. And who knows how much longer they will live, you know.
13. Thirteen is my lucky number, so I thought I had a chance in hell.