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2025 Golden Nib Contest Guidelines Please read carefully! These Guidelines have CHANGED! NOTE: FAILURE TO FOLLOW THE SUBMISSION GUIDELINES WILL DISQUALIFY ENTRIES FROM CONSIDERATION FOR STATE AWARDS. ENTRIES NOT ADHERING TO STATED GUIDELINES, INCLUDING THE LACK OF AN AUTHOR BIO ON THE COVERSHEET, WILL BE RETURNED FOR CORRECTION IF TIME ALLOWS. IT IS THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE CHAPTER GOLDEN NIB COORDINATOR TO ENSURE ENTRIES FOLLOW THESE GUIDELINES. The 2025 Golden Nib writing contest is officially open. The Golden Nib, started in 2005, is The Virginia Writers Club (VWC) annual writing competition in three categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry, with cash prizes for first, second, and third place finishers at the state level. The contest is run in two tiers: local Chapter (first tier) and State level (second tier). Each Chapter forwards its first-place winning entries for judging at the (second tier) State VWC level. Contestants must be a current member of The Virginia Writers Club, not just a chapter of the organization. Entrants who live within the jurisdiction of a VWC chapter should enter the first tier of the competition through that chapter. No chapter can set a due date that falls before July 10. Members of VWC who are not affiliated with a chapter should email Chuck Tabb, President of VWC, at ctabb919@gmail.com for information on how to submit for Golden Nib. Unaffiliated members’ submissions are due on June 30, not July 10. All other entries are to be submitted to the author’s local chapter. Each chapter submits their 1st place entry in each category to the state finals. First, second, and third place state-level winners in each category are announced at the annual meeting held in November. All 1st , 2nd, and 3rd place chapter winning manuscripts submitted will be included in the VWC Golden Nib and Teen Nib Journal, which will be released in early 2025. All chapter winners will be included unless the author either notifies Chuck Tabb at the above email address requesting they not be included, or they indicate they do not wish to have their entry included in the Nib Journal on the cover sheet/submission form where the author can indicate they do not want their manuscript published in the Golden Nib and Teen Nib Journal. If your entry wins any of the state-level awards, the author should notify Chuck Tabb at the above email address if they do not wish their entry included in the Nib Journal, even if they said "No" on the cover sheet. CONTEST RULES/GUIDELINES · Manuscripts must be the original, unpublished work of the entrant, and must not have won a prize at any level in any other competition. The VWC State competition allows entries published in your personal blogs, but nowhere else. Works published in blogs other than your own, on social network sites, or in an online or print publication are ineligible and should not be submitted! · Entries written by Artificial Intelligence (AI) are NOT permitted! Each entrant MUST include a statement at the end of each submission stating the entry did not use AI to compose the entry. Consider that AI does not have an issue with plagiarism! (AI language is generally so stilted that winning would be nearly impossible anyway.) · Entrants may submit only one entry per category of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. · Fiction and nonfiction entries must be no longer than 3,500 words, including any notes, bibliographies, or other supporting text. Poetry entries must be no longer than 50 lines. Please be aware that poetry that has excessively long lines may be reformatted without changing any words to fit onto the pages of the Journal. Submitting your entries implies acceptance of this possible reformatting. Reformatting in this case means a single line might be broken into two lines of type with no capital letter starting the second line of type, with an indention of the second line indicating the two lines are part of one line of the poem. An example follows: Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, This would only occur when necessary to allow formatting the poem from an 8½ x 11 page to a 6 x 9 page for the journal’s trim. FORMATTING THE ENTRY - A fillable coversheet is available at this link: Coversheet. The coversheet must be filled out in its entirety, including a mailing address, email address, and an author bio written in third person (he, she, they) of no more than 200 words. This coversheet must be submitted with each entry. The file names of each coversheet should be saved as follows: F.Lastname.Firstname (for fiction entries) The file names of each submission should be as follows: F.Title (for fiction submissions) Authors' names should NOT be a part of the submission file's name. - Submissions can be in doc, docx or rtf format only. No pdf or txt documents are allowed. - All pages must show contest category, word count (or line count for Poetry), and page number in the header. (These should NOT be placed in the area where the manuscript itself is typed.) - The first line of the text should be the title of the work, centered on the page, followed by the start of the manuscript below that, as follows: The Title of My Magnificent Manuscript (Hit "Enter" again here to create space between the title and first line of the document.) The text of the fiction, nonfiction, or poem. All subsequent paragraphs should be indented on the next line of type with NO extra space between paragraphs. The tab key should not be used to create the indention, nor should the space key. Chuck Tabb will be offering a FREE class to VWC members on Zoom about formatting the Golden Nib entries as well as the BASIC use of Microsoft Word to make formatting easier in May for those unfamiliar with how to make these processes for formatting easy in a word processor as opposed to a typewriter. He will cover all of what should be done to properly format an entry for Golden Nib. While some of the information might be EXTREMELY basic, there are definitely those who could use this class. It might even be helpful for those not intending to submit for Golden Nib but want to learn how to use the basic functions of Word. Did we mention it's FREE? Here is a link for registration for this class: https://virginiawritersclub.org/event-6128143 - If the author’s name or any identifying information appears on any page of the manuscript, the entry will be disqualified. - Manuscripts must be in 12 point Times New Roman font. Page settings must be 8 ½ by 11-inch with one inch margins. Other fonts and sizes will result in disqualification of the entry. - Fiction and nonfiction manuscripts must be double-spaced, with a justified right margin (i.e., the right margin is straight, not ragged). - Poetry manuscripts must be single-spaced. · All submissions not in accordance with format and other rules will be disqualified unless there is time to return the entry for correction and resubmitting, as mentioned in the first paragraph of this document. Be aware that there is a time factor involved here, so entries not submitted correctly could be completely removed from competition and/or the Golden Nib and Teen Nib Journal. · No paper submissions will be accepted. All manuscripts and coversheets must be submitted electronically. · A list of Golden Nib winners in each category will be published on the VWC Web site after the Annual Meeting, which takes place in November each year. If an author’s work is published in the VWC Golden Nib and Teen Nib Journal, all rights remain the property of the author. SUBMIT ENTRIES TO YOUR VWC CHAPTER BY ITS SPECIFIED DEADLINE Each chapter has its own guidelines, deadline, and requirements for entering. All chapters must adhere to the state contest rules as presented in this document. · Chapter judges must choose ONE 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winner for each category judged (assuming there are at least three entries in a category). No ties are allowed. · The entrant must be a VWC member. If the winner at the chapter-level is not a member of the VWC, the author must join VWC before the entry is forwarded to the state level competition. Please note that membership in a chapter does not include membership in VWC. · Contact your local VWC chapter to find out what the deadline is for chapter contest submissions! Again, chapter deadlines cannot occur before July 10. · Except for VWC unaffiliated members, entries sent by authors directly to the State Level coordinator(s) or to Chuck Tabb, the current VWC President, will not be accepted. · Only the chapter coordinators of Golden Nib may submit manuscripts to the state-level coordinators for state-level judging. The deadline to submit all first place entries to the state-level coordinator(s) is September 1, 2025. · The deadline to submit all 2nd and 3rd place chapter winners to the state-level coordinator(s) is October 15. Again, only chapter coordinators may submit these manuscripts. · All cover sheets must be sent to the state-level coordinators as attachments IN A SEPARATE EMAIL from the manuscript entries! · The name and email address(es) of the state-level coordinator(s) will be forwarded to the chapter-level coordinators by July 10, which is the earliest deadline for chapters to stop accepting submissions for local judging. · It is the responsibility of each chapter to share the information of where to submit entries for local judging with their members. Each chapter should supply Chuck Tabb at ctabb919@gmail.com the name and email address of the coordinator of The Golden Nib for their chapter, if different from last year's coordinator. He will forward that information to the coordinator(s). Finally, please understand that the chapter-level coordinator is not your personal secretary. Please follow these guidelines when submitting. It is not their responsibility to fix errors, nor is it their responsibility to save your submission and cover sheet under the properly formatted names of those files. Thank you for your understanding. STATE VWC AWARDS: Only first-place winners from the chapters will be eligible for the state contest. Winners of the state-level VWC Golden Nib Contest will be announced, and awards presented, at the VWC Annual Meeting and Awards Ceremony in November. Awards for each category are as follows: First Place-$150; Second Place-$100; Third Place-$75. These prizes were increased in 2025.
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