Scribes Valley Notes

We get many questions about the Scribes Valley Writing Contest . We thought we would list and the most frequently asked Why do you have a reading/entry fee?      Basically, we use the reading/entry fee to fund the contest. We use it cover costs such as advertising the contest and building the anthology. Any prize money awarded also comes straight from the reading/entry fee. What are the prizes?      All finalist stories (usually 10-15 stories) are published in our annual contest anthology. Each finalist author receives a complimentary copy of the print anthology, along with a discount on any other copies they would like. Please note, there is absolutely no obligation to purchase additional copies. We’re not that kind of publisher. From the 10-15 stories, we select the top three and award those authors with a monetary prize. The monetary prize is based on the number of entries in the contest—the more entries we get, the bigger the pri...

My wife and I love to take day-long road trips. We get in the car with no particular destination in mind, stop at a local grocery store to stock up on “rations,” then hit the road, making decisions on which way to turn as needed. Most of the time, we are pleasantly surprised where we end up. Last weekend, however, we had a destination in mind. My wife and I grew up in a small town in Tennessee. While we didn’t know each other until we were older, we both frequented, over the years, the same establishments in town. One, specifically, was the Blue Circle Restaurant (http://www.bluecircleburger.com). It was a drive-in style restaurant, part of a small chain in East Tennessee, famed for their steamed-bun hamburgers. The restaurant was wildly popular with both the older and younger crowds in our town, but, as with most popular things, it eventually faded, then went out of business. Sometimes we sit around and reminisce about such things from our past; how it seemed so much easi...