Welcome to HarperTeen's first ever online FanLit contest!

Now all of you aspiring authors out there have a chance to strut your stuff in a national forum!

I wish they'd had something like the HarperTeen FanLit contest when I was a kid. It offers aspiring authors a fantastic opportunity to learn what it's like to be a real writer—having to turn things in by a certain date, learning to live with rejection—as well as the invaluable experience of being critiqued by professional writers and editors!

Actually, I DID enter a writing contest sponsored by Harper when I was in high school (only back then the teen imprint was called Avon Flare). Aspiring writers aged 12 to 18 were asked to submit their own original novels, and the winner's book got PUBLISHED by Avon Flare!

My submission was called A WORM IN THE PADDED ROOM. It was about a high school punk rock group whose demo tape gets mixed up with a by a Communist's group tape containing secret plans to take over the U.S. government (looking back, Communists—and our national fear of them—seem so quaint today), and the band's struggle to SAVE THE U.S.A. (while also staying true to their music, of course).

As you can imagine, A WORM IN THE PADDED ROOM did not win the Avon Flare Teen Fiction Contest that year. The winning entry was about a boy whose model lawn gnomes come to life and begin killing everyone in his family and town.

Which, you have to admit, isn't as good as a punk rock band who saves America. But it's pretty original.

Still, I was so bummed that A WORM IN THE PADDED ROOM didn't win that I didn't try to get published again for almost a decade.

DON'T MAKE THIS MISTAKE! Every single author I know has been rejected—usually multiple times—at some point in his or her career. If we all gave up every time we got rejected, there'd be no books at all! THE PRINCESS DIARIES got rejected 17 times or something before HarperCollins (actually, it was Avon Flare back then!) had the good sense to buy it.

So get out your pens or keyboards, and start writing! You never know what you can do until you try.

More later.

Much Love,

Meg,
Meg Cabot, Author of How to be Popular