Sayle's Site
Some of my favorite quotes on writing:
"A writer is a world trapped in a person."
~ Victor Hugo
"Without patience, magic would be undiscovered—in rushing everything, we would never here its whisper inside."
~Tamora Pierce
"Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person."
~F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Below is a comprehensive list of awards I have received in the Scholastic Writing Competition.
2015
The Kingdoms of Myula Prophecies poetry collection is a series of five prophecies that I originally wrote for a book series I was working on in my freshman year of high school. While the book series was never completed, and I don't plan to continue writing it, the prophecies I wrote to go along with it won an Honorable Mention as a poetry collection.
2016
Big Blue Riding Hood, which earned a Silver Key, is a take on the story of Little Red Riding Hood, and features a tale where Little Red had a twin brother, Big Blue.
Voice is a short story that won a Silver Key. It's about a girl who has something similar to schizophrenia, and her final decision to leave her family and vanish so she no longer burdens them.
This poetry portfolio, which won and Honorable Mention, consists of five pieces: care about caring, which is stream-of-consciousness poem from the perspective of a coma patient; Cloak of Wolf-Skin, which is a twist on Little Red Writing Hood, and it was later very much revised for my first quarter College Writing portfolio; Mother and Lost Child is a dialogue poem that I originally wrote as song lyrics; My Inner Reality is a metaphor poem originally written for my Honors English 9 portfolio; and Thorn-Pricked Finger was also written for my English 9 portfolio, and is a twist on Sleeping Beauty. All of the poems originally in a portfolio can be found in their respective tabs.
2017
This poem is an Epic poem that was submitted to the Science Fiction/Fantasy category due to the fact that it exceeded the allowed line count limit of the Poetry Category, winning an Honorable Mention. It follows the life of, instead of a hero, the mother of a future hero. Unlike many stories, this one features a nameless narrator, a style I often employ in shorter fiction pieces.
2017
This Movie Review for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them won an Honorable Mention, and was originally published on sjhswindup.com.
She is a poem I wrote towards the end of my junior year of high school. It won an Honorable Mention in the Poetry Category, and is about six pages in length. It details the love story of a couple, and is an extended metaphor for the two different ways they fell in love with the other.
Elemental is a novel I spent over two years writing, having started it in the summer before my sophomore year of high school and completed it, up to a third draft, November 2017, my senior year. It won a Silver Key in the Novel Category, and is around 132,000 words. I've not linked the entire novel, only the excerpt I used for the contest (aka the Prologue).
2018