Like Second Skin, my science-fiction semi-dystopic military novel, won two third-place awards from The BookFest Fall 2025; Fiction Romance – Science Fiction and Fiction Sci-Fi – Military.
This was the first manuscript I ever completed to “the end”. And it sat around for over two decades waiting for me to finish editing and rewriting parts of it. My kid read it in their late teens and liked it. I knew I should publish it, but over that two-decade it sat stagnant, I figured it had “aged” and would need some updates.
A year ago, I read it from end to end, and I found that I thought the story held and really just needed some minor updating.
So I completed those edits and updates and published it through DreamPunk Press early this year.
And submitted it for The BookFest awards early this fall.
I really hadn’t expected much; I consider it part of my early writing, when I was still learning and weak in my storytelling. Maybe that was just my imposter syndrome making itself known, and now I think I should read more of my early unpublished writing (much of it is short stories, like “Guilty Conscience”, that I also revisited and was accepted by Tundra Swan Press for its anthology, The Haunted Zone.)
Time to go and revisit those writing archives.
Tara Moeller 