Books Shelf Writing Competition 2021

When my wife died in 2015, I was heartbroken. Jila was everything to me—my best friend, confidant, lipreader and interpreter, and my muse, the source of my inspiration. After a year of mourning, I decided to pull together all the stories she told me over the sixteen years we were together and write her story. 

Jila’s family liked the idea, but insisted I change names, which I did. And I embellished the facts to maintain a literary pace and sustain the interest of my readers. After four years of writing and another few months of professional editing, The Lip Reader was ready for a publisher. 

As I searched for a literary agent or interested publisher, I noticed an email searching for entrants to the Books Shelf Fiction Competition 2021. I entered, but didn’t think about it again. Last week, to my amazement, The Lip Reader came in third place. Hundreds of books were entered into the contest, and my book came in third place. I was flabbergasted. 

Below you’ll find the three winners of the Books Shelf Fiction Competition 2021 and a little information about each book with a link. 

The First Place Winner: No Pistol Tastes the Same, by Jacob Patchen  

Written by Jacob Paul Patchen, an award-winning author of YA fiction like At Daddy’s Hands and Sheltered: When a Boy Becomes a Legend. 

No Pistol Tastes the Same is a fiction novel about the strength of love, PTSD and how it can devastate a family. 
Sgt. Grimm’s pistol tastes like bourbon. Another war in the Middle East leaves Marine Sergeant JP Grimm punishing himself for not pulling the trigger on a boy in a suicide vest. Now, in the unsettling comfort of his home, JP struggles to reconnect with his own son, Adin. Sensing his distance and hardheaded stance against help, his wife tries to give him space, love, and time to work through his shame and guilt on his own terms. But as her husband’s PTSD symptoms and behavior deteriorates, and he seeks comfort in his pistol and whiskey, her love can only go so far. As the world shows signs of impending doom from a weakening magnetic field and flaring sun, JP, too, shows signs of his own impending doom. After pushing everyone away, JP must face his demons to reconnect with his son before he becomes his enemy, save his marriage, and save himself before the modern world burns out in a fiery, electromagnet disaster.  

Second Place Winner: The Witches of Vegas, by Mark Rosendorf

Where can Witches and their vampire mentor practice their powers without being discovered or persecuted?

By using their magic, the Witches of Vegas become the number one act performing on the Las Vegas Strip–a great achievement for them, but not so much for the magicians–who can’t possibly keep pace.

Isis Rivera is the adopted fifteen-year-old daughter of The Witches of Vegas. Zack Galloway is the teenage nephew and assistant to the last magician left in the city. Although they should be rivals, when Valeria, a four-hundred-year-old witch with a long-seeded grudge against humanity arrives in Sin-City, both teens act to bring their families together to stop the evil hag in her tracks.

But can the combined witches’ powers and the ingenuity of the magicians be enough to stop Valeria from taking over the city and possibly the world?

Mark Rosendorf is a mild-mannered high school guidance counselor for special needs students. He has also moonlighted as a magician. Today, he teaches magic to his students.

By night, Mark is the author of The Witches of Vegas series, a young adult fantasy series which shares the adventures of Isis, Zack, and The Witches of Vegas with the entire world. He has also published such works as The Rasner Effectthrough The Wild Rose Press.

Third Place Winner: The Lip Reader by Michael Thal

Set in Iran during the 1960s and 1970s, and later in Los Angeles, California, Zhila Shirazi tells her story firsthand. She reveals the real-life struggle of being a deaf woman who refuses to allow adversity to stop her from reaching her dreams of living a normal and fulfilling life.

Michael Thal is the author of five published novels—Goodbye Tchaikovsky, The Abduction of Joshua Bloom, and The Koolura Series—The Legend of Koolura, Koolura and The Mystery at Camp Saddleback, and Koolura and the Mayans. The Lip Reader will be published in November, 2021 by Paper Angel Press. 

You can learn more about Michael Thal on his website and blog.  

The entry period for the 2022 Fiction Writing Contest began July 27 and runs to December 31, 2021. If you have a finished work of fiction in English, no matter if it’s published or not, you can enter this competition at https://www.booksshelf.com/writing-contest-2022-fiction.