Let me tell you something right up front: our listeners are amazing.

This year we had more scholarship applications than ever before, and the quality was through the roof. Choosing just four applicants out of this unbelievably talented batch was incredibly hard, and incredibly painful. We had fiction submissions this year that are publisher-ready, right now, and still didn’t make the cut–that’s how stiff the competition was. But, in the end, we did manage to narrow it down to four winners, and I am delighted to announce them here:

For the Carl Brandon Society scholarships:
JY Yang
Yasmine Fahmy

For the Out of Excuses scholarships:
Alexander Murie
Shallee McArthur

They have been contacted, and will be joining us on the 2017 Writing Excuses Retreat this summer. If you applied and didn’t get chosen, don’t worry: you’re awesome, and we love you. I’ll be sending emails out today and tomorrow to all of you to thank you personally for applying, and to let you know how much we appreciate you. Please apply again next year, assuming you’re not already published and famous by then–seriously, some of you are that good. And if you didn’t apply but wish you had: awesome! We’ll do this again next year, and we would love to have all of you with us.

And, again, I want to thank the rest of you: our alumni and our listeners and our Patreon supporters. It’s because of you that we’re able to do this, and it’s because of you that these four incredible writers can have this experience. We have a level on our Patreon that literally just says “You don’t get anything extra at this level, we just take your money and use it for scholarships,” and SO MANY of you do it! You’re wonderful! We’re getting so many scholarship donations, in fact, that we suspect we’ll be able to offer an extra scholarship or two next year; no promises, but we’re crunching the numbers and we think it will work. If you love good writing and want to give back to the community, supporting these scholarships is a great way to do it.

Congratulations again to our winners, and to all of you we say: you’re out of excuses, now go write.