@LabMom4131 Gosh that’s awful! So sorry it didn’t work 
Friendly reminder to have your faculty advisors fill your forms! I realized today that I completely forgot and brought like fifteen forms to school!
oh yeah for the themes thing I did an experiment over my four years of submitting in Scholastic
senior year I submitted 26 pieces (bless fee waivers they didn’t even verify them which was sketchy tbh…I did qualify though!). half were about my cultural identity, other half my normal artsy poetry. Everything that got something in regionals were the cultural pieces (so 13/26)
my two national medals (one of which one a special achievement award) were about my cultural identity and the other about African-Americans. Scholastic is veryyyy skewered imo especially for poetry and personal essay/memoir
@shakuton Did you tag your pieces when you submitted them, and if so, were you more general or specific?
@phanakin @wistfulwords @shakuton Sorry for the belated reply. My point was not to avoid those popular themes, but rather to focus on what you are truly passionate about and the quality of writing itself. For example I also write consistently about political and cultural identity themes and they’re very successful on a regional level but my nationally awarded poems were just well-written and impactful and didn’t belong more “favored” themes. Point being, write well about what you love, and you’ll win. Don’t worry so much about the preferences, and especially don’t force yourself into writing topics you think are favored just because.
Are you guys going to upload your work electronically or by mail?
And if I send my submissions by mail, is the deadline the date when my regional program should receive my submissions or is it the date when I should send it by?
I could be wrong but I think the writing or artwork has to be uploaded, it’s the form with the signatures that can be either uploaded or mailed in.
@Pentatonix123 I tagged my stuff, but I think it was just for filing processes (don’t quote me on that). My medal pieces were both submitted for a Special Achievement award so that probably added another layer.
I’m unable to upload the manuscript of my novel? It says “An Unknown Error Occurred”—does anyone know what’s happening? It’s a .pdf file.
My D was getting that error message when uploading her artwork on the laptop/Firefox. Drove us crazy. For some reason it uploaded just fine when we tried on the iPad/Safari.
@phanakin
@Dancingmom518 you’re totally right!!! i was trying it on Google Chrome, and it wouldn’t work—but upon trying Safari, we’re completely fine. Thank you so much!
@phanakin I’m glad it worked out. Good luck in the competition!
For anyone else, does their payment say “payment selected”? I’m kind of nervous that the payments didn’t go through.
Well, I am going to act like I did not forget about this until a week ago. Thankfully I got all my forms done, and now my work is submitted. It is relieving to take all this stress off my back after having submitted everything. Good luck to everybody, as the long wait till February/March commences.
@beautifulchaos
I have the same message, most likely because I just submitted the payment today. I think it just needs to process through.
Yeah! As I said before I’m only submitting 3 pieces, all of which are short stories and I’m pretty proud of them. I feel like they have much better quality than last year and it was the appropriate amount for me to work with in order to polish them up thoroughly and all. I’m mailing my forms tomorrow and payed for all three pieces yesterday and turned them in. I’m pretty much done now and I’m hoping for the best this year.
Good luck to you all and those who didn’t win anything in YoungArts (like me ^_^) hopefully you’ll get better results for Scholastic.
Good luck everyone! My son is actually doing a Portfolio review session this Saturday to put all the finishing touches on his Senior portfolio. I’ll miss him being able to participate in this.
Were the awards announced earlier last year? February feels… late.
@wistfulwords Yeah, in my region the results came out Janurary 29th of last year. But, I think they’re releasing it in February now so there’s less of a wait for Nationals in March
My local region’s deadline is tonight. Good luck in the contest guys! I hope we all get gold keys/national medals 
Hi all,
I’ve just submitted 7 writing pieces to the International RAL. I ghosted this thread for a few days after submitting cause of some weird sense of anxiety (just found typos. oof). @beautifulchaos Totally agree! Good luck everyone.