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I managed to find a picture of the inside of the book, and it gave me some new information: while I had thought that the contest took place in Spruce Grove, Alberta, the city it took place in was actually Thunder Bay, Ontario.
I hope that this helps some.
You may already have considered it, but if the competition came from Thunder Bay, it could have had something to do with the Northwestern Ontario Writers Workshop
, which has had an annual competition for a while. I notice that their list of past winners (PDF) had a "High School" category in 2005. I have no idea whether or not the competition resulted in a book, though.
This would have been 1999/2000 - that's when I lived in Thunder Bay. I checked out the group, and it doesn't ring a bell. Thank you for the suggestion, though.
I think I've asked this question before, but I figure I'd ask anyways: when I was about thirteen (2005), I lived in Spruce Grove, AB. I was homeschooled and one of my short stories got put into this anthology that seemed to be from a contest. There are a few points I can remember about the anthology:
- All the text in the book was blue - One of the stories was about a competitive swimmer; her main rival was named Veronica, and it turned out that Veronica was doing steroids at the Olympics. - Another story was about ants becoming giant and the protagonists trying to save their families from the ants. - A third story was about a kid who fell into a toxic lake (I think he was near Drumheller) and ended up in the time of the dinosaurs; after hiding in the lake again from a T-Rex, he ended up back home. - A fourth story had a young warlock who ate sandwiches with batwings and tomatoes (his favorite!) and lived with his aunt and uncle. - a fifth story had the protagonists having every idiom come true when they said it. The last line (as I recall) was "I looked out the window. The moon was blue." in after saying that the idiom thing only happened once in a blue moon.
Those are just the stories I can remember off the top of my head; I think the cover was primarily blue with splotchy green and brown bits, and the cover text being white. Since this is just from one region and is pretty obscure, I don't think I'll be able to find an answer, but I thought I'd ask anyways.
Edited by Tanglemorph