Hi Charlie. I've moved your post from the HBT Announcements and Feedback subforum to here, the General Beer Discussion subforum, where hopefully more folks will see it.
Entering competitions is a great idea, not necessarily for the glory of winning medals, but for the honest feedback from judges who don't know who you are. That feedback shouldn't be taken as gospel - evaluating beers isn't an exact science and there are many variables. But if you consistently get feedback about phenols in your beer, for example, that is an indication that perhaps you should address that issue.
http://bjcp.org/apps/comp_schedule/competition_schedule.php is a listing of all credentialed competitions coming up across the country. Its often good to start by entering a few competitions close to you. Shipping your beer can be both time consuming and expensive, many local competitions will have drop-off options. On the other hand, some of the best feedback I've received has been from more distant competitions.
When you enter a competition, you don't specify whether your beer was made via the extract or all-grain method. All you are telling the judges is what style the beer is. So you need to take a look through the BJCP style guidelines and make sure you're entering your beer in the right category. That may not be the category you intended when you made it - if your English IPA tastes a little more like an English Strong Bitter, enter it as the latter.
http://bjcp.org/docs/2015_Guidelines_Beer.pdf
No need for a recipe you made up from scratch. Honestly, many recipes in a style are remarkably similar. The recipe isn't being evaluated - the beer in front of the judges is.
If you have any questions, ask away, there are a lot of brewers here with a lot of competition experience.
