Showing up for the race
As the super challenge participants warm up for their next marathon this weekend, I’m cooling down after a frenzied week of reading and commenting on the entries for the first round, a task I would never have thought I’d be doing if you’d asked me five years ago.
For 20-odd years I only wrote when inspiration hit. I’d just slouch around on couches all day waiting for the inspiration fairies to ring a bell for me. But I’ve learned a lot about myself since I started writing regularly again. The best thing I’ve learned is that I need to throw my hat in a ring in order to be productive. Deadlines, competition, and mutual feedback all inspire me to create and improve. My blog’s 250+ posts in 2.5 years are a testament to that. I’m no mathematician, but I’m pretty sure 250 writes (with actual endings even) is 80 kajillion percent higher than the rate of production my old writing modus operandi produced.
But I gotta tell you that shoebox on the top shelf of my closet filled with about a dozen barely-started novels I’ll never finish sure does look pretty…
dusty. It looks pretty dusty.
Whether you’re submitting to the weekly challenge or diving into the challenge this weekend, we can’t wait to read what you bring us. Remember to read the submission guidelines before you press post or hit send, especially if you are new around here. (Welcome!) Have a favorite yeah writer or two? Why not ask them to be your writing partner? Everyone needs another set of eyes to point out the typos, content errors, and ungainly phraseologies in our posts. Stop by the coffeehouse and meet some of the people behind the words!
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Yeah write super challenge for fictioneers!
The first round of the fiction super challenge is over, and the judges are busily reading your entries. We’ve even got a few superstar guest judges joining the yeah write editors this time around! Keep an eye on our announcements page to stay up to date; we will post the round 1 results as soon as they are in, sometime this week.
Prompt up!
Prompt up is our optional weekly writing prompt for the fiction|poetry challenge! Here’s how it works: we choose a sentence prompt from last week’s winning nonfiction post and announce it in the kickoff. It’s your job to use that prompt in your poem or story and then run with it. The prompt is just a springboard, though: feel free to use it as your first sentence, move it, change it, or float down it to other territories.
Nancy wrote a letter to someone who could probably use some empathy right about now. This week’s prompt up taken from her essay is: Anything that goes wrong is someone else’s fault.
The poetry slam is back!
Do you miss our microstory challenge? Then this is the poetry slam for you. This month, we’re taking it a little easy on you with the nonet. No scanning! No rhyming!
If that’s not enough for you, this month’s nonfiction know-how will also be useful to fiction writers: we’re focusing on tension. There are two basic reasons that people continue reading a thing they’ve started. Find out what they are here.
Yeah write #288 fiction|poetry writing challenge is open for submissions!
Basic yeah write guidelines: 750 word limit; your entry can be dated no earlier than this past Sunday; fiction or poetry only.
How to submit and fully participate in the challenge:
- In the sidebar of this week’s post, please grab the code beneath the challenge grid badge and paste it into the HTML view of your entry
- Follow the InLinkz instructions after clicking “add your link” to upload your entry to this week’s challenge grid
- Your entry should appear immediately on the grid if you don’t receive an error message
- Please make the rounds to read all the entries in this week’s challenge
- Consider turning off moderated comments and CAPTCHA on your own blog
Submissions for this week’s challenges will close on Wednesday at 10pm ET. Voting will then open immediately thereafter and close on Thursday at 10pm ET. The winners, as always, will be celebrated on Friday.
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