After a brief hiatus, I’m thrilled to be back on the jury for yeah write’s 100th birthday party! Thank you to everyone who linked up, commented, and voted this week—we had the most entries on the grid since going to the invitational format. We’re off to a fabulous next 100 weeks with your support.

Jury prize winner—invitational grid 

“Hey, Raw Meat!” by Marcy at (Don’t Be) Too Timid and Squeamish

In just under 500 words, Marcy deftly paints a picture of a lifetime of friendship between her dad and his best friend Jimmy, creating Scorsese-worthy characters in snatches of dialogue, summed up in this efficient description of their conversations: “Everything they said to each other ended in an exclamation point.”

Years pass in a few paragraphs as Marcy grows from a little kid “playing Vicki Lawrence on a jukebox to a surly teenager listening to Led Zeppelin behind a closed bedroom door.” The men’s friendship endures and – with their complementary t-shirts and matching mannerisms – their larger than life personalities attract even a sulky adolescent to join them in their escapades: “I would still choose to tag along with them.”

But time moves on, people age and they sometimes get sick and their exuberance becomes labored. In Marcy’s poignant scene of her dad feeding raw clams to a cancer-ridden Jimmy, propped up on the couch, his stricken and speechless wife staring from the doorway, we fear all hope is lost. Read the post yourself to learn the ending.

Bonus for Marcy! Marcy also happens to be the random drawing winner from last weekend’s moonshine grid. A copy of The Best American Essays 2012 edited by David Brooks is on its way to her if it hasn’t gotten there already. She’s in a groove.

Congratulations, Marcy, on your jury prize. Go grab your badge and display it with yeah write pride.

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Crowd Favorite–challenge grid

“The apple of my eye” by Cyn at “That Cynking Feeling”

Congratulations to Cyn from That Cynking Feeling, Crowd Favorite this week for her post “The apple of my eye.” A be-here-now meditation on the eating of an apple turns into a tale of triumph, as we learn how the unwanted apple in the author’s hands represents a developmental milestone for her autistic son. With simple descriptive language that moves skillfully from present to past, the post illustrates the complicated backstory behind even the simplest of acts. Congratulations! Grab your badge – you earned it.

Random winners of yeah write #100 birthday gifts

We are giving away birthday presents this week! How about that? Giving other people presents for our birthday. Our actual birthday is the week of yeah write #104, but we figured we’d start the prizes on the big round number of #100.

Winners are TriGirl from Tri-ing to be Athletic for the custom badge (Wow!) and, over at the speakeasy, Cierra from AzimeraLane for the Jennifer Egan novel Waiting for the Goon Squad. Email us to claim your prizes!

For the rest of you, we’ll be giving away prizes each week until yeah write #105.

Weekend moonshine grid opens today at 6 p.m. eastern time!

Tell your friends! Yeah write is now open on the weekends—no editors, no voting, no writer’s block—just hanging out in the clearing among the trees and discarded moonshine jugs. Use this chance to show the yeah write community the other side  of your blog—your top 10 lists, your stream-of-consciousness posts, that hilarious text message exchange with your brother. No commercial or sponsored posts allowed, but this will be a good space for letting us all know when you have a cool blog event coming up.

The moonshine grid opens at 6 p.m. eastern time each Friday and will close by 12:01 a.m. each Monday. Grab the badge from the sidebar and go find the perfect post to share!

Win-win

The thumbnails are now sorted in the grid from most votes to the least. In the case of a tie, the thumbnails are additionally sorted by page views. Part of the top row five? Please grab a winners’ badge from the sidebar and display it proudly on your own blog. Congrats!

Do not be discouraged if your blog has landed near the bottom of the grid; it is always a tight race. The fun lies in getting better exposure for your blog and in the spirit of competition as incentive to improve your writing and blogging skills. It’s a win-win for everybody involved.

Thanks again, everybody, for linking up, for reading, for accepting the weekly writing challenge. And for making yeah write the most welcoming spot on the Interwebs for writers who blog and bloggers who write.

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