I’m not gonna get too excited about our 500th yeah write weekly email blast subscriber since every time I sneeze into my elbow, I lose at least two subscribers, however, knowing our subscription list began in October 2011 with 93 people I manually added, 500 is still a very nice number to celebrate. Nobody move.
We have a few yeah write virgins on the grid. Lemme talk directly to you guys for a second: We’re so glad you’re here. Yes, your people can vote, but it’s important you don’t ask for targeted votes. How will you know if your writing won the challenge for you and not your sorority sisters clicking away on your yellow star because it’s you they love? Even thought they’d never heard of a blog until you asked them to find you here? Yeah write voting is not an Internet clicking contest. We read all the entries, we vote on merit.
Each week, we get to read an entire post on how yeah write voting works. Since many of you have been away for the summer, please consider this your refresher course. Even surgeons forget where the thingie is and how to tie off that other thingie if they indulge themselves with brief vacations. Be not ashamed, ye who are in good company.
What to look for as you’re reading this week’s submissions
Reading as a reader
The writing should be inviting and the story should flow effortlessly. Did the writers keep your interest, especially on topics you knew nothing about before reading their stories?
Reading as a writer
Is the post written the yeah write way? Remember, the writer has the rest of his or her natural days to write whatever and however. When writing for yeah write, there are guidelines to follow.
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- It needs a clear introduction, a reason for telling the story.
- It must have a central conflict: the one problem or event moving the story forward. The “so what”. If there is no so what, there is no story.
- It has to be more than a journal entry written for one person, the writer. It’s supposed to be a personal essay/work of fiction/work of non-fiction/piece of creative non-fiction designed for a specific audience, the readers and voters of the grid.
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Reading as a mechanic
Pull out your purple pen. Better yet, download this handy yeah write vote-o-rama spreadsheet.
Your yeah write editors have given you a head start by only allowing posts with 1,000 words or fewer onto the grid; don’t worry about post length. But do worry about clear language, correct spelling and correct grammar unless, of course, the writer is using well-crafted dialect or slang as a stylistic choice. Does anything interfere with the readability of the post such as an overzealous application of freakish typefaces? The writer’s content should be the focus of the space, free of distractions.
Yeah write summer writer’s series #71 is open for voting.
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- Everybody gets three votes.
- Unless there is a program glitch on our end or willful treks to various Starbucks for new IP addresses on your end, voting for your own post should be disabled. If a yeah write editor added your post for you, the app won’t recognize your IP address as the owner of the entry, so please be on the honor system about it.
- You are free to campaign for your favorite entries on Twitter, Facebook, your blog and any other social media, but please please encourage your visitors to read through a few submissions first. They may find something they like about us and stick around awhile.
- Yeah write voting day is not Internet clicking contest day—no flashing your submission number to the camera or scrawling it on your boobs/manboobs. Do not request targeted votes. We read, we consider, we vote on merit. Download and use this handy scoring spreadsheet for some merit-mathin’.
- When alerted by suspicious and weird visitor patterns, we will validate each vote like a crazy person, redistributing those pesky self-votes and “vote for me, me, me” votes evenly among the poor at various food banks.
- Click on the thumbnail to read the post, click the yellow star to vote for that post.
- The page is gonna refresh after each yellow star click, so you’ll have to work your way back down to the grid to do it again.
- Sometimes, it will seem as though the Inlinkz app isn’t registering your votes. Refresh the page manually, and you should see the yellow stars have disappeared. You may have to change browsers. Keep calm and carry on.
- After you’ve voted three times, all the yellow stars will disappear and the current vote tallies will show under each thumbnail.
- Voting will close on Thursday at 9 pm US eastern. The winners’ post, including the jury prize winner and the crowd favorite, will publish three hours after that.
- Be good, y’all.
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