Here for the first time? Welcome! 

We’ve got two writing projects going on at the same time: our weekly writing challenge grid and the yeah write NaBloPoMo grid. If you’re here to share with us a personal essay, blog anecdote or piece of creative nonfiction, keep reading this post because you’re in the right spot. If you’re here to find your tribe and refine your crazy by blogging every single day for the month of November, click here to join in the fun by reading the BlogHer NaBloPoMo yeah write Frankengrid.

Need a place for your fiction or poetry? The speakeasy is waiting for you over here.

Challenge grid and speakeasy badges

For Tuesday’s challenge grid and speakeasy, there are badges in the sidebar for you to grab by copying the code from the box below the graphic then pasting it into the HTML view of your post draft. It’s better if you not only paste into the HTML view, but hit publish while still in the HTML view. That should solve some of the difficulties some of you have been having getting the badge to show in your published post.

Challenge grid v. the speakeasy

Like I told the virgins in the introductory paragraph, the challenge grid is primarily for blog anecdotes, personal essays and creative nonfiction pieces. Quick primer: for yeah write purposes, the personal anecdote is the well-told blog story we love to read, the personal essay centers around the person writing the essay and should reveal a new perspective on the original topic before the essay concludes. Creative nonfiction, though it may contain a personal story, has more of a global focus with a subject matter requiring research.

The challenge grid is moderated by our submissions editor checking for all of the yeah write storytelling elements. Check all the helpful links further down in this post for details if you need them. Another micro-primer: 1,000-word limit, no fiction or poetry but it still must tell a story. 

The speakeasy is reserved for fiction and poetry. It’s open submissions with Flood checking only if your post meets genre requirements.

$100 Amazon gift card writing challenge winner—Christie Tate of The Outlaw Mama

After five weeks (subtracting one of those because of super storm Sandy), we have a winner of our cumulative points challenge: congrats Christie Tate of Outlaw Mama!

Christie is one of our steadily top 10 finishers, yet if you visit her blog on a non-yeah write challenge day, you’ll read the posts of hers I love the most. She is funny, self-deprecating and writes in such a universal voice, I can’t even be mad when she’s complaining about her nanny. I mean, with only the extreme exception, people with nannies don’t have serious problems, amirite? Christie has a way of presenting her life as raw and as honestly as any writer, nannified or not.

Christie has chosen to donate her gift card, and that warms my cockles. So much so I am adding $50 from my household budget to the original $100 donated by John Lunt Designs.

Her selected organization is Equality Now which, according to its mission statement “works for the protection and promotion of the human rights of women and girls around the world. Working with grassroots women’s and human rights organizations and individual activists since 1992, Equality Now documents violence and discrimination against women and mobilizes international action to support efforts to stop these abuses.”

Yeah write is honored to donate to Equality Now in Christie’s name.

You can view the entire challenge results through yeah write #82 by clicking here for the public spreadsheet. Our top 10 vote totals belong to:

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• The Outlaw Mama      38 points
• Snaps and Bits             34 points
• Simply She Goes         30 points
• In the Tesseract          29 points
• A Teachable Mom      26 points
• IA Soup Mama             19 points
• The Authentic Life     18 points
• The Jester Queen        17 points
• Ashley Etc                      15 points
• Does Anyone Care      15 points      

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Helpful links

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• FAQ
• a blogger’s guide to writing a yeah write post
• what yeah write is, what yeah write isn’t
• vote-o-rama tracker
• weekly winners’ posts

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Optional photo prompt

In case you are bereft of writing inspiration this week, a photo for you.

 Yeah write #83 opens Tuesday. Bring us your best stuff. Bring us the best stuff on the grid.