Happy Birthday To Me!
I love April. I was born in April and I got married in April, so this month is already one of my favourites. On top of that, I share my birthday month with YeahWrite, so I feel like all the exciting things happening around here are joyous birthday surprises for me (shh, don’t burst my bubble).
We’ve launched our sleek new site, we have all our old favourite grids on board, microprose is back, and there’s a new Super Challenge. Hooray! You get to share the birthday fun with even more opportunities than usual to stretch your creative muscles.
I’m especially excited about microprose. Those of you who’ve been with us a while will remember our old micro challenge, the gargleblaster. Well, it’s back in a new incarnation. The new microprose challenge will be a regular monthly opportunity. Have you got a compelling story you can tell in just a few words? Is there an event you’ve been waiting to tell the world about in the briefest detail? Why not try your hand at microprose? Check out Christine’s post tomorrow for more details.
Finally, we all like getting useful feedback on our writing, so don’t forget to check out Rowan’s helpful guides on how to give constructive criticism in our Writing Help section.
April ‘Poetry’ Slam: Microprose
Charles Dickens was paid by the word, and it shows. I mean, if you’ve ever read Oliver Twist, we bet you found yourself wondering if all those words were really necessary to move the story forward. It’s a question we should all face every day while editing our own work, to be honest: why all these words? How can we tell our story without forcing the reader to slog through a whole bunch of extra text and without losing the essence or the voice? This month, instead of looking for ways to flesh out your writing, we’ll be talking about ways to trim it down – just in time for the first grid of our monthly microprose challenge! Learn more from Christine here.
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 it down to other territories.
Amy gave us a window into her childhood in her moving essay, Foster Home #2. This week’s prompt up taken directly from her essay is: “I steal cold hot dogs from the refrigerator.”
How to submit and fully participate in the challenge:
Basic YeahWrite guidelines: 750 word limit; your entry can be dated no earlier than this past Sunday; fiction or poetry only.
1. In the sidebar of this week’s post, please grab the code beneath the fiction|poetry badge and paste it into the HTML view of your entry;
2. Follow the Inlinkz instructions after clicking “add your link” to upload your entry to this week’s challenge grid;
3. Your entry should appear immediately on the grid if you don’t receive an error message;
4. Please make the rounds to read all the entries in this week’s challenge; and
5. 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.
Thank you for sharing with us your hard work! Good luck in the challenge…
Loading InLinkz ...About the author:
Asha keeps moving from one side of the world to the other. Her most recent move has taken her back to Perth, Western Australia where she grew up. She lives near the beach but hates sand between her toes. It’s a real conundrum. Asha began blogging at YeahWrite in October 2014 with this post, and YeahWrite was lucky to pull her on board as a Contributing Editor in December 2016. She is currently working on a novelette that grew from a series of flash fiction pieces. Asha is published in a variety of places including Modern Loss, PANK, Dead Housekeeping, and SheKnows. You can find her inconsistent blogging at Parenting In The Wilderness, or at her fiction blog, FlAsha Tales.
