Good Things Come In Threes
Surprise! It’s Asha again with this month’s Microprose Challenge. We’re pushing boundaries a little in this challenge. The number of prompts you have to include has increased, and the word limit is under 50 words.
This month, you have exactly 48 words to convey your so what. For those of you who didn’t click the link on “so what”, it’s a term we use at YeahWrite to refer to the central argument of your work, the reason a reader should care about your words.
Remember that you must include all three prompts in meaningful ways. If you have a general prompt, then it must appear in your prose, but it can be modified. For example, if the prompt is the colour green, then you can use “green”, “emerald”, “chartreuse” or any of the many shades of green to convey the colour. If the prompt is a specific item, action, or setting (for example, a rusty key, running away, or an abandoned warehouse), then you must use the prompt exactly as it’s given. As we tell our Super Challenge contestants, the item, action, or setting need not be the main or only instance of an item, action, or setting in the story, but it should be important enough that the plot wouldn’t happen in its absence.
Remember that we’ll be reading your work, and we’ll send you a nice note about where you missed the mark should you fail to meet the parameters of this challenge, but you won’t appear on the grid when it’s time to vote. Take a few extra minutes to make sure you’ve matched all the submission guidelines from wordcount to prompt use! Rowan dove into prompts this month over in our writing help section, and it’s worth taking a few minutes to read her post about how to think about and use prompts in your work when you’re writing for a challenge like this one with mandatory prompts.
This month’s three prompts that you must include in your Microprose in exactly 48 words are; the colour red; a single lily; the sound of a piano playing.
This is the badge you need:
Below is the YeahWrite badge you need for this month’s microprose challenge. Under the badge is a few lines of code. See that? Copy it and then paste it into the “text” or HTML view of your post editor. If you don’t copy it exactly, the image will not appear correctly in your post, and you will receive an error message when you submit the post to Inlinkz. If you have any questions regarding adding this code to your post or website, please contact us at editors@yeahwrite.me.
How to submit and fully participate in the Microprose Challenge
Basic YeahWrite guidelines: must contain the three prompts found in the introductory post (above); your entry can be dated no earlier than Wednesday August 2nd; fiction or nonfiction, told in exactly 48 words (remember we count intros and footnotes but not photo credits and required notices); no poems, please. You many enter only one microstory per monthly challenge.
How to submit and fully participate in the challenge:
- Please grab the code beneath the microprose badge in the body of this week’s post 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; and
- 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.
