Celebrations
I’m a sucker for big outdoor celebrations: festivals, parades, community picnics, all of that, especially when there’s an element of ritual or tradition involved. Yesterday, as you probably know, was Chinese Lunar New Year (known as the Spring Festival in mainland China). The Spring Festival starts with firecrackers and culminates with a Lantern Festival, where paper lanterns light up the skies as visible symbols of hope, success, and happiness.
In honor of Chinese Lunar New Year, we want you to give us a story in exactly 48 words that includes a lantern. For the purposes of this challenge, we are defining “lantern” as a portable, enclosed light source. It doesn’t matter how the light source is powered – fire, chemical, electric, heck put a baby dragon in there if you want – but it has to be a thing that gives light and is enclosed for convenience of carrying it around.
Your lantern may not be:
- Fixed in place (such as a lighthouse or streetlamp)
- An open flame (such as a campfire, but also a diya – we want lanterns not lamps)
- A metaphor (such as the moon or hope)
- A handheld but not enclosed light source (such as a torch – either the fire or electric flashlight kind)
Good luck, and happy writing!
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.
Need a hand?
Microprose sounds easy. After all, how hard can it really be to write a story with fewer than 100 words incorporating a prompt or two? But it turns out it’s our hardest challenge to really get right. Whether you’re a seasoned micropro or a brand new microwriter, it’s worth taking a minute to glance through the tips and tricks our editors have put together, like this quick refresher on what makes a micro great, or this one on how to incorporate mandatory prompts into adjudicated challenges. Make sure you make it to the vote this week: check your wordcount (we count those footnotes!) and prompts!The microprose challenge ends in:
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How to submit and fully participate in the Microprose Challenge
Basic YeahWrite guidelines: must be in response to the prompt above; your entry can be dated no earlier than Wednesday, February 6; your entry may be nonfiction or fiction – but not poetry – told in exactly 48 words. You may enter only one microstory per weekly 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:
Christine Hanolsy is a (primarily) science fiction and fantasy writer who simply cannot resist a love story. She joined the YeahWrite team in 2014 as the microstory editor and stepped into the role of Editor-In-Chief in 2020. Christine was a 2015 BlogHer Voices of the Year award recipient and Community Keynote speaker for her YeahWrite essay, “Rights and Privileges.” Her short fiction has been published in a number of anthologies and periodicals and her creative nonfiction at Dead Housekeeping and in the Timberline Review. Outside of YeahWrite, Christine’s past roles have included Russian language scholar, composer, interpreter, and general cat herder. Find her online at christinehanolsy.com.
