Math is hard; you reap the benefits
One of the things we pride ourselves on at YeahWrite is the quality and consistency of our judging. To give you the best and fairest results, we don’t scatter your group’s stories among a bunch of judges; each judge reads, scores, and gives feedback to the whole group. That way nobody benefits (or suffers) from having a really high- or low-scoring judge doing one or two stories in the group. BUT. That means that we have to keep the groups down to a reasonable size – no 30 person groups.
That’s a really long-winded way of saying that yes, we knew we would be cutting our list down to about ten writers when we made up the groups, but it apparently didn’t sink in that we had three groups, and ten isn’t divisible by three. So, as we try to do in any case when there’s an opportunity to give writers the benefit of the doubt, we did: our final round for Super Challenge #11 will have twelve writers, not ten.
As you know, we’re trying a new, two-round “longlist/shortlist” format for Super Challenge #11, and it seems to have paid off. The judges were seriously impressed with the overall quality of this round’s submissions, and it was more difficult than ever to pare the shortlist down to a mere twelve entries. In fact, one judge told us that half the essays they read were publishable as-is, and the other half only needed one more round of edits to reach the same level. So writers, if you didn’t move on, don’t toss that essay. Take a little time to review your feedback, polish it up, find one more beta reader, and find a home for your work.
Before we announce who’ll be moving on, let’s take a moment to chat about the next round of the Super Challenge. Starting Friday, the advancing writers will be working with a word, phrase, or sentence, incorporating it into an essay about… well, about wherever that sentence takes them for inspiration. The essay could be personal or persuasive. The catch is that the prompt shouldn’t stick out or sound unnatural. Words should flow, nuance should be on-point, and our judges shouldn’t be able to tell where your writing ends and our prompt begins. Don’t worry: we’ll tell you any rules about punctuation (can you change it?) or verb tenses (are you stuck with ours?).
Sound fun? Let’s see who’ll be taking on that, er, super challenge:
Congratulations to Our Advancing Writers
Let’s have a hand for the following twelve writers, in alphabetical order as always, who will be advancing to the next round of the Super Challenge:
Colette Bennett
Myna Chang
Penny Devlin
Marcy Dilworth
Deborah Kraklow
Jennifer Mierisch
Laila Miller
Britt Mishra
Dani Nichols
Margaret Shafer
Laurie O’Connor Stephans
Paige Vest
Wait, wait, there’s more!
Writers, if you don’t have your feedback, please send us an email at superchallenge@yeahwrite.me, ’cause that email should have reached you about twelve hours ago.
Now that this round of the competition is over, you’re free to post your work anywhere on the Internet you like, or take our judges’ suggestions and rework your submission to send on to other markets. If you put your work on your blog or website, we’d love it if you took a few seconds to click the blue button right here and share it with future Super Challenge competitors!
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About the author:
Rowan submitted exactly one piece of microfiction to YeahWrite before being consumed by the editorial darkside. She spent some time working hard as our Submissions Editor before becoming YeahWrite’s Managing Editor in 2016. She was a BlogHer Voice of the Year in 2017 for her work on intersectional feminism, but she suggests you find and follow WOC instead. In real life she’s been at various times an attorney, aerialist, professional knitter, artist, graphic designer (yes, they’re different things), editor, secretary, tailor, and martial artist. It bothers her vaguely that the preceding list isn’t alphabetized, but the Oxford comma makes up for it. She lives in Portlandia with a menagerie which includes at least one other human. She tells lies at textwall and uncomfortable truths at CrossKnit.
