Welcome back! We’ve got some exciting news.
2019 swept in on a polar vortex here in the northern US, bringing changes to YeahWrite and our Super Challenge is no exception. If you participated in our nonfiction challenge this winter, you’re already familiar with these changes. If you’re not, I’m excited to share them with you!
First of all, here’s what’s not changing:
- Cash prizes
- Exciting prompts
- Qualified, vetted judges
- Substantive feedback for every story, every round
But here’s what we’re adjusting:
- A two-round schedule. We listened to feedback from our authors and judges and we’re trying on a format that fits into your life better and allows us to maintain the high quality of our judging and feedback, which is important to us!
- Guaranteed minimum prizes. Nobody wants to enter a contest if they don’t know what they could win, right? So we’re guaranteeing a minimum prize pot, but we’re still going to split the total entry fees to come up with the final prizes. Best of both worlds, right? Right now our prizes stand at $150 for first place, $100 for second, and $50 for third, but they’re only going up from here!
- Exciting, anthology-style prompts. We’re keeping everyone’s favorite prompt, the two-genre split, for our final round, but we’re digging deeper for the first round prompts to find ideas that will refresh and inspire your creativity.
- Lower entry fees. As participation in the Super Challenge has grown, we’ve had to raise entry fees to maintain quality and support the three-round challenge. The new format means that we can keep our fees affordable and still bring you the best judges and prompts.
But the best part? Registration opens today for YeahWrite’s twelfth Super Challenge. We’re taking it back to fiction this time around, with prompted 48-hour stories. Check out the schedule and prompts and sign up here!
What’s a Super Challenge, though?
All of the editors at YeahWrite are writers too. That’s why when we sat down and started brainstorming ideas for how to run a writing competition that we’d want to pay to enter we ended up with three bullet points: cash prizes, great feedback, and getting that great feedback in time to learn from it.
Every writer in our Super Challenge gets substantive feedback on their story from every judge who reads their work before the next round of the competition starts. That means you’ll have a pretty good idea what you need to work on before going into the next round. It also means that nobody walks away with nothing. We know nothing’s worse as a writer than a blank rejection, a “your work didn’t make the cut” with no idea why.
As much as we do love feedback, we also love cash prizes. And writers. We love writers. So what better way to combine these things than to say more writers means more money? Once registration closes and we count up the entry fees, we split the pot: half of the fees we receive go directly into the prize pot. That means the more friends you convince to sign up with you, the bigger the prizes you could win!
What are you waiting for? Check out our prompts, schedule, and more at Super Challenge #12!
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.
