Fourteen is the loneliest number
Kidding. Fourteen is amazing. Fourteen means we’ve been running this little Super Challenge for over three years, and it gets better every time. But even since the first challenge, I’ve loved getting to announce who won. Winners, you’ll also get an email confirming your details so that we can send your prizes to you.
We hope you’ve had as much fun writing as we had coming up with the prompts. I’ll tell you a secret: sometimes one of us comes up with what we think is the best prompt in the world, and someone else has to be the one to tell them that it’s way too hard to do in 48 hours, or that it’s, well, er… let’s just say that we’ve learned to run everything past a 12 year old kid and see if they start laughing. But at the end of the day we come up with what we hope are good, rich, meaty prompt combos, not something automatically generated by a computer somewhere with a list of genres or objects. And we write the prompts we wish we could write to, in many cases – or at least the types of prompts – and so it’s always a thrill reading how competitors handle them, or how their visions of the perfect story very from the ones we wish we could write. Because let’s face it: as a writer, can you look at a prompt and not at least try to think of an idea?
Once again, anything that went right is entirely due to our admin team’s untiring work behind the scenes, and anything you hate is probably my fault. Except that thing with the mail merge. That’s still a mystery, but it’s why we build slack time in between when we send the groups out and when you have to start writing!
Enough about you, let’s talk about me
Just kidding. You’re here to find out who the winners are. So with no further ado, here we go:First Place
$250
Chrissie Rohrman
Project Genesis
Second Place
$200
Charlie Rogers
Pick Up The Phone
Third Place
$150
Gail A. Webber
The Shut-In
Honorable Mention:
Lisa Fox – Harassment
Janna Miller – Just Like She Was
Runners-up:
(in alphabetical order)
Tara L. Davis
Stephanie Lennon
Sarah Anne Lloyd
Victoria Martin
MM Schreier
Congratulations again to everyone who entered. Epistolary stories aren’t easy to write: you have extra plot-time constraints, because you have to figure out not just what happened, but how the character got the opportunity to write about it. From logs to letters, you worked it out, and we hope you had fun doing it! (Kidding. We’ve all entered challenges. We actually hope you didn’t spend too much time screaming into a pillow and cursing us.)
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 on Wednesday.
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 venues. We’ve also made this special grid for you to link your work to if you like:
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.
