I say this every time, but judging the Super Challenge is one of the hardest and most rewarding parts of running the competition. So: let’s talk about math for a minute, ok?
Mathematically, we can only advance 12 writers to the final round. (Ok, technically it’s supposed to be 10 but 10 doesn’t divide by 3 and we’d rather be generous in advancing people than stingy.) What that means is that if one group was full of amazing writers, we still only moved four of them to our shortlist. What that also means is that if one group was… not full of amazing writers… four of them moved to the shortlist. I’m sorry. I’d be sitting here second-guessing whether I meant me too. Your essay was probably better than you thought it was.
Fortunately for y’all, math only counts in competitions. Several judges wrote to us separately to ask us to encourage writers who didn’t make the shortlist to find a home for their essay. I think my favorite quote (used with permission) was “I would have advanced [darn] near this whole group if I were selecting for an anthology instead of scoring a competition.” So if you didn’t make our shortlist this time, it means you have an extra weekend to go pitch your essay, ok?
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.
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 sentence or phrase. Each writer will incorporate that sentence 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 sentence shouldn’t stick out or sound unnatural–you might have to play around with your writing voice to incorporate it. 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. We’ll tell you when we release the prompt if there are any special rules about changing tenses (the default is you can’t) or adding punctuation (the default is that you can’t change any punctuation in the phrase but you can put quotes around it).
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 writers, in alphabetical order, who will be advancing to the final round of the Super Challenge:
Grainne Armstrong
Renee Boyer
Elizabeth Candido
Rosie Clemo
Cindy Cook DeRuyter
Rachael Elliott
Melinda Hagenson
Anna Hiller
Jen Mierisch
RC Nath
Dani Nichols
Susan Walker
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 post it online (or if it’s published later) we’d love it if you linked it up to our Super Challenge grid for future writers to see. Remember your first Super Challenge? It’s nice to be able to look back and see what kinds of essays appear — and where they end up!
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.
