Crossing the finish line
Prompted competitions are hard—but that’s why they’re fun, right? They challenge us in so many ways. Not only do you need to create a compelling story, you might need to write in a style or genre that is unfamiliar or even uncomfortable to you. The purpose is not to discourage writers—quite the contrary! The point is to challenge you to stretch yourself, and hopefully, even to surprise yourself, with a story you can be proud of. Sometimes that stretch is uncomfortable, and either the prompt or the story gets sacrificed. The good news is, even if you didn’t quite hit a prompt by competition standards, you’ve still got a story – and one you can polish up with the comments from your judges and submit to an anthology that doesn’t have the same prompt requirements!
Folks, this is the end of Super Challenge 16. The judges’ results are in and tallied and we’re ready to announce the winners! 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. After sixteen challenges, our challenge is keeping it fresh for you and our judges without reaching deep into the grab bag of genres and pulling out, I don’t know, sliding-perspective-literary-fiction or something. Let us know how we’re doing!
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.
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
$300
Katie Entner Delay
The Absolutely True Legends of the Singular Ambassador Orson
Second Place
$200
Chrissie Rohrman
Small Packages
Third Place
$100
Margaret Shafer
Great Jake and the Flood
Honorable Mention:
MM Schreier
Renee Boyer
Runners-up:
(in alphabetical order)
Amber Cohen
Stephanie Lennon
J. Lynne Moore
Alex Otto
Charlie Rogers
Mela Rourke
Jessica Wilcox
Congratulations again to everyone who entered. Each story took the prompts in a different direction: our judges said their biggest challenge was comparing them! Hopefully you’re finding your feedback useful and relevant, and are considering reworking your story and getting it out into the world. (If you’re struggling with your feedback, I like to walk away from it for a day or two, or get someone else to read it for me, so that it doesn’t feel as personal.)
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.
