It’s shorts weather!
Well, it’s shortlist weather, anyway; there’s a nice chill in the air this morning and while I know summer’s not over, let me have this, okay? I’ll go back to sweltering in as little clothing as I can get away with soon enough. Still, there’s something lovely about late-summer days, lying in a hammock and pretending to read essays for fun instead of for work. Our judges asked me to pass along a compliment on the content warnings, folks: it’s a lot easier to relax into an essay if you know it’s not booby-trapped, or have an idea of what the booby-traps might be.
As always, anything that went right this round is entirely due to our admin team’s untiring work behind the scenes, and anything you hate is probably my fault. Unless it’s your feedback—hating and loving your feedback is just kind of part of being a writer.
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 or a phrase. Each writer will incorporate that word or phrase into an essay about… well, about wherever it takes them for inspiration. The essay could be personal or persuasive. The catch is that the word or phrase 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. This may mean that you need to adapt your writing style a bit throughout the rest of the essay so that it doesn’t stand out awkwardly. Need a little extra help? Check out our Navigating Prompts post on word or phrase prompts. You don’t have to, but we did tell you exactly how to approach the prompt, so if you struggled with centering your first-round prompt, this might be a great time to brush up on your technique.
Sound fun? Or at least not terrible? 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 next round of the Super Challenge:
Danielle Dayney
Kris Livingston
Kate Macolini
Amanda Myers
Jennifer Palmer
Madeleine Pelletier
Duane Rygh
Frances Turner
Sanchana Venkatesh
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 venues and anthologies. If it finds a home, we’d love to hear about it in the Coffeehouse! And if you choose to post it to your personal site or blog, you can share that link in the Coffeehouse as well.
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.
