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yeah write #185 weekly writing challenge: challenge winners

by | Oct 31, 2014 | Fiction|Poetry, Microprose, Nonfiction, Winners, YeahWrite | 4 comments

[vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″][vc_column_text]BOO! (tee hee) I’ve been waiting all month to do that, although I’m kind of sad I have to take my unicorn costume off tomorrow. But never mind about that now. It’s still today!

This was another great week at yeah write weekly writing challenge. There were two virgins in the competition, welcome! And thanks to all of our returning writers and editors for participating!

You might have noticed, we’re totally excited about Halloween around here. Our editorial staff is all dressed up and ready to hand out staff picks to the trick or treaters on all three grids today, so if you see your name in there, run over to the sidebar, ring the doorbell, and grab your staff pick badge. It’s better than candy! (Mmmm, candy.) The rest of you little tricksters can keep scrolling down to see the voting results.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]

Yeah write #185 editorial staff pick: nonfiction

The Angel of the House Has Left the Building by Lisa

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At medieval feasts a sotletie, or subtlety, was often served between courses. This dish was the cook’s means of showing off, and featured foods prepared to look like heraldic creations or other foods, such as piping eggshells full of almond paste and nesting them in gilded marzipan “twigs.” Lisa has given us a subtlety of words this week in The Angel of the House Has Left the Building. Every time you think you’ve grasped what story she’s telling she strips away another layer to reveal a different story, until at the heart she tells us that the story, like its characters, has slowly been worn away to invisibility with each reveal. What’s left is heartbreak and a sense of inevitability.
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Yeah write #185 editorial staff picks: fiction|poetry challenge

Where is it? by Jan

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“Where is It?,” a short story by Jan of Red’s Wrap, is part-Gaslight, part-The Shining, and all about obsession. This claustrophobic piece starts out with a wide-lens view of all the places that creatures can hide in a house, delivered in the second-person POV. The POV then narrows to the first-person, with the anxious narrator zooming in on an imagined heartbeat coming from the kitchen walls. Jan skillfully layers clouded mysteries – is the narrator male or female, crazy or sane? – on top of exquisite details. Chewed edges, christening ribbons, photos of a picnic, the hairs of one’s nostril—these details invite us to imagine the narrator’s obsessive thoughts nervously ticking away behind the words.
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Untitled by Thom

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The tone in Thom’s untitled piece is a roller coaster: grog, fear, tenderness, dread, then finally relief. With the opening of a door, what seemed to be an odd ghost story is suddenly a tale about loving another person. Due to its form, I’m not sure if this piece is a poem or a short story, but I am sure of the love Paul felt when he got out of bed and took Darlene in his arms. 
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Yeah write #185 editorial staff picks: microstories challenge

Confessions by Angie

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With all the Halloween hype, the spooky creatures wandering around, the monsters in our heads and under our beds, it’s easy to overlook the fact that you don’t need to go overboard with gory images to create a lonely and eerie scene. Angie does this beautifully in her poem Confessions. With one small thump she demonstrates how the death of a marriage is simultaneously mundane and horrific. She sets the scene, shows us what’s happening, and only in the last moment tells us why it’s important. As far as wordsmithing goes, I especially loved the concept of “words scatter[ing] around the stick shift.” It’s a lovely, evocative phrase that nicely symbolizes the shattering of their relationship.
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Jack by Silverleaf

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A jack-in-the-box can be both delightful and frightening. Silverleaf’s microstory about one is also both. At first I felt sad for Jack, forgotten on the shelf. Then, POP! Silverleaf hints at the sinister as Jack calls to the child to set him free. Will it be all fun and games? That’s left up to the reader to decide.
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[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″][vc_column_text]Congratulations to this week’s winners! If you earned the highest number of votes in either challenge, you are this week’s crowd favorite. If you came in second or third, you get top row honors along with the crowd fave. Grab your winner’s badge from our sidebar!

Looking for your badge? Now that all our writers are under one roof, we’re sharing our badges as well as our drinks. That’s right: fiction|poetry, nonfiction and microstories have the same badges. It doesn’t clutter up our sidebar, and they’ll still look pretty on yours!

Everybody: before you go, please take some time to leave your favorites a little love in the comments.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

Weekend moonshine grid opens today at 6 p.m. eastern time

Egads, is it finally Friday? That means it’s time for our weekend community to open up and let practically every one in town have a seat at the bar. BYOB, bring your own water, bring your own non-commercial story. Natalie, our fiction co-editor is the fictional bartender, and this week she’s serving up candy corn martinis. Mmmm (Wait, I hate candy corn).  [That’s ok, I love candy corn enough for all of us. -RG]  Join her at the moonshine grid. She has something for everyone.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″][vc_column_text]

Challenge grid final results:

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4 Comments

  1. Jen
    Jen on [Fri] 31 Oct 14 at 12:00 pm

    I loved the stories this week! So fun, thanks all and Yeah Write editors! Happy Halloween!

  2. TNKerr
    TNKerr on [Fri] 31 Oct 14 at 11:08 am

    So – If my experience is representative of others, then everyone had a helluva good time this week. Thanks so much one and all!

    • TNKerr
      TNKerr on [Fri] 31 Oct 14 at 11:09 am

      … and have a great Halloween!

  3. Jan Wilberg
    Jan Wilberg on [Fri] 31 Oct 14 at 10:55 am

    Good morning and thank you! Your prompts are always the best. Simple but super challenging. Your critique is a little writing course – pointing out stuff that never occurred to me. So valuable. I am a really major Yeah Write fan.

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