I first heard about NYC Midnight from I Should Be Writing, a podcast hosted by Mur Lafferty. They pointed out that it’s a great resource for writers because you get to keep your own property. The writing is yours, and you get to keep it.
There are some constraints. For example, you can’t publish a story you’ve written for one of their contests until after a specified date. That is totally OK with me. They also distribute some of the money they receive to writing charities and resources, and you get to choose which categories you want to support.
They seem to be a totally awesome organization, and they have a good website. I wouldn’t call the website great (it’s a little 1985), but the organization behind it is something I believe in.
So, I thought I would enter one.
My first attempt did not go exactly according to plan. I entered that first contest, mulled too long, and missed the deadline. But because they allow late entries (though they’re not eligible for advancement), I still got feedback from the judges. So while I failed the first contest, I also succeeded.
Which was enough to go again.
Since then, I entered the Flash Fiction Challenge, mulled too long; the 500-word Challenge, mulled too long; and the Two-Story Writing Challenge. And there’s the upcoming Rhyming Story Challenge as well.
Eventually, I hope to get it right.
That’s why I decided to create a page specifically for writing challenges.
But not everything here will be a formal contest. A coworker once challenged me to write a parody song for her, like the ones I wrote about in my other two posts, The Story of Better Ground Roast and MP3 Brain: Permanently on Shuffle. She wanted a parody of Gerry Rafferty’s “Right Down the Line.” And while working that up, it turns out there’s a nice story attached to that.
She loved the song I wrote for her, so that belongs here too, along with the story.
This page is about what challenges me to write and what comes out of those challenges.
One other thing: this page is going to be organized by when the challenge happened, not necessarily by when I wrote the post about it. If I write something tomorrow about a challenge from last week, it will go near the top. If I finally get around to writing about something that happened back in February, it’s going down where February belongs.