I signed up for the NYC Midnight Short Story Challenge 2016 which kicked off last night. Well, technically at 1:29am this morning for us here in NL, but whatever. Participants have eight days to write a 2,500 word maximum story which much match a given genre and include a given subject and character. Mine are mystery, a cult, and a barista respectively.

I first stumbled across the NYC Midnight site last fall with its Flash Fiction challenge, giving you 48 hours to write a maximum of 1,000 words in a similar fashion, which I also entered. That one allowed participants to take place in two rounds, scoring points if your entries were in the top 15 of your group, then the top 3 people in each group went on to the third round, and then so many of those went on to the fourth and final round.

While I didn’t make it to the third round, I did get points in both my entries (the first one is here and second one here, for those interested), and a fair bit more for the second than the first. You also receive feedback on each entry too, which will also happen with this Short Story contest, which was nice.

With the additional time to write, I’m really hoping to put more into this attempt. Both of the 1,000 maximum word stories I entered before were basically done in half a day or so, due to my failure to schedule for each weekend. Both weekends I ended up going to St. John’s overnight on either Friday or Saturday and those days and nights were wasted, at least with respect to writing. That lead to the next morning being wasted too, by the time I woke up, had food, lollygagged around the city, etc.

I’ll be working during the week of course but I should still have ample time for writing, provided I make myself write. And hey, that’s why I have this blog, right? Even though this is a bigger goal, by 2.5x, I’ll have far more than 2.5x the time in which to write it, so it’s all good.

I popped into Carbonear to pick up a few things this afternoon, and a plot revealed itself to me while I was driving. Here’s hoping I can flesh it out into something interesting. Wish me luck!