This year I entered my first writing competition! I chose to jump into the NYC Midnight Short Story Competition 2020. I was super excited about it, partly because I thrive on external deadlines, but partly because it’s something I’ve never tried before. Read on for more about the competition and a link to my entry for Round 1!

Laura VanArendonk Baugh, a member of my crit group, #IndyScribes, mentioned the competition at one of our meetings. She had participated before and really enjoyed the challenge, and after hearing her talk about it, three more of us decided to sign up.

The competition started in January – everyone who registered was randomly assigned a genre, subject, and character to include in their 2500-words-or-fewer story, which they had eight days to write.

I’ve been working on a romantic suspense novel; Laura writes high fantasy; Chelsea had been working on dystopian YA; and James usually writes realistic fiction. We all agreed to give each other a quick beta-read once we’d gotten our drafts done, and waited with bated breath for the prompts to drop.

NYC Midnight assigned me a comedy about customer service, featuring a wedding planner. OK, I thought, I can work with that.

I was a little bit jealous of Chelsea’s spy fiction, retirement, a diving instructor, but she definitely took it in a really cool direction I never would’ve thought of. I loved Laura’s thriller, memory loss, a headhunter and Jim’s horror, a billboard, a backpacker, but I had so much fun with my comedy, customer service, wedding planner that I even let my very own mother read it. (Friends, I have not shared any of my writing with my mother since we abandoned the romance novel we were co-writing when I was in high school.)

She said it was “cute,” but as my (usually also very cute) kids were both attempting to be the center of attention during our video chat, I’m not sure what else she thought of it.

If you’re interested in reading it, you can find it on my Short Stories page (replacing the “nothing here yet” haiku that had been holding that page down since 2015!). Feel free to let me know if you think it’s “cute.”