The Pete Wood Challenge is an informal ad hoc story-writing competition. Once a month Pete Wood
spots writers the idea for a story, usually in the form of a phrase or a
few key words, along with some restrictions on what can be submitted,
usually in terms of length. Pete then collects the resulting entries,
determines who has best met the challenge, and sends the winners over to
Bruce Bethke, who arranges for them to be published on the Stupefying Stories web site.
You can find all the previous winners of the Pete Wood Challenge at this link.
This
time the challenge was to write a flash fiction
piece keying off the phrase:
“[character]’s mother told [character] they needed to make new friends.”
As to be expected with a slow lob of a pitch like that, our writers belted it out of the park, with results ranging from amusing to disturbing. Without further ado, then, the winners are…
First Place: “Don’t Ignore Your Television’s Captioning” • by Carol Scheina
Second Place: “Honeybunny and the Embroidery Witch” • by Brandon Case
Third Place: “Literally” • by Yelena Crane
Honorable Mention: “Watch Over Me” • by Addison Smith
Honorable Mention: “It’s Alive!” • by Kimberly Ann Smiley
Thanks
to everyone who gave this challenge a try, and we look forward to
seeing what you can do next month, with the next Pete Wood Challenge!
If you like the stories we’re publishing, join our crowd-funding campaign today. We do Stupefying Stories out of pure love for genre fiction, but in publishing as in tennis, love means nothing. To keep Stupefying Stories going at this level we need to raise at least $500 USD monthly, and rather than do so with pledge breaks or foundation grants, we’d rather have broad-based and ongoing support. If just 100 people commit to donating just $5 monthly, we can keep going at this level indefinitely. If we raise more, we will pay our authors more.
If you really liked these stories, tell your friends about us! Remember, likes and hearts are nice, but shares and retweets boost the signal!
Find out what you’ve been missing!
Buy the three four latest issues on Kindle with just one click!
0 comments:
Post a Comment