{"id":22595,"date":"2020-04-30T18:28:32","date_gmt":"2020-04-30T22:28:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=22595"},"modified":"2020-04-30T18:28:36","modified_gmt":"2020-04-30T22:28:36","slug":"a-new-writing-challenge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2020\/04\/a-new-writing-challenge\/","title":{"rendered":"A New Writing Challenge"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"has-drop-cap\">Details forthcoming, probably in a real post on Saturday. For now, though: I&#8217;ve entered a fiction-writing contest, the first round of which will take place next week. Stories to be submitted to the contest in each round will have to follow these rules:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>be of a fictional genre randomly assigned to each entrant by the contest organizers, from among this list: Action\/Adventure; Comedy; Drama; Fairy Tale\/Fantasy; Ghost Story; Historical Fiction; Horror; Romance; Romantic Comedy; Sci-Fi; and Suspense\/Thriller.<\/li><li>include a <em>word<\/em> randomly assigned by the organizers; <\/li><li>include an <em>action<\/em> randomly assigned by the organizers (this apparently will be loosely of the <strong><em>[verb]<\/em>ing a\/an\/the <em>[noun]<\/em><\/strong> format, <em>\u00e0 la<\/em> the old Mad Libs game); and<\/li><li>be no more than 100 words long.; <em>and<\/em><\/li><li>take no longer than 24 hours to write.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>It is, in short (ha!), a <em>micro<\/em>fiction-writing contest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>With the assistance of several Facebook contacts, I&#8217;ve come up with a list of 37 &#8220;actions.&#8221; I also used a random-noun generator page I found on the Web to give me a list of 50 nouns. Putting this together with the 11 possible genres, this yielded a total of  over 20,000 possible combinations. I then ran a little program to randomly select 1,000 from among all these possibilities, and you can find that list <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/l.facebook.com\/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fjohnesimpson.com%2Fimages%2Ffb%2FSelected%2520Microfic%2520Ideas%2520-%252020200430.xlsx%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR1P07BuHoMYL0yNxVxuYny2KNN8t-mShEWDcW-xr1skww174E0SQTRE8mg&amp;h=AT3Ny5vLiOlanuYCp91_IXmNyslJOReaMjBAyJvxnOURzOcUR4R5xpPKPwmO6yFYIgTWLTSnn6I24dmCa0LNGmyT2VCbQtQpz27gSomqa2yeRutZSiGiSgN1n0Qpun8&amp;__tn__=-UK-R&amp;c[0]=AT00cUP9OlCo2P4XzfOaYx4aefpc0e5yyFwTQLOErutuqsU6DSfYO3G8z0ABmDNNU-Qx6f0TPk2B-0GfW9GN3bwBsJjgPMEyPmq4KEuBDc5Jg5U4p5-pbjVktRpHxL8g09Yii5RGKLl0YHQlY2K573OoqyhJoVWvRZStPUWuSHyHYZmICJyDRQ\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a> (in the form of an Excel spreadsheet).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Of course the contest organizers will have their own lists of random words and actions &#8212; lists which they will not publish in advance &#8212; so this isn&#8217;t a real test. Nonetheless, I hope to <em>practice for<\/em> the first round, at least: every day, starting tomorrow, I&#8217;ll pull a randomly selected combination of those three main constraints from the list of 1,000 randomly selected possibilities. And I&#8217;ll write a 100-word &#8220;microfiction&#8221; based on it. And of course, I&#8217;ll post that little story here, together with the prompt which led to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(I will <em>not<\/em> post here the actual contest entries I may come up with, lest I run afoul of some little micro-rule or other designed to guarantee the contest rights to first &#8220;publication.&#8221;) <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We&#8217;ll see how this goes. Things being what they are, here and everywhere else right now, I may well opt to continue the experiment through the rest of May.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the meantime, expect my first practice story by tomorrow afternoon sometime. I anticipate no applause.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Details forthcoming, probably in a real post on Saturday. For now, though: I&#8217;ve entered a fiction-writing contest, the first round of which will take place next week. Stories to be submitted to the contest in each round will have to follow these rules: be of a fictional genre randomly assigned to each entrant by the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Daily Microfiction: 'A New Writing Challenge'","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5,4878,105],"tags":[298,4752,5121],"class_list":{"0":"post-22595","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-06_writing","7":"category-fiction","8":"category-short-fiction","9":"tag-writing-exercises","10":"tag-nyc-midnight","11":"tag-flash-fiction","12":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-5Sr","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22595"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22595\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22599,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22595\/revisions\/22599"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}