Hi all,
This week I’m going to talk about a monthly writing challenge I usually take part in, called Furious Fiction. I was introduced to this by the chairman of my writing group. He sends the email around each month and we can participate and share our stories if we want to. I try to take part as much as I can, though sometimes because of NaNoWriMo or not being able to come up with an idea for the prompt I don’t contribute.
First off, what is Furious Fiction?
It is a writing challenge that launches on the first weekend of each month. On the Friday, an email is sent out with the prompts and you need to squeeze it into 500 words. They usually supply a few words that have to be in your story as well as another challenge. This month’s was to write a story in the middle of something. I went with the middle of a trial, which Bastet has to complete without being killed by a zombie lioness.
The email goes out on Friday and you have 55 hours to write your story and submit it. The ones who manage the challenge are Australian, so you have to go by Australian time to submit it before the deadline. They have a countdown on their website when the challenge is live which is really handy to keep track of how much time you have left!
So far all of the stories that I have written for this challenge have been set in the Curse of Anubis universe. Two have been in Bastet’s perspective, while the others have been various unnamed characters that kick off certain events of the story. I’m hoping to get these stories submitted to anthologies instead of collecting them together for the Curse of Anubis Short Story Collection. There are other stories that I want to write for that book, but Furious Fiction really helps with getting other ideas out.
I’ve participated in a few of their challenges and I find them all really fun, it’s a good way to flex your writing muscles and write on a strict deadline. Some of the words that you have to add in can sometimes be hard to work in too, so it takes a lot of thinking.
I love participating in this challenge and a lot of the members of the writing group that I’m a part of write stories for it too. It’s really interesting to see what others come up with the same prompts and deadline. I’m going to try to participate as much as possible, even if I don’t win! The winner and the shortlist entries are all displayed on their website once all the entries have been read. The winner receives $500.
That’s it for this week, I hope you enjoyed reading! See you next week.
