NYC Midnight 3rd Place Finish!

They sent out the results around midnight, New York time, because they’re called NYC Midnight. Being in Central Time, I’m usually still up at that hour, but it had been a long day.

So I woke up today to learn I’d placed third (of 4,300+ competitors) in NYC Midnight’s 100-word microfiction challenge:

What a thrill. I’ve been entering NYCM’s contests since 2019: short stories, screenplays, micro, flash, even rhyming stories. The prompts are always a fun challenge (especially never knowing which genre you’ll be assigned; talk about flexing your writer muscles), and the community forums are great. I’ve made it to the finals a handful of times but never placed until now.

The secret to my success? Writing while in the middle of doing other things, evidently. Of the 3 stories I wrote in the 3 rounds of this contest, I wrote the first at dawn in a hotel room at a waterpark before my kids woke up. The second, I submitted at the 11th hour from a bunk bed in my daughter’s bedroom, where I was sleeping due to house guest arrangements after her school play. And I wrote the last one in the car on the way from Tennessee to Carolina Beach, N.C., while staring out the window at kudzu (shout out to my husband, who drove and let me bounce ideas off him at the same time).

If you’re looking for a contest and you love horror, NYC Midnight is launching its first-ever Scary Story Challenge this October!