This weekend will be a wild one… spent mostly at home, brainstorming story ideas. I’ve got two competitions on deck: Writing Battle Winter 2025 starts tonight and the first Sci-Fi Shorts competition begins tomorrow. Both contests are prompt-based, with short time frames for writing the story. Each has a 1000 word limit (which translates to about 4 printed pages, double-spaced). Writing Battle allows 72 hours for writing; Sci-Fi Shorts gives 48. Not a lot of time to fiddle around — and you need to find your idea quickly if you want to have any time for edits and beta reads. Sci-Fi Shorts will be for Science Fiction and Fantasy stories — not sure how the prompts will look for that, but the genres are set in advance.

Writing Battle is a whole other story — the coolest thing about Writing Battle are the decidedly wacky prompts. Past genres I’ve written in include: Halloween Frights, Enemies to Lovers, Disaster, Sci-Fi Western, and Cozy Fantasy. (You also get assigned two other prompts, which can be a character, an object, or a location.) The fun part for me is figuring out how to write the story I want to write that still fits within the genre confines. Some were more successful attempts than others — and the genre debates on the forums can get wild! Still, by the end of the battle, I’ll have a brand-new story that wouldn’t have existed otherwise, plus a decent amount of feedback that I can use for refining the story before I sent it out for publication. It’s a lot of fun! If you enjoy writing, you should definitely check it out!