The Garden Brief
June Announcements
Good morning!
I know it’s May and graduations are abounding at the moment. I wanted to extend a congratulations to all the graduates reading this blog.
Continuing on the subject of graduations, we have decided on a theme for our short story contest this year.
This year we decided we wanted to try something different. Usually our short story contest gets announced at the beginning of December. We haven’t gotten enough submissions when we do that. I am assuming it is because that is finals time, details aren’t announced beforehand, and it all feels last minute.
This year we are announcing our details now. Today. First, we want to give you a bit of a timeline. We plan to open submissions around November and December. We highly encourage you to at least plan out your idea over the summer, so that you don’t get swamped at the end of the year.
We are thinking about having a contest for sharing our blog and sharing this short story contest. No finalized details, but we want this to be something shared across Substack. We would love to pull in other blogs and make this a community contest, meant to bring together readers. More details on what exactly this will involve will come later.
. . .
I know you want details…
Let’s get into them…
For this contest we are raising the maximum words allowed to 10,000. The minimum allowed is still 1,000. We figured a higher word count would work better for this theme.
Adults and youth will be judged together. If we get so many stories that we absolutely have to split them we will, but I know many of the writers on Substack are fantastic writers. I want to hold you all to the same standards. If you have an objection to that let me know, and we can talk about judging adults and youth differently. I do want to clarify that youth must be at least 13 to submit a story.
We are not limiting submissions to subscribers. I’d especially love subscribers to take part, but as I said earlier, I want this to be open to the community. Share this with your friends and your blog, encourage the community to participate.
Finally…
The theme we picked…
. . .
. . .
Graduation.
We want this to be incredibly open.
Write about what you’re going through as a graduate right now.
About what high school was like
About planning your future
About how you planned your future and God changed it
What you have done since graduation
A character you made up and their experiences to any of the above or below
College graduation
High school graduation
Middle school graduation
Going into high school after middle school
Going into college after high school
Going into the world after college
Anything related to graduation, even if it is just mentioned in passing.
Play with it. Since you get to know the theme now while graduations are finishing up, pull ideas from your friends and family, your grandparents, even your church leaders.
Let us know if you have any questions. More details and events to come.
On a smaller note, my friend Eleanor Bennett and her Substack: Eleanor's Substack just joined! She is just starting her blog, go on over and wish her luck and check out her posts.
See you next time,
Kenzi Ember