Wildflower Whispers
May Short Story Writing Contest
Hi Everyone! Ken here, I sent out our monthly announcement on Monday, but, since I forgot that I was posting until the last minute I didn’t manage to finesse all the details and rules for our writing contest. So, that’s what I’ll be doing today.
Due to school and general business of life, this is the first short story contest that we’re hosting in 2025. Our last one was during the month of December. Since it’s been a while since the last contest, I’m going to go over the general rules first.
Guidelines
Your story should be between 1,000 and 8,000 words. We prohibit swearing, graphic violence, and inappropriate themes. If you have any questions about if your story fits the guidelines feel free to reach out to
and I will be happy to let you know whether we can accept it. There are no major requirements for how your story should flow so feel free to be creative with this one. Adults are allowed to submit their stories, but if less than two adults enter, their stories will be judged with the rest. This contest will produce gold and silver winners. The gold winner will be offered a chance to be a guest author for the YA section, if declined it will go to the silver winner. Both gold and silver winners will have their story featured on the YA section.Whether we have bronze winners as well and how many guest author chances we give will also depend on how many entries we have. And on that note…
We do require a minimum of 4 contestants to enter. If there are less than 4 contestants, we will not announce winners. Please spread the news and share this contest with everyone you think would be interested in joining.
Theme
As I mentioned in our YA Brief our theme is Spring! This may feel a little bit like a stretch and possibly a little hard to write, so because of that we are going to give you a few examples and ideas for what we mean by spring.
The idea is to write something in the springtime of the year, or maybe something to do with new life, a fresh start, a love conquers all odds kind of thing. This is very generic, so we hope you have fun branching out, and we aren’t making the spring theme mandatory, although we’d prefer to stay away from some slightly darker stories.
As I mentioned in the paragraph above, Spring theme is not mandatory, because it can both be hard to write about and may be a little bit limiting. That being said, if you do have something fitting for the theme we’d love as many spring stories as we can get.
Given that we aren’t being strict about the theme, we’d love stories with the theme, but that will not be in our judging criteria. The first thing that will be taken into consideration is the quality of your writing, fairly simple so I’m not going to explain it. The second main thing that will be taken into consideration is how well you grab our attention and keep it. Does the story follow a good plotline? Does it all make sense? And does it make us want to keep reading? And for this specific contest, the third thing we will be judging based off of is, dark versus light. All I mean by that, is we want some lighter stories, not exactly fluffy, just not quite as harsh of a reality as some of the stories we had for our winter theme. Not super important, but we’d love a break from the harder stories, which does not mean your story shouldn’t have a moral story or something like that, just think something you’d read after reading a story that leaves you a bit sad. Anyways, I didn’t explain that amazingly, but hopefully you get the idea. If you’re still confused please just reach out to me and I will be happy to clarify, or you can leave a comment below and I’ll try to clarify it there.
Deadline
So, this post is going out on the 9th of May. That’s a bit later than I meant to send it out, if we left the deadline to stay at the end of May that would only be 3 weeks, and I don’t think that would be enough time for enough people to submit stories so we can properly judge. Because of that, we have decided to extend the deadline. The deadline will be June 7th, 11:59 your time. We will be slightly lenient with the times, but please try to have your story in on time. We will try to have the winners posted around the 14th of June. If there is any reason you may have to submit late, please send me a message letting me know so we can make arrangements and possibly still accept your story.
In case anyone wasn’t sure, this contest is open to all, subscribers and not, so share away!
We had a little trouble last time with figuring out who’s story belonged to who, so we are instituting 2 new rules.
The first one, make sure your name and title are at the top of your short story document submission. We need to be able to see your name and title on the document before we start reading. We also need an accurate word count, either at the end of the document or at the top, we don’t mind if it’s slightly over the 8k word count, we do mind if it’s under the 1k word count, since 1000 words is a relatively small number, we require that you have the minimum number, because otherwise it’s not really a story at all.
The second rule is that before or after submitting you must go on to your document and make it available for anyone with the link to view. If you would like to give us either commenting or editing permission that is also acceptable, but we must have viewing permission, and it is annoying to have to figure out who each story belongs to and then go ask them to allow us to read the story, since without being able to view the story we can’t actually see your name and see who we have to reach out to. We’ve had problems with this before, and that is the only reason we are making these rules.
We hope you all enjoy writing your stories for Wildflower Whispers. Once you’ve finished, you may submit your story using the form below. Please note that the form will ask for a link to your story. We request links to docs made using Microsoft Word, Google Docs, or something similar. Overall, make sure to have fun! Don’t forget that the deadline is June 7th at 11:59pm.
Thank you so much for reading and entering.
Ken
Hi, maybe this is an obvious question (sorry:) but can I enter even if I was the winner of the December contest? Thanks!
So excited! Thank you!