The big day is here! I’m thrilled to announce the winners of The Story Engine/The Shortest Story 100-word microfiction contest!
We are also hosting an appreciation thread on Facebook, where you can share your story in the comments and read other writers’ stories. I’ll explain more about this below!
The Winners
First, on behalf of the judges, let me say thank you so much for sharing your stories with us! We saw so many original takes on the prompt—tales that enchanted us, surprised us, and showed us characters and worlds we’ve never seen before. Narrowing the stories down was such a difficult task, and I’m personally grateful I had such a wonderful team of judges to work with.
These are the six stories we decided on after much consideration and multiple rounds of judging using the criteria we set out, but there are so many stories worth celebrating in the many entries we received!
Youth Category
- Winner: “The ritual of immortality” by Rebecca Harshman
- Runners-Up: “ERROR” by Jerry Li and “Another” by Nik Alderson
Adult Category
- Winner: “Curation” by Ari Switzer
- Runners-Up: “Up the Last Hill” by John Adams and “Summer Diary” by Daniel G. Fitch
The judges were really blown away by these stories. I’ve emailed the authors to ask for non-exclusive digital rights to publish the stories and share them with you as postcard stories in the style of stories I post on https://shorteststory.com.
If you’d like to read the stories when they have been designed and published, sign up for The Story Engine mailing list in the footer of the page or follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.
Sharing Your Stories
We received so many wonderful stories, and it was an incredibly difficult task to cut down to just six entries.
I've had some requests to share all the entry stories, but this is a little tricky given that I did not ask for publication rights as part of submissions. I wanted authors to retain rights to their stories and to be able to enter unencumbered. But I know many of you want a chance to share your phenomenal creative work!
I am inviting all entrants to share their stories in an appreciation thread on Facebook so you can see the many different approaches and creative approaches authors took.
The thread is here if you would like to share your work: https://storyenginedeck.com/shareyourstory
I'll try to get around to leaving comments on all the stories!
(If you no longer have a copy of your story, you may email me to request a copy of it!)
On behalf of the judges, let me say thank you for your stories and please keep on writing!