5MinuteFiction

 Yes! This is the place! I’m guest hosting this week. Tonight you’ll see my usual SciFi Question of the Day post (With a cute pic of Nathan Fillion in a kilt!) Tuesday morning I’ll re-post another version of this post so people know they have the right place. Then at promptly 8:30 east coast time (that’s 5:30 to folks in California) I’ll post the prompt. I don’t use a capcha code for comments, but I do approve each entry. I’ll be watching as entries come in, and your comment should appear no less than a minute after hitting “enter.”

Any questions? You can find me on both Gmail and twitter as USNessie

See you tomorrow night, right here!

Welcome to 5 Minute Fiction!

This adrenaline-fueled, instant-gratification writing contest pits your writing skills against the clock. The challenge: Check out the prompt (which will appear on this site on every Tuesday at 8:30 pm EST and spend five minutes writing the most brilliant thing ever. You have an additional ten minutes to accommodate the vagaries of relative time, technology, and the fickle internets.

NOTE: This is not the page where the contest prompt appears, nor where you submit your entry. Look on the main page. A new entry will appear at 8:30pm EST.

The rules:

• Your entry must contain the prompt.
• You can write anything: any style, any genre, poetry or prose.
• Post your entry in the comments of this post no later than 8:45 pm EST.

What happens then?
The weekly judge will sweat over all the entries and choose his or her five favorites, which will be announced around 10pm EST. Then it’s up to you: vote in the finalists’ poll. The winner, announced at 9:00 pm EST on Wednesday (the next day), takes all! In this case, all means intense pride and the adulation of all the participants.

A Few Notes:

• In the interest of time and formatting, it’s best to type straight into the comment box or notepad. It’s also smart to do a quick highlight and copy before you hit “post” just in case the internets decide to eat your entry. If your entry doesn’t appear right away, email me. (This week, email USNessie, NOT Nicole!)
• I reserve the right to remove hate speech or similar but I’m not too picky about the other stuff.
• This is all for fun and self-promotion. So be sure to put your twitter handle at the end of your post and a link to your blog if you have one.

History: 5 Minute Fiction was hatched by writer Leah Petersen in 2010. After almost two years of managing the contest, she passed the torch to Nicole Wolverton in February 2012.