I recently participated in the 11th Annual Short Story Challenge, sponsored by NYC Midnight. Each writer is given a prompt involving three elements: a genre, subject, and character assignment.

My genre was political satire (something I’ve not done before, and I wasn’t jumping for joy to be assigned it.) My subject was a loophole. My character was a bodyguard.

I tend to enjoy the creative challenge of responding to arbitrary parameters. The piece I ended up writing is called “How We Cured Racism.” I had 8 days to write it (a maximum of 2500 words) and uploaded it in time for the Contest’s first round deadline on January 28.

I’ll find out in March whether I will be selected to advance to the second round, which will require responding to new parameters and writing a piece at a maximum of 2000 words, but this time in only 2 days.

I hope I get to try the next round, as I found the first one stimulating and was pleased with the result. Currently, I’m revising the story and hope to start submitting it for publication soon. I’ll post more about the contest as soon as I hear anything.