(Whoops, I meant to post this earlier, but maybe someone is looking for a weekend writing exercise!)

from National Public Radio, Three Minute Fiction Round 5. Stories are due 11:59 PM Eastern time, this Sunday September 26th.

Our contest has a simple premise: Listeners send in original short stories that can be read in three minutes or less. We're looking for original work no longer than 600 words.

Each round, our judges throw out a challenge. This time, your story must begin with the line, "Some people swore that the house was haunted." It must end with, "Nothing was ever the same again after that."

About Our Judge, Michael Cunningham

Michael Cunningham is the author of the novels A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours (winner of a PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize) and Specimen Days. He lives in New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish his latest novel, By Nightfall, on Oct. 5.

The contest is open to legal residents of the fifty US states and the District of Columbia, but there's nothing stopping you from playing along at home if you wish! Complete rules, submission details, and more information available at the link above.

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If you've heard of something interesting and writerly going on in the real world, or you have something going on, yourself, feel free to share.

I had a thought!

Would anyone be interested in some sort of anonymized option for posting stories? I'll admit, this thought was inspired by fannish kink memes, but maybe some of you out there would like to test-run a new genre, or write something in a potentially-irritating style or what have you, in a space that's separated from your current following.

(Of course, you're also perfectly welcome to just make a new account and post the entry under that username, as people have done on the internet since the beginning of the internet.)

I'm interested in suggestions of options for allowing people to keep control over their words. I'd be happy to repost a story here for someone without their name attached (maybe with an agreement to leave it up for a month?) but there's also the option of hosting the story off-site somewhere under the author's control and discussing here. I think that published versions of google docs don't have account names attached to them? I'm sure there are other such options that I'm not aware of.

Or, if there's anything else I (or someone else!) can do to pique interest in posting or discussion: sound off!

I'm sure many of you are super-busy with all manner of writing things, but I looked up from the rock I've been living under and realized it's been... a while.

So. Whatcha doin'? Anything we can do to help? Want to cheer about how well your writing is going? (or complain about how it isn't?)