NYC Midnight is a series of pay-to-play writing contests. The current contest (which just started May 30th) is flash fiction, which is often a go-to for me. Contestants are grouped and each group receives a genre, location, and object for their prompt, then you get 48 hours to write and submit a story of 1000 words or fewer.

As a general rule, I don’t do fee-based submissions, be that markets or contests. However, I discussed this contest at a con with a writer I respect. She had good things to say about NYC Midnight, particularly about the feedback it provided on every story submission. Being in an incredible sale drought, I thought some feedback might be nice, as might a little validation if I can get through a round or two of the contest. So, on my birthday, I decided to get myself a gift and join the contest.

I consider the fee an investment to help me decide about the contest’s value for myself. Is it worth participating? Is it worth the fee? Is the feedback valuable and/or worth more than a writing group’s feedback? Should I recommend it to people or warn them away? I won’t know unless I participate, so I did.

As a member of Codex Writing Group (a speculative fiction writers’ group for writers with professional sales or major workshop experience), I get to take part in a flash fiction contest every January. I’m up against writers with significant writing chops and accomplishments there. I usually hold my own. I’m hoping for similar results in this contest, but I’m not holding my breath for prizes.

So how’s it going so far? It’s been interesting. I have written and submitted my first story. The submission format was a little odd, requiring a title page and synopsis instead of a more typical manuscript format. It took about 30 minutes to be sure I was doing it right. And Now I get to wait until the end of July for results and comments. I guess I should have looked at that closer, because that seems like a long wait. The Codex contest, by comparison, had a similar prompt-to-submission window and gave only to the end of the week to judge. In the early years, that could be a lot of stories to read, rate, and comment on. Now they’ve made groups (not unlike NYC Midnight’s) so it’s more manageable, but still 12-20 stories to handle. The groups for this contest are reportedly about 35 stories.

I don’t want to give away my prompt completely since I’m not sure what the privacy rules are (I looked at them but don’t recall), but I’ll tell you my genre: Political Satire. Yeah…I’m a sci-fi/fantasy guy. Their examples of political satire included 1984, Wag the Dog, and SNL political sketches, the first of which definitely gave me permission to do something science-fictiony. The location and object kind of felt like they were steering toward a specific type of story, possibly with a specific political slant. I didn’t really take the bait on that.

I found this story challenging to write, a fact not helped by being at my parents’ house to celebrate my dad’s 75th birthday while I wrote it. I had 3-4 false starts before getting an actual story written. I didn’t like it, so I wrote another full story. Of course I didn’t like that one either, so I went back to the first full. At this point I had maybe 2 hours to the deadline.

I monkeyed with the story for a half hour or so before I started to feel confident in it. Then I went and looked up the submission process and checked the FAQs. Yeah…my order could have been better.

The FAQs were the scary part. The story is required to have the prompted location as its primary setting. Okay, I had noticed that part earlier, so I had written it so that the physical setting used was indeed the one in the prompt…unless you consider an online application a setting, because that was where the story was really happening. So maybe that was a stretch. What did the FAQs say about that? That my story might be disqualified if I didn’t use the location sufficiently. Ooh boy. And what else did they say? That the object in the prompt has to be physically in the story or referred to in a story-in-a-story kind of way (like a bowl of porridge if a character recited the tale of Goldilocks). Did I do that? Well…not exactly. I took liberties with both setting and object. The object was part of the title and came up repeatedly, but was that prompt-object supposed to be physically present in the prompt-location? No. And that’s another story-might-be-disqualified offense, depending on the generosity of the reviewer.

So yeah, this might be a big fat DQ for the bargain price of $58 (I missed the early registration window). Did I get a marketable story out of it? Maybe. I definitely know of a couple markets that I could send it to, but it may or may not fit their preferences. It’s a weird little story with a very weird format, basically designed as if interacting with an A.I. In my world, stretching the limits of the prompt is a positive. We’ll see if NYC Midnight lives in that world too.

Now I wait to see how this went. Did it get disqualified? Did it pay off setting it in a future with a crisis that isn’t actually a current or even predicted crisis? Were they impressed with my creativity? With my writing at all? Check back and find out. For now, all I can tell you is that the contest format was a little different than I’d anticipated and the rules are making me a little nervous. But at least I wrote a thing. (Technically two things, though I disliked the second), and that ain’t nothing.