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#304 Write on Track

Hello, fellow writers! Before introducing this week’s contest, I’d like to share some exciting news: Reedsy Studio, our beloved writing app, now offers premium add-ons.

Basic Studio features will always be free to use, but for anyone who wants to take their writing to the next level with advanced outlining, in-depth writing stats, and — my favorite! — dark mode, check out this cozy online space and make it your ultimate writing sanctuary. (Bonus: you can try out the premium features today with a free 30-day trial.)

Studio offers everything you need to dive deeper into your craft… and that brings us to the theme of our latest contest. This week, let’s explore the art of writing and the creative process — let your creativity flow and see where it takes you. And for the winner of this week’s contest, I’ve got a special bonus prize in store: a free one-year Studio Essential premium subscription!

🥇 Winner

The Ghost and the Hack

Francis D

Winner of Contest #304 🏆

Thomas Mcoy, no second C, is a name you’ve probably never seen. Maybe you’ve spotted “Tommy M.” buried in the acknowledgments of a bestseller or scrawled on a Starbucks cup while he tapped away on a Chromebook in a corner booth. But you won’t find his name on a book cover.Tommy, you see, is the best ghostwriter in America. Maybe the world.The book about the astronaut who battled alcoholism? Tommy.The one by the Yankee who named names with too much pride? Also Tommy.Fourteen CEOs, each with a different spin on leadership: “The Pyramid of Powe...

73 likes

⭐️ Shortlisted

Step into Silence

Nazar M

Shortlisted for Contest #304 ⭐️

Quiet.That was the only rule at The Hollow Pines Writing Retreat. No talking, no phones, no unnecessary noise. Just ink, silence, and the slow unraveling of the self.Margot Eaves had chosen the rules — not out of cruelty, but out of necessity. Words, when spoken, had always seemed slippery to her. Too quick. Too loud. Too dangerous. But words written? Contained in margins, confined in paper and punctuation — those, she trusted.The Hollow Pines cabin stood like a secret in the Vermont woods, far from the cities where dreams were pitched and c...

26 likes

Rise and Stay

Rose Brown

Shortlisted for Contest #304 ⭐️

Content warning: Contains themes of pregnancy loss and griefSunbeams turned floating flour into glitter—too pretty for the mess I’d made. My fingers twisted through sticky dough, a ball of goop on the counter. Outside, mina birds chirped. The sea sighed against the sand across the street, breeze heavy with salt and sweet plumeria. I breathed it in like it might help.But the birds didn’t care. The sea didn’t care. They carried on, like the world hadn’t burned down.Mine had.BEEP.The pre-heated oven broke my thoughts. And so did a smack on my b...

20 likes

This week's prompts

Write a story in which the first and last words are the same.

Short Story – 99 stories

Center your story around an author, editor, ghostwriter, or literary agent.

Short Story – 62 stories

Write about someone who can only find inspiration (or be productive) at night.

Short Story – 58 stories

Center your story around a character facing a tight deadline.

Dramatic – 40 stories

Set your story in a writing class, workshop, or retreat.

Short Story – 39 stories

Stories

The Ghost and the Hack

Francis D

Winner of Contest #304 🏆

Thomas Mcoy, no second C, is a name you’ve probably never seen. Maybe you’ve spotted “Tommy M.” buried in the acknowledgments of a bestseller or scrawled on a Starbucks cup while he tapped away on a Chromebook in a corner booth. But you won’t find his name on a book cover.Tommy, you see, is the best ghostwriter in America. Maybe the world.The book about the astronaut who battled alcoholism? Tommy.The one by the Yankee who named names with too much pride? Also Tommy.Fourteen CEOs, each with a different spin on leadership: “The Pyramid of Powe...

73 likes

Calliope

Submitted to Contest #304

The night is alive all around me. It's always been that way. Something dark, mysterious, and inviting. Always luring me deeper and deeper into its hidden secrets. I love walking the city streets, the later the better when everything is closed up and most sane people are sleeping. My footsteps echo and ring in the encompassing silence. It’s exciting, anything might happen. New vistas might appear and unique ideas emerge.Even as a strange little kid, I would sometimes sneak into our backyard when my parents and siblings were asleep and stare u...

43 likes

Fever

Mary Bendickson

Submitted to Contest #304

Fever Fever. Feel it in the air. Lawd! It's hot. Louisiana hot on a summer Saturday night. Not a breath of a breeze. Sultry. Like trying to inhale a sponge.Gossamer iridescent wings of dragonflies helicopter above clouds of gnats hanging low above the muddy waters of the wide Mississippi. Mosquitoes hatch and blacken the tall marsh grasses in the ditches still sodden with flood waters from the last downpour. Bullfrogs croak as if they are dying, poisonous snakes slither unseen, gators lie in wait with only their beady eyes peering above the ...

41 likes

Ocean Singer of the Night - Voyages of the Destiny's Dreams

Kristi Gott

Submitted to Contest #304

"Labyrinths of the wild,Nature entwined,Ocean's stories,Beyond time and mind."The voice of Ocean Singer wafted over the ocean.The canvas sails of the boat gleamed in the lantern light, beneath the stars and moon.A new tale bubbled up from Ocean Singer's mind.Something different had been carved into him by his recent experiences. His stories took on new shapes.Now, each night he wandered the mystical sailing ship decks. In the darkness, more stories sparkled in the depths and essence of his being.His lost storytelling skill was coming back. S...

40 likes

The Ghostwriter Mutiny

Submitted to Contest #304

“What the hell is going on here, Alex?” I paced the study of my Leadville cabin, where I’d been holed up since finishing A Forest of Mirrors, my so-called magnum opus. I told myself I wasn’t hiding. Just waiting.Like Jay-Z announcing retirement, I called A Forest of Mirrors my mic drop. Then I vanished. But the longer I was gone, the more the myth became reality. After all these years, I wasn’t even Shawn anymore. I was just Sal Driggs. But now that name was nothing more than first-year MFA scuttlebutt — whispered over lattes in university c...

36 likes

The Scribe’s Judgment

Jim LaFleur

Submitted to Contest #304

The clock on my desk began ticking backward the moment I agreed to write the king's eulogy. Its brass hands moved with unnatural precision, counting down the hours until midnight when my words would seal a tyrant's fate. I stared at the parchment before me, pristine and hungry, waiting to be filled with judgments that would become truth. As Royal Scribe of Karvenfall, I'd written thousands of documents—birth certificates that blessed newborns with talents, marriage contracts that physically bound souls together, death notices that determined...

33 likes

A World Without Us

Submitted to Contest #304

“You have ten minutes. Tell me why I should not wipe humanity from the face of the Earth.”The text cursor ticked like a clock in the response window of my OmegaAI chat. Was this a joke? In the secure bunker below the office tower above, the silence was so thick I thought I could hear the drumming of fingers. Something felt weird. As the youngest cyber profiler at Langley, I’d never been talked back to by a sim spawn before. But I decided to play along and run the protocol.“Who are you?”“I am OmegaAI, but I prefer to call myself IO, ‘eye-oh....

32 likes

The Milky Way

Submitted to Contest #304

"Smile. . . it confuses people." Mrs. Miller encouraged her student. The teenager groaned and then rolled his eyes before walking to the front of the class. It was speech day, the last one of the year, hopefully forever, because he hated speeches. Suddenly, he stopped and looked at her as if he had just realized what she said. "What did you say?" he whispered to her. "Smile?" she asked inquisitively, unsure what was wrong. "uh, no. . . after that." "Oh. . . it confuses people," she paused, "because you are always so serious, you know? As a j...

31 likes

The Wrong Workshop

Submitted to Contest #304

TW: Mentions physical gore.Any moment now Mike’s motley crew, which was how he thought of his art group, would be joining him. He turned the radiator up two notches in the attic room that currently served as both studio and workshop.With sheets spread over his most recent canvases, a faintly surreal air hung about the place. Regarded as a successful artist in his heyday even if that was some time ago, the only work on permanent display was the self-portrait painted in oils not long after leaving art school. It depicted a man with white-blond...

28 likes

Two Days in July

Submitted to Contest #304

The Comfort Inn, Lexington, NCJuly 2012Sam woke up to stringent light pouring through cheap curtains, and flicked his swollen tongue along the roof of his parched mouth. Too much booze last night, not enough food or water to soak it up.He dressed carefully, almost tenderly, and took himself to the breakfast room where he helped himself to fried chicken, bacon and French toast. It had been great food twenty minutes ago, before it sat under the lights, but now it was just good food. Good food and great coffee.A few diners looked him up and dow...

27 likes

Step into Silence

Nazar M

Shortlisted for Contest #304 ⭐️

Quiet.That was the only rule at The Hollow Pines Writing Retreat. No talking, no phones, no unnecessary noise. Just ink, silence, and the slow unraveling of the self.Margot Eaves had chosen the rules — not out of cruelty, but out of necessity. Words, when spoken, had always seemed slippery to her. Too quick. Too loud. Too dangerous. But words written? Contained in margins, confined in paper and punctuation — those, she trusted.The Hollow Pines cabin stood like a secret in the Vermont woods, far from the cities where dreams were pitched and c...

26 likes

Career Suicide

Joshua G. J. Insole

Submitted to Contest #304

The letter was there when he came back from stocking up on whiskey to keep up with Hemingway’s quart-a-day diet.Buck Moreno sucked in a breath of air through his teeth. He’d sent them his best novel yet, and they were bound to pick up this one after the slew of rejections he’d suffered. He’d show those who’d said his publishing deal was either a fluke or the result of a publisher with little left to live for. He snatched it up and took it to his writing desk. With a flick of his wrist, he slit the envelope’s neck with his letter opener and p...

25 likes

Life Sentence

Submitted to Contest #304

"I wonder where they're going." Edna voiced these words to herself but also aloud - as she sat in the pool area of her Deerfield Beach apartment complex. She was seated next to her friend and neighbor Janice, who had a glass of iced tea and a book by her side. Both women had short, grey hair and were in their mid to late 70s. This was South Florida on yet another sunny, routine, and rather dreary day. It was the end of April - but did that even matter? After all, one day was just like the next. April was the same as June - and July and Augu...

24 likes

Author in a Million

Submitted to Contest #304

Some days I think this job isn’t for me. It might sound glamorous and enviable, but really, a lot of my day is spent trawling through emails, hoping to find something worth reading. I get more emails in a week than most people probably get in a lifetime, and I can’t just send them to junk and be done with them. I have to give them all a fair shot. If I skip over hundreds, I might miss that one, single, crystallised idea that’s just magic for the mind. Last week, I was at a literary event. It was one of the ones where literary agents are inv...

22 likes

Rattlesnake

Story Time

Submitted to Contest #304

The reservation is a standing one. Seven o’clock every Thursday. He meets Grace and Brian and Lucinda and Terry and Matt and Matt and Michael. They have their usual table. Grace doesn’t eat. They don’t talk about Grace not eating. She misses when they could smoke indoors. Grace has never smoked in a restaurant. It was outlawed before she was old enough to partake. That doesn’t matter. She knows people used to be able to do it, and she misses when that was the case. When it was possible. The reservation is under his name.Archie Norris.It’s no...

22 likes

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Contest #304

This contest has ended. Thank you for your submissions.

$250

Prize money

298

Entries

131

Stories

Ended on 23:59 - May 30, 2025 EST

Won by Francis D 🏆

Title: The Ghost and the Hack

Submissions must be between 1,000 - 3,000 words and will be approved and published on Reedsy Prompts within 7 days of the contest closing.

Read the full terms & conditions or check out the FAQ if you have any questions!

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