This Saturday (04/18/26) is WritersWeekly.com’s Spring, 2026 24-Hour Short Story Contest!

The topic (which is a BIG secret until start-time!) will be sent to all registered participants at 12:00 p.m. (noon) central time. Leading up to that, I’ll be frequently checking my email, looking for any questions writers have about the event. Inevitably, someone in another time zone gets confused about when the topic will be released. I’ve become very good at looking up different time zones on Google, and telling the participants at what time the topic will arrive in their inbox…in THEIR time zone.

After a few hours, the early birds will start submitting their stories. Some people write about the assigned topic, and submit their story in just a few hours. Others write, rewrite, revamp, edit, start all over, rewrite, edit some more, etc., and submit their stories at the last minute. Honestly, those stories tend to be better than the ones submitted after just a couple or few hours. But, we still judge all of them the same. The judges don’t know what time a story was submitted.

Each time someone submits their story, I send them a confirmation email, saying we received it. Needless to say, that means I’m online most of the weekend (except I do sleep on those Saturday nights). I then wake up with a TON of emails in my inbox. I admit that I do start reading stories right away, because I love to see in which direction each writer takes the assigned topic.

After the contest ends at 12:00 p.m. noon central time on Sunday, I will open all of the emails, and copy/paste all stories into one gigantic MSWord file for the judges. Those do NOT include the email headers so the judges don’t know in which order they were sent to us. I sort them by name, not by the date/time of submission. I then create a spreadsheet for the judges that is shared online (privately!) between us. Each row has the page number of the MSWord file where the story begins, and the story’s title. There is a box for us to put the score for each story.

We then read all of them, score each one 1 to 10, and then I re-read ALL of the stories that scored 8 to 10, and choose the top 3 winners and the honorable mentions. The judging process takes approximately six weeks, and it’s the funnest part of our jobs! 🙂

If you want to participate, sign up right away because only 500 participants are permitted for each contest.

• 1st Place wins: $300 plus a book publishing package from BookLocker valued at $975.
• 2nd Place wins: $250
• 3rd Place wins: $200
• Plus 100 Honorable Mentions. Those folks win a free ebook of their choice from BookLocker.com. 

This is our 27th year of hosting this extremely popular writing contest!!! 🙂

RELATED

• EPISODE 9 of the WritersWeekly Podcast: How to Win Writing Contests (and winners of the most recent 24-Hour Short Story Contest!) – Angela and Brian offer valuable advice on how to win writing contests, with a narrower focus on the best methods to win.
• All Past Contest Topics
• All Past Winning Stories (1st, 2nd, and 3rd place)
• TONS of Testimonials from Participants!
• Guidelines and Rules
• 14 Tips To Give Yourself A Leg Up In Writing Contests!