One thing we don't see as often in poetry anymore is the epic. Back in the good old days, poets would dash off epics left and right, but the trend seems to have dwindled as of late. So, we're bringing it back in style: if you haven't guessed yet, this month you'll be writing an epic!

There's no shortage of ways to write epics, so we're going to narrow it down a bit to something called "heroic verse." For the purposes of this contest, your epic poem will be:

• A narrative
• In rhyming couplets (each pair of lines must rhyme)
• In iambic pentameter (each line contains 5 iambic feet... read more about this at poetry boot camp)
• Between 1000 and 2000 words (because we don't have time to read 100 Iliads!)

And since epic poems are epic in scope, this month's contest will be epic in length and epic in prizes. Entries are due by June 30, 2009, and first place scores $100!

We love flash fiction: it's fast, it's fun, and it forces you to get really creative. So guess what? This month's contest is all about flash fiction, and the theme is "the forest." Easy as that! Submit a piece of fiction under 1000 words featuring a nice green and foresty theme and show us what you've got!

November is here, and you know what that means... it's NaNoWriMo time!

If you're participating this year, we know you're going to be scribbling frantically trying to finish your novel, so we thought, "Why not let our authors submit the start of that novel to our next contest?"

Genius, we know. But if you're not participating in NaNoWriMo, never fear—you can still enter the November contest!

To enter the November writing contest, submit the first chapter (or first 4,000 words, whichever comes first) of a longer piece of fiction. If it's part of your NaNoWriMo work, then awesome, but it doesn't have to be—it can be anything you feel like writing.

Now enough dilly-dallying—you've got 46,000 words left to write!

December is here, and that means NaNoWriMo is finishing up. Congratulations to everyone who participated! We figured that after cranking out 50,000 words in just 30 days you'd be a little tired of writing prose. So to give you a little variety, this month's contest is a poetry contest.

Have you heard of a rondeau? Until last month, we hadn't either. Then a friend of ours pointed us to a few rondeaus. The simple lyricism stuck with us, and we decided right then to make it the feature of our next contest.

A rondeau is a poem of thirteen lines of eight syllables (A and B), plus two lines of four syllables (C, for a total of fifteen lines), split into three stanzas. The C lines are special—they're what's called the refrain. This means that both of your C lines must match the first four syllables of your first A line. Confused? Take a look at this sample (shamelessly stolen from Wikipedia), with the refrains in bold:

We Wear The Mask, by Paul Laurence Dunbar
A We wear the mask that grins and lies,
A It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
B This debt we pay to human guile;
B With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
A And mouth with myriad subtleties.

A Why should the world be over-wise,
A In counting all our tears and sighs?
B Nay, let them only see us, while
C We wear the mask.

A We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
A To thee from tortured souls arise.
B We sing, but oh the clay is vile
B Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
A But let the world dream otherwise,
C We wear the mask!

Got it? So put it all together, and the rhyme scheme looks like this:

Stanza 1: A A B B A
Stanza 2: A A B C
Stanza 3: A A B B A C

As you can see, it's only fifteen lines, so your poem will be short. The trick is in finding rhymes for the A lines; rhyming 8 out of 15 lines without sounding repetitive is tricky!

You can learn more about the rondeau (and read some samples) at Wikipedia entry. Good luck!

Halloween is one of our favorite holidays, so when October rolls around we get pretty excited! In keeping with the spooky spirit, this month's contest is all about scary stories.

This month we'll be accepting horror stories. Warm up those word processors and write something that'll give us the chills! Submit your best horror or Halloween-themed story to enter this month's contest. Check below for rules and submission details.