As we were lounging about the Scribo-castle pondering our next writing contest (steins of mead in hand, of course), we realized that in the two-and-some years Scribophile's been around, the one kind of contest we haven't had yet is a fantasy writing contest. It's time to fix that!

Introducing the Swords and Sorcery contest, the contest where we get to read your fantasy short stories. Break out your maces, axes, and hammers, polish your claymores, dust off your wands, put on your robes and wizard hats, get the elves drunk, grease up the dwarves for battle, and write the best damn fantasy short story you can!

Submit your under-3000-word fantasy-themed short stories before August 15 to be considered. Have fun, and who knows, maybe we'll see the next Lord of the Rings come from a Scribophile...

Art is often influenced by other art, and the art of writing is no exception. Have you heard of a kind of poem called ekphrasis? No? Then you might be surprised to learn that some of the English language's most famous poems are ekphrasis: Ode on a Grecian Urn, Elegaic Stanzas, and Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, to name just a few.

Ekphrasis is a poem describing or meditating on an existing work of art: a painting, a sculpture, a building, and so on. It can range from being a graphic description to an abstract reflection and everything in between.

To enter this month's contest, compose an ekphrasis of under 600 words. You can pick any visual work of art to be the subject of your poem, but it has to be real—no making up paintings! While you could write an ekphrasis about something non-visual, for this contest you must be able to see your subject (so you can't write about a poem or a song). Bonus points if you include a link to a picture of your chosen artwork in your work description.

It's a new year and a new decade, just the perfect time to make some fresh starts.

We hope your new year's resolution is to write more—and in that spirit, this contest has some awesome prizes to get you motivated!

Write a short story (under 3000 words) featuring the theme "new beginnings." The first place winner will receive a $100 Amazon.com gift card and a credit for 3000 words of editing service from the great folks at Elite Editing. 2nd place will receive a $50 Amazon.com gift card.

Happy new year, and good luck!

November is coming up, and you know what that means: warm up your word processors, refill your fountain pens, gnaw at your pencils, sharpen your quill nubs, and set the espresso machine to overdrive because it's NaNoWriMo time!

It's that magical time of year where writers from all over the world hunch down in their favorite writing corners to produce a 50,000 word novel. Some will succeed, some will fail, but most everyone should be able to get Chapter 1 done—and that brings us to this month's contest!

Submit the first chapter of the NaNoWriMo novel you're writing to enter our NaNoWriMo '09 writing contest. It won't be your best work ever (after all, 50,000 words in 30 days is a lot to write), but that's the point. We want to see your raw, unedited writing. Everyone will be on the same playing field, so don't be shy—let's see what you've got. Good luck!

We'll admit it: we're huge Star Trek nerds. One of our favorite characters is Data, an android who spends much of the series lamenting his lack of human emotion. After watching Data bumbling through a few episodes last month (beer and nostalgia always make for an interesting combination), we were struck with inspiration for our next writing contest.

The theme for this contest is "Computer Love" (and we don't mean the Kraftwerk song). Write an original science fiction short story, under 3000 words, that features some kind of mechanical construct—a computer, a robot, an android, a spaceship, whatever you can imagine—and the greatest of human emotions: love. As long as you've got those two things, the rest is up to you!

Entries are due by September 30, 2009, and first prize is a $100 Amazon.com gift card. Get your word processors warmed up, and good luck!

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.

We think it's about time for another poetry contest!

Wow us with your verse, rock us with your rhythm, dazzle us with your diction—whip up the best poem you can, any subject, any form, and submit it by October 7. We'll accept any poem up to 500 words. Check below for rules and submission details.

We here at Scribophile are big Battlestar Galactica fans (check if out if you haven't seen it!), and with this season over, we've been craving some great science fiction.

Are you the next Arthur C. Clarke? The next Robert Heinlein? Vernor Vinge? Dan Simmons? Then show us your stuff! We're accepting the best sci-fi short stories you can throw at us—anything between 1000 and 4000 words, as counted by us—through August 31.

Our last few contests have been relatively structured—we've asked for submissions that fit a particular mold. So for the July contest, we decided to go with the laid-back spirit of summer and let everyone do their own thing (well, sort of).

The July contest is a poetry contest with a very broad theme—and when we say "broad," we mean it. The theme is "questions," and we'll accept any kind of poetry you can throw at us. Free verse, sonnet, epic, haiku, or clerihew... show us what you've got, but stick that theme in there somewhere! Oh, and there's a maximum of 1000 words—because sometimes brevity is the soul of wit.

Pretty simple, huh? We want to see what your creative brains and mighty pens can come up with!

Lately we've been digging in to some classic mysteries—Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Sam Spade, and the rest. We love a good mystery, and nothing's quite as gripping as the first chapter to a mystery novel. Everything's set up—the scene, the characters, and the crime—and you can't help but want to read more.

In that vein, we want you to write a mystery! But not a whole mystery... that'd take more than a month for sure. We just want to see the first chapter of your mystery. We want to be tantalized by your characters and intrigued by your case—and you've got at least 2000 and at most 5000 words to do it in!

We're geared up to read a little poetry for this month's contest. Some of our previous poetry contests have been pretty free form in terms of style, so this month we're going to try something different. This month's theme is "Changes," and we'll only be accepting sonnets (English sonnets, for those of you keeping track). Sonnets have a few rules you have to follow:

• They must be in iambic pentameter (we won't be too exacting when it comes to this one).
• They must be exactly 14 lines long.
• They must have this rhyme scheme: a-b-a-b / c-d-c-d / e-f-e-f / g-g (/ means a new stanza).

It might seem a little intimitading at first, but there's really nothing to a sonnet. For a great example of an English sonnet (written by Shakespeare himself), check out the Wikipedia article.

In past contests we've provided a theme to help inspire you to write. This time, we'll do the opposite and leave the theme totally open to your imagination. We want to see what you scribophiles can dream up!

We won't be accepting just anything, though. Entries must be in flash fiction format; that is, all entries must be under 1000 words (as measured by us) and must be fiction. No non-fiction allowed!

Those are the only rules. Choose your words wisely and start writing!

This month we're going to try something different. Instead of short stories, this month's contest will be featuring poems, and instead of a general theme, we're providing you with a picture for inspiration. See the picture of birds in a tree to the left? Your poem should somehow feature an element from that picture. It doesn't have to be specifically about the image, but it should include elements from the image. It's as simple as that... be inspired and put that pen to the paper!

We'll be accepting poems of any length and any genre.

Ah, February: the month of love. With Valentine's day around the corner, everybody wants to write a love story. So we thought we'd give it a little twist. Instead of accepting run-of-the-mill romances, we want exactly the opposite: stories about the supernatural. But not just any old ghost stories... after all, we're talking Valentine's day here! Your story of the supernatural has to feature Valentine's themes or imagery. Maybe a monster will terrorize the neighborhood by dropping bloody hearts onto people's beds. Maybe a tough specter with a heart of gold will fall in love with a goblin at the annual demon convention. Maybe the kids at school will pass out cursed Valentine's that fortell your death. Maybe Cupid has a secret dark side. We don't know. Make it as serious or as silly as you like, but make it good.

We'll be accepting short stories between 2,000 and 4,000 words (as measured by us). Your short story can have any tone: it can be funny, serious, scary, eerie, or whatever else you can dream up. Maybe it'll be a combination of all of the above!