Things I Like - Books

I don’t know when it was announced, but I ran across NPR’s 3 Minute Fiction Summer Writing Contest on their site this week. The contest, which asked readers to submit an original short story that could be read in three minutes or less (approximately 500 – 600 words), had received more than 3000 entries by July 12th.

Some time between then and July 21st, they stopped accepting entries:

We are no longer accepting submissions for our Three-Minute Fiction contest. Thanks for the thousands of submissions, and keep checking back — we'll keep
reading and posting our favorites through the summer!
~NPR

I’m not sure what this means - maybe the original contest had a deadline (July 15th makes sense given the dates above), maybe they didn’t expect to receive so many entries and were overwhelmed by the task of reading through them all (this is NPR, maybe they don’t have the staff to do this quickly). Or maybe so many of the stories already submitted were so awful that they had to end the submissions on threat of a review panel walk out.

Three of the ‘favorites’ received to date were posted. The opening lines of Not That I Care by Molly Reid was kind of intriguing:

There goes our neighbor, Jim, running into the street again. He grabs one of the ducks crossing. Doesn't even look to see if anyone is looking, just scampers out — hunched over, elbows bent and reaching behind him like he's trying to grow wings or is throwing himself to the asphalt — then scoops a duck and holds it with both hands close to his chest and runs back into his house.

Nothing new has been posted since the 12th. As of today, there are 47 days left of summer. I’m wondering how many more ‘favorites’ they will find…