Words, Pauses, Noises is proud to announce our First Annual Writing Competition!
The competition will be judged by a panel of writers, poets, and literary agents, and the first place winners in each category will receive a £100 prize. The winners and those pieces which are shortlisted will also be featured in our first physical publication!
Our categories are Short Fiction, Flash Fiction, and Poetry. You can submit one (1) work to each category, and that work may be on any subject, in any genre and style. That means anything, from romance to horror, science fiction to period pieces. We will not be accepting any interviews, reviews, essays, non-fiction travelogues, or excerpts of novels. Our standard submission agreement applies.
The word count limits are as follows:
SHORT FICTION: up to 1500 words
FLASH FICTION: up to 700 words
POETRY: up to 40 lines
Please follow the submission instructions provided on the COMPETITION RULES PAGE.
The contest is running from 2 December 2013 until 31 January 2014 and all winners will be notified by email when the judging has been completed.
So dust off that laptop and get writing! We look forward to seeing a wide range of works and styles. For those still hesitant about putting something on the blog, this is a chance to submit anonymously. Your work will be read by agents and published authors, with the chance to be published yourself!
Words, Pauses, Noises 
My shortest story is 1530 words….my shortest flash fiction is 800…are either of these allowable at all?
Cheers,
Dave
Hello Dave,
Sorry for the slow reply, the blog has been in the process of changing editorial hands.
The 2014 competition has closed, but we will soon be posting the guidelines for our 2015 competition so please stay tuned for that. The word counts for the different genres are, unfortunately, hard maximums.
However, we are much more flexible with regular submissions and would be happy to read the lengths you’ve mentioned. You can see our usual submission guidelines here.