The Contest Challenge

Good enough! I assume it's a regular-sized contest. If not, definitely try to match the contest lengths. Wait, back in 2017, I hadn't mastered some of the finer points yet. One mistake I was making was running super short contests with some regular-length ones. Of course, no one wanted to enter the regular ones when they could write a 100 word entry or whatever. That's why I now run June and November as really short contest months, to give everyone a fair shot. Also, I chose November so that folks doing NaNo could whip out something really fast and not stress the challenge. But for those who are feeling froggy, I often allow them to enter ALL the contests for an exclusive MB, as I offered this June. But if you don't participate in that month, you can catch up, but you can't do all the contests (or even 10 for a community MB) for the exclusive MB. That's a special promotion for that month only. After June/November, you can only get credit for 1 contest in those months.

Starting last year, I think it was, I started highlighting the long contests in August. So, if you are catching up August 2019, you can pick any regular-length contest, if the official ones you're supposed to be catching up aren't open. But if you are catching up August 2022, you need to pick a contest with probably a minimum of 2k words. Also, a couple of years ago, April became Poetry Month. I do sometimes run a contest that also allows stories, but not always. In the beginning, I didn't always run a poetry contest, so I got a lot of complaints from poets. Thus, this is to get even...plus, April is National Poetry Month.

Anyway, I hope this helps you choose contests wisely, if something isn't open. Normally, I like to pre-approve contests, but TBH, at this point, I'm just happy to let you pick your own as long as you pick something legitimate. When I'm picking for folks, I do try to pick something less popular to help it get entries, but these days, I'm less motivated to do that. As you see, I can barely keep up with the challenge as it is.

Anyway, keep going! You're doing a wonderful job--far better than I would have!