Unofficial Challenges Repository

Unofficial Challenges are addictive.

There, I said it.

As someone who loves reading, inviting talented writers to create just the stories you want to read is an amazing opportunity! Add to that the brilliant excuse to be distributing prizes, and you have yourself an intoxicating cocktail.

Once you've experienced hosting one, you'll be craving to host more — I know I do!

But once the challenges are closed, and all the tips have gone around, will all these awesome stories be lost in the depths of the platform? Will they be covered in waves of new material, where nobody will be willing to scroll back enough to check?

The one obvious solution would be to pin the challenges. But we only have three pins available, and I'd love to be hosting more than three challenges during my stay on Vocal.

I'm looking forward to the day Vocal will have a feature allowing us to share personally curated reading lists, but until that day, I'll be using this post as a repository for all my challenges.

Past, present... and maybe even future!

I'll keep this post up to date and have it pinned on my profile. Please come and browse for challenges you might want to take part in, amazing creators you might not know yet, and great stories to read, all united by a common theme or prompt.

And if you feel inspired by the prompt of a challenge that is already closed, please add a link to your story in the submissions post anyway!

I might not give you a prize (unless my finances have significantly improved, you never know!), but I will add your story to the list, read it thoroughly, and leave a comment (might take me some time though, please be patient!)

Now that I have reached the 600 words needed to publish this post, here we go:

Active Challenges:

• A Very Vocal Beauty Pageant — Unofficial Challenge (Non-V+ Welcome!)

A challenge to choose the first subjects of my upcoming series with a deep dive into the works of a fellow Vocal creator. Judged by the community through a system of points that reward engagement and engaging writers.

• A Dollar for Your Thoughts

This "challenge" has no real expiration date, and it is mainly a call for ideas to share with Vocal on how they can make the platform and our experience on it better.

As long as posts are respectful, original, and relevant, I will be tipping them all 1$ each (after reading them thoroughly, which might take some time, so please be patient).

• Calling For Your Underappreciated Stories

This one is not strictly speaking a challenge, but it is a call for any of you to share your stories and get a little extra visibility, a read, and a thoughtful comment in response...

Which can be nice enough to be considered a prize by some of us.

Sharing it here has the double advantage of giving more visibility to the stories you linked, and freeing a pin on my profile: talking win-win!

Closed Challenges:

• A Summer Mystery:

This was the first Unofficial Challenge I ever hosted. It revolved around the idea of writing a solvable mystery in any format and inside any community. I allowed multiple entries per creator with the caveat that each entry had to be in a different community.

There were 13 submissions, spread across 7 different communities.

You can read all the entries following this link:

Judging so many amazing stories proved much harder than I expected, and it took me several reads per story, lots of time, and ultimately a point system to come to a definitive decision.

Read all about the selection process and the winners here:

• Geek Out! Upside Down

This challenge asks for paired submissions in the Geeks/Bookclub/Beat/Gamers communities... with a twist!

It took forever, but we finally announced the winners!

• Ministry of Silly Pictures:

A challenge that asked writers to "write a poem inspired by a picture, inspired by another writer's poem's picture"! Read the brave 8 submissions here:

And all the challenge winners!

• A Dutch Challenge

Choose someone else's work and make the "Dutch" version of it.

Winners to be announced soon!

Once new challenges close and get rewarded, I will link those posts here, with a short description.