Mar 1, 2020
Gear for Your Journey, a New Promposity Challenge
Promposity invites you to contribute as we enter March
About a year ago I moved from the city I had called home for twenty-five years to a foreign place. A strange climate, a new community, and an alien role as the wide-eyed newcomer. We had what we needed, to be certain, but much that we had grown accustomed to was simply gone.
When you go on a journey, you leave behind the old and you return new. But you need to go prepared. You bring along tools and supplies to help you along the way and for use at your intended destination.
Journeys are a tremendous force, and one might well describe literature as a study of journey even if you don’t subscribe to Campbell’s Monomyth idea. From Tolkein’s “Unexpected Journey” to Prydain’s brave Taran in his transformation from assistant pig-keeper into candidate for High Kingship, journeys are often the core of the stories we write.
But what gear do you give your heroes? What goes into the bag? Soldiers take pictures of family and decks of cards, harried and unwilling heroes are rushed out with very little, the businessman grabs his briefcase and his overnight bag. What do they take with them to have and to hold along the trail, forsaking what is left behind?
In short, we’d like to explore what preparation for a journey means — or lack thereof! What you take with you as physical and emotional baggage, tools, or resources defines success for so many stories. Explore it with this prompt:
“What do you need to be ready to go?”
Here are the requirements:
- Story or poem must be submitted as a draft, and must be your original unpublished work. Feel free to put multiple in throughout the month if you are particularly inspired to explore with us
- Include a color image which can be used for commercial purposes in the header with the credit listed below it
- Submissions must be under 1000 words in length, not counting the title and subtitle — we want you to use this as motivation to get writing, not use up all your writing time or energy for the day
- Submissions should include one tag that is either flash fiction or poetry
- At the end of your story, link back to this challenge article and extend an invitation to participate in this challenge to at least two (2) other writers on Medium
To get you started, I’ve written my own response to this challenge:
If you are not yet a writer for the publication but would like to become one, add a request to the comments below or email us at Promposity@gmail.com with “New Writer Request” in the subject line. Those who have already been added as writers, can submit their stories and poems directly to the publication.
For this challenge, we won’t be selecting winners. You’ll be a winner simply by participating. As always we will publish stories as they come in and promote them on several different social media channels (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Mix, Hacker News, Reddit, Saidit, Pinterest, etc.) and include them in our newsletter which will be sent to all of our followers as well as to the Medium community at large.
All published submissions will be considered for inclusion in a future anthology. If you aren’t interested, please put this in a private note on the submission and send us an email to that effect. Choosing not to be considered for the anthology will not affect whether your submission is accepted.
All entries will be:
- announced at the end of the month
- published on the front page of the publication
- featured in a special newsletter
For further information about submitting to Promposity:
We’re on journeys of our own, each one of us and each character we drown in our ink. Come explore with us and tell us what you think through a story or poem. You always blow us away — We can’t wait to see what you come up with this month!
