As part of our book of the month feature on Sweetly by Jackson Pearce (in stores in just 21 days!!), we’re giving you a chance to put your creative writing skills to good use. And since Sweetly and the companion novel Sisters Red are both modernized twists on classic fairy tales, that’s where we’re drawing our inspiration for this month’s contest!
The Contest:
Choose on of your favorite fairy tales, and write the beginnings of a modernized twist on the classic story. Choose anything from Cinderella, Snow White or Sleeping Beauty to Jack and the Beanstalk, The Three Little Pigs, or Thumbelina. Any fairy tale is up for grabs!
Submit the first 250-500 words of your story in our Sweetly Contest Entry Form.
The Prizes:
Three (3) winners will each receive a finished copy of Sweetly and a Sweetly lollipop, courtesy of Little Brown.
The Rules:
- One entry per person
- U.S. only
- Use the entry form
- Use proper grammar & spelling
- Entries should be approx. 250-500 words in length
The Deadline:
All entries are due by midnight (PT) on Wednesday, August 31st.
Questions? Leave ’em in the comments & we’ll reply!
Novel Novice 
Just a question about the contest–it says to write the beginning of a story. Can I write a piece of flash fiction that’s complete on its own? Or are we talking just the beginning of a larger work? And is a poem OK? Thanks! This looks like so much fun!
A piece of flash fiction would be great!
Can we write more than 500? Like maybe a 1000 or so… I wouldn’t overdo it but it’s kind of hard for me to write anything that short
You can write as much as you want, but please ONLY submit up to 500 words for the contest. It’s okay if the submission is just the beginning of a story. It does not have to be complete, but we just don’t have time to read so many entries if they are longer than 500 words. Thanks!
Well I got 800 words. I’ll try to shorten it or something! 🙂
Or you can just submit the first 500 — it doesn’t have to be a complete story! Note in the instructions above, we say you only need to submit the *beginning* of a story … 🙂
Okay I’ll submit the ending of the prologue so it actually gets to the fairytale part! 🙂
Is there any possible way that I could submit 545 words?
Yes, that’s fine — as long as it’s close to the 250-500 range, it doesn’t need to be exact. 🙂
I know this is a stupid question, but do we keep the copyright to the work after submitting to the contest? What happens to the winners’ stories after they, uh, ‘win’?
We post the winning stories here on Novel Novice, but yes, you will still own the copyright to everything you’ve written.
This is the greatest contest I’ve participated in yet! (:
I love your writing contests! Just sent in my entry. 🙂
Hello, again.
Thanks for answering my first question. I think this contest has really hit a “”sweet” spot with me. However, I have another “silly” question. When will the winners be posted?
I can’t promise a timeline — we’re very busy, and it takes us a while to read all the entries. I’m still trying to get through the submissions from our July contest. I’ll announce winners as soon as I can.
I was just wondering if there might be a timeframe for announcing the winners of this contest. I know it takes time but I was just wondering
I honestly can’t give you a time frame — simply because it takes us a lot of time to read through writing contest entries, and we have VERY busy schedules (right now, in particular), so we just can’t make a guarantee when we’ll get to them all. I promise we’ll do our best to make sure you don’t wait too long.
I understand being super busy myself. thanks for taking the time to answer back. Can’t wait to see who wins. I love your writing contests 🙂