We're throwing a short story writing contest based on our column Seattle Writing Prompts. Better yet, it's being judged by Matt Ruff, author of six novels. His most recent, last year's Lovecraft Country, is being turned into a series on HBO, produced by Jordan Peele and JJ Abrams. The grand prize is $100 and publication here in the Seattle Review of Books, and an interview to appear the same week as your story.

More details

Every Saturday, for the past six months, we've been running a column by site co-founder Martin McClellan that explores a part of the city, and offers writing prompts based on the history, or mis-history, of that place. So now that we've got six months under our belt, we thought it might be fun to have a short story writing contest based on the Seattle Writing Prompts.

How it will work

1. Look through our Seattle Writing Prompts archive, and (if you haven't already) take inspiration from one of the prompts.
2. Write (if you haven't already) a short story whose concept was sparked by the prompt. You don't need to follow it exactly, but it would be nice to see where you began.
3. Submit your story, and let us know what prompt inspired it, by August 15, 2017. We'll do an initial pass, then send them on to Matt Ruff. We'll announce his pick here in early September.
4. Send to submissions@seattlereviewofbooks.com, with the subject line "Seattle Writing Prompts Contest Entry".

Fine print

You're selling us, essentially, first serial rights to your story. You retain full copyright to your work. There is no word limit here, but we are looking for short stories instead of prose poems. You can be the arbiter of what that means to you. We consider comics short stories. We pay on publication. Interview will require you to meet with someone from the site for about 30 minutes, but that can be on Skype if you can't do it in person. You do not need to live in Seattle to enter this contest, but we retain the right to weight stories with strong Seattle connections more heavily.