My NYCM Contest

We are switching format and talking about one contest

New York City Midnight is a contest for writers across many different formats. I participated in the 2026 short story contest that started in January, and the results came in at the beginning of April. It was my first time participating, and I have some thoughts.

First, some context for how the contest works. If you know this already, you can skip this paragraph. In the short story contest there are about 5000 participants, which gets broken down into groups of 40, and each group receives their own prompt that all 40 have to write within. My group had horror / self-control / a loud neighbour. The writers then have a week to submit a story, which are scored against other stories from their group. Top five in each group moves on to the next round, which separates the remaining writers back into groups of 40, rinse and repeat. There are four rounds in total.

My results

So, I didn’t make it past round 1. Did not even get an Honorable Mention, which stings, but such is life. I have no insight into how well I did beyond that, since only the top five and HM are revealed. It’s a pretty competitive field, of course, with 5000 writers from across the world, just participating is a leap of faith.

I don’t mind losing. I wouldn’t be throwing myself into contests the way I have, unless I was certain I could take that hit. Unlike every other contest though, losing in the first round doesn’t just mean I didn’t win the whole thing—I also do not get to participate in the next round, which feels strangely worse than if I had just lost outright.

Just to be clear, I don’t think the contest owes me anything, or have treated me badly, it’s just the format that is functionally different and introduces another reason to be down about losing.

Where NYCM is different from most other contests is that feedback is built into the pricing structure. Where magazine contests sometimes offers editorial feedback, it costs a lot beyond the price for participating, whereas NYCM includes this in the price for competing. That is also why it is considered one of the more pricier contests to enter (especially if you don’t make it past round 1).

That means I got written feedback from three different judges about what they liked and what could use more work. I’ve gotten some differing opinions on the value of judges’ feedback in NYCM, but at least mine read sincere and their feedback aligns pretty well with what I’ve received from readers across the past few months.

Character description

“A touch more of physical description would help further ground the reader in the story and could also amplify tension […]”

I don’t do a lot of character description in short story format. I sometimes address clothing or a specific item a character has, but rarely their facial features or hair. I personally feel that it slows the story significantly whenever I dip into descriptions like these, but I’ve gotten a lot of feedback on people wanting to know what characters look like in order to picture them better in their head.

I will try to adopt this feedback a little, though I’m not aiming to overcorrect. I’ll do a bit more to set the general outline of a characters features, but I feel that it is better to leave vague and let the reader fill in the rest with their own imagination. Unless there’s a specific feature that is pivotal to the story—like heterochromia having some magical feature that ordinary eyes don’t—I don’t really see the point in being specific.

What my basic outline is going to consist off will be differ, but I think age, body size, clothing, are useful for making that description worth the time investing in it. I try to make facial expression a part of the dialogue, like frowns and furrowed brows, so I don’t think I need to make a huge fuss about that.

Ambiguity

“I liked that you encourage the reader to work things out for themselves, but I was still left with a lot of questions at the end of the story, which meant I was unable to figure out what this story was really about.”

This is perhaps where most of my readers get annoyed with me. Two out of my three judges found this to be the area that they would want more clarity on. While they praised the approach of refusing to explain and leaving it to the reader to figure out the pieces and put them together, it was also a point against my writing, since they clearly felt they lacked the clarity figure out exactly what the story was about, and what had happened.

This is a general feature of my writing, and I think I’ve gotten better at it since I wrote my story back in January. It is a precarious ledge to walk, and I’m not making it easier on myself to write like this—and it doesn’t make for fundamentally better stories. It makes for confusing stories if the reader doesn’t know what they’re in for, and even for those who appreciates my puzzles, I often leave them wanting.

So, why write like this? Honestly, I think it’s because I do the opposite way worse. When I explain things, I tend to overdo it, and to my ear it comes off as preachy or micro-managing the reader’s imagination. One example off the top of my head was from when I started out writing. I had this idea to depict each minute movement of a fight scene, which made for incredible slowed-down fights, losing all momentum. I’m a better writer now than I was back then (I think), but after realizing this, I have focused on boiling even fight scenes down to their very essence. Someone’s getting punched, so it doesn’t matter the trajectory of the movement, what attempt to block there was, or even how it felt landing on the ground.

He’s one the ground now, and his chest hurts. His opponent mounts him and starts raining down fists. Much better, I think.

So, circling back to the feedback I’ve gotten, I’m not at all dismissing it. I think it is valuable that I listen and try to understand why readers feel they are missing pieces, especially if I want to make this style of writing work with a broader audience. I’m moving slowly toward including more and more pieces of the puzzles, and also simplifying the ideas I leave vague, so they’re not too complex to grasp.

I’ll still fail, I’m sure of it, but perhaps one day I’ll make someone go, “Aha! I got it!” And that will be brilliant for me and for them. Until then, I’ll keep confusing people. If nothing else, it’s fun to see what explanations readers come up with in their frustration.

What have I learned?

I have much to work on in my writing. I think I’m closing in on a style that’s worth pursuing, but the only way to gauge my success is whether I am being read or not. Here’s for the future, and thank you for reading.

P.S. I’m publishing a new piece of flash fiction at the beginning of May. This one is about mycelia. Stay tuned.