Are Vocal challenges a waste of time?

Vocal Challenges is how Vocal makes its money. A lot of them are open to Vocal Plus members who pay $9.99 a month or $99 a year. If you're lucky you may have claimed one of their discounts or even got it for me for a few months, as I did. A lot of the big writing contests cost money to join, and lots of writing contests can get anything from a hundred to a thousand entries. Vocal is no exception.

Vocal Challenges is the site's star attraction. It's always fun to try new things and write what inspires you. But lately, I feel like the Vocal Challenges are leaving a sour taste in my mouth because of how fluid the rules are. Also. the large quantity of them gives me the pressure that I have to enter every single one to make my Vocal membership worth the money.

There's always a nice atmosphere on Vocal when the challenges start. But once the winners are announced, the buzz ends. People feel lost and disappointed. They have only a handful of judges, going through hundreds and thousands of entries. I've entered Vocal challenges many times but never placed. I did get a bonus for the colourful poetry challenge. That was a nice feeling because it felt like my efforts had paid off.

I used to love doing Vocal Challenges and my favourite was the poetry ones. Though lately I've been feeling drained with the summer fiction challenges. I ended up writing one that would fill in all the themes so I didn't have to write anymore because I was so tired. I'm feeling drained from the writing and on top of working full-time employment, working out and creating new sidle hustles, I am just too exhausted to write.

Now I feel like there's too much stress behind them. Sometimes these challenges can take ages to plan and write. I was hoping to have finished all my writing projects by now, but I'm not even halfway on some of them. I'm happy with the self-edit feature, but I want to edit my titles as well. If I hadn't had Vocal free for a few months, I think I would have cancelled my premium membership, but at the moment, I am making enough money on here to justify it. I think it's only worth having if you know you will make enough with the views and tips.

For the summer fiction challenges, Vocal has promised bonuses for people who have entered every single challenge. As awesome as this is, I can see this going horribly wrong. I can see people complaining that they never received their bonuses. I've seen people get bonuses for writing 10 stories, reading 10 stories or getting a bonus for 50 stories. I didn't get any bonuses with 500 stories at all.

I did get a top story with my celebratory. These milestone bonuses seem to be random. I personally think if one person gets it, we should all get it as it will be a great motivator for all. It makes people wonder where their bonus is? It should be all or nothing.

They have great big ideas, but Vocal is lacking in execution. Because of that, I sometimes wonder if entering Vocal Challenges are a waste of time? There was a lot of talk about how one of the latest winning entries is over 2000 words when 2000 words is the max limit. Now I see they've made an exception for exceptional stories, but at the same time, it is a kick in the face for the writers that followed the rules. They could have gotten away with a lot of backlash if they just scrapped the upper limit.

Maybe there's a lack of staff, money or resources that is stopping them from pulling these big challenges off. Even though they have grown, they still seem to be a small team that's overwhelmed by the responses of the challenges.

Say you have a short-story contest where the rule is no romance, and a story that wins has romance in it won. The other writers would be annoyed? Because people pay to enter their stories. I know Vocal will say the judge's choices are final, but the backlash from the Vocal challenges is keeping me away from the Vocal groups on social media because of all the negativity it's causing.

Sometimes I don't even know if I want to win a Vocal challenge. I've seen how people complain about other people's winning entries. They should be offering feedback and advice to the winner instead of being a coward behind the screen.

Complain all you like. Vent off if you need to. You are still writing on this platform. You are still paying for the membership. That is what they will see. As long as Vocal has subscribers, then Vocal has won.

I just feel like I'm not getting anything out of Vocal Challenges anymore. Every time I go on the facebook groups, it's always negative stuff going on, or people complaining about other groups or writers on this platform. We were promised community, but we've ended up spilling tea.