New Contest For May, Featuring Your Very Own Deranged Lighthouse Keeper!

I've been thinking about hosting another contest for a little while now, and I think the time has finally come! What, you may ask, will you be hankerin' to hear from us this time? Well, after much thought and deliberation (a few seconds, at least), I have come up with an ever-so-nefarious prompt. I bet you can't wait to hear it!

The Challenge

Write a letter (it can be in poem form if you so choose, or not) from a deranged lighthouse keeper to their deceased lover, confessing to a horrific act they committed in order to keep the light burning.

The letter can be of any length and must be entered by the end of the month (May 31). Any genre will do, and any style (Horror is the easy choice, of course, but if you want to make it something else instead, more power to you!).

The prizes for the most enticing of these lovely lighthouse letters will be: $3 for first place and $2 for second place. I know, I know, last time I switched them up, and that was certainly a fun experience, but this time, I'm going traditional with it. After all, what is life without tradition?

In addition to those prizes, I will also mention the winners on my Twitter/X and Facebook pages.

The Rules

Each entry must follow the prompt. If any of the details in your letter contradict the ones included in the prompt or if they are left out entirely, that letter will not be considered in my final assessment.

Entrants must leave a comment below, with a link to their published story/letter, and each entry must include a link back to this original post. It took me a minute to figure out how to do this when I first tried entering these contests myself, so here's the deets: When you're writing a story, there's a little plus sign that appears on the left side of your writing area when you go to a new line. If you click that, you can choose "Embed link." At that point, you will simply copy the link from this page and post it into the bar that appears under the "Embed link" area. Then click Enter. Voila! Like magic, a link to this page will embed into your page!

Entries can include any previously published letters that you have written for Vocal Media at any time, if by some chance you happen to have previously written a letter from a deranged lighthouse keeper to their deceased lover confessing to a horrific act they committed in order to keep the light burning. If you think you have one that somehow fits these parameters, I say go for it!

You can enter this contest as many times as you like! Who knows, maybe you can even win first and second place!

Depending on how many entries there end up being, it will most likely take me a while to get through them all, so please be patient. A hard deadline for me to choose the winners will be June 30th of 2025, but I expect to have chosen before then. I will be paying out to winners via the Tips feature on Vocal, so please verify that your Stripe account is in good standing and that you can receive tips. Thanks so much!

Contest Tips

I tend to be a fairly critical reader, so here are some recommendations for keeping my interest:

Be sure to use spell check and give the letter at least a once-over for grammatical issues (I can get past some typos and grammatical errors, but I assure you that it will affect my judgment if any remain, at least on a subconscious level).

Try to give me something somewhat unpredictable to read (I'm not saying that a predictable storyline absolutely won't win, but it probably won't).

Give enough description to keep my interest, but don't go into too much detail about what color and sharpness the blades of grass are (unless there is some actual purpose to that in the story). That level of detail tends to bore me. I like the freedom to form my own concepts of the visual details, unless the hue of the bark on the willow tree is actually vital in some way to the story. It's just a letter, so surely this will not be an issue that comes into play, unless the lighthouse keeper went all out on that poor willow.

I generally advise using dialogue tags every once in a while when people are talking (I'm easily confused, and I don't want to have to keep going back to where I knew who was talking and then start counting to figure out who is talking now). For this letter-writing contest, however, I'm not too concerned about it. If your lighthouse keeper is writing dialogue in their letter, maybe they don't use dialogue tags. Maybe they don't use punctuation. Maybe they don't form complete or coherent sentences. It's your lighthouse keeper. You tell me.

And In Closing

This should be a fun contest for everyone! Be sure to read through some of the other entries and leave a comment on here letting us know what you thought. Also, share the contest here and there so that everyone has a chance to join. I look forward to seeing what you all have to say!

Also, if you didn't get a chance to see my previous contest winners, be sure to check them out here:

And here:

Author's Note: I had a blast reading the entries to my previous contests, and I look forward to reading your entries in this one. I truly hope you enjoy writing them as well! If you'd like to show your support, please feel free to leave a comment, click the heart, and subscribe!