The Cat And The Machine: An Unofficial Challenge

Everyone seems to have been having a blast with my challenges so far, including me, so I've decided to host another one. I hope you’re ready to write!

The Challenge

Imagine a sentient vending machine and a stray cat outside a grocery store. The two have an agreement in which the machine trades cursed snacks for secrets the cat steals from the dreams of sleeping townsfolk.

Your story can be of any length and must be entered by the end of next month (July 31). Any genre will do, and any style.

The prizes for this one will be: $5 for first place and $2 for second.

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

The Rules

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

Entrants must leave a comment below, with a link to their published story, 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 stories that you have written for Vocal Media at any time, if you think you have one that somehow fits these parameters.

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 August 31st 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 story 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.

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).

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:

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!