The Lodestar Contest

April May pick-up round of the 2024 Lodestar season is underway! (And I'm sorry to those who saw this post titled "April 2024 Round is Open!" during my brain lag.)

As always, if you see a loophole you want to exploit in the Instructions and Guidelines, go ahead.

Before you go, please give me a moment to tell you why "Egg" is on the cargo, ah, list. That single word has been a prompt in one of my favorite contests, "The LGBT Writing Contest" . Twice (that I know of, so maybe more).

Both times (that I saw it) I wanted so badly to be able to write something based on it, but I never could quite get myself together enough to actually put down anything resembling a story.

I finally figured out that my real problem was that I wanted to read stories with that prompt rather than write one.

And so here we are. Please help.