February 2025 Winning Features

Congratulations to our February 2025 Winning Features! These stories caught our eye, and we hope you enjoy them as well.

Do you think you have a 100 word story in you? Follow the weekly blog posts and enter each week or submit today via the form below for a chance to be published or featured.

Laurie Whitman

Finding interesting topics about her community, food, cooking, and grandchildren, Laurie wrote columns in local newspapers for many years. Laurie’s story about her granddaughter’s birth was published in the True Stories section of Readers Digest. Laurie has five children and seven grandkids. She wishes to thank the La Grange Writers Group and the Brookfield Writers Group for critiques and love.

100 Word Feature

Monthly Submission - via form

Circle of Love

We were sitting, tired and cranky, on a bench in Chicago’s Art Institute awaiting entrance to the Monet exhibit.

Five women, all talking at once, stopped in front of us.

The young woman in the center of the chattering circle was very pregnant, her striped knit dress stretched tightly across her middle.

With her hands on her belly, she exclaimed, “He is moving right now!”

Her circle of love tightened, each woman taking a turn to feel the kicks.

“Oooh,” the group cried in unison.

My daughter and I smiled with the memory; my 9-year old granddaughter smiled and wondered.

100 Word Feature

Online Submission - via weekly participation

Veneer

The city is always more beautiful at night. Darkness hides the graffiti and grime. Lights glitter like houses at Christmas when strings of white circle around trees, outline roofs.

During the holidays, there was a girl in my neighborhood who walked the streets after sunset. She always stopped in front of our house to gaze at our tree. It was lit with multicolored bulbs and positioned in front of the picture window. I could see her breath. I could see her eyes sparkling with suburban fantasies. She didn’t know that, like everything else in our lives, the tree was fake.

Michelle Meyer

Michelle Meyer is the author of The Trouble with Being a Childless Only Child (Cornerstone Press, 2024) and The Book of She (2021). Her poem, “The Circus Girl,” won the 2024 WFOP Triad Ekphrastic Challenge, and individual poems have appeared in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Ink In Thirds, ONE ART, Pearl Press, Tiny Spoon, and elsewhere.

Congratulations again, February 2025 Winning Features!

We had a lot of interest, and it was difficult to whittle this down! Please keep the stories coming either through weekly participation on the blog or via the form (limited to one entry per month). Thank you to all who participated and entered! Keep writing and help spread the word to come lay down ink…

January 2025 Feature Winners

#100WW Use the hashtags and share on social! #comelaydownink

We nominate for awards, including Best of The Net.

Alternatively, we also have a New Submission Form for 100-Word Stories. These submissions will all be considered for publication online and in our print mag.

You can submit only one story per month via the form. However, you can participate each Wednesday on the blog in addition to one monthly submission.

On the first Wednesday of each month, we will publish 2 selected 100 Word Stories (1 from submissions and 1 entry from the 100 Word Wednesday weekly prompt here on the blog.)

Read other entries and comment. This will be a positive forum for feedback.