It's Advent, are you ready.... for seasonal micro fiction?

After a month of novelling dangerously - hands up 1667 words a day #NaNoWriMo novelists - are you ready for a daily story-soaked 140 characters?
Yes, Paul and the marvellous illustrators have done it again and we have a completely new set of seasonal images for this year's advent calendar!

This is how it works:

• Every day in December we post a teaser image on W&P that links to a growing advent calendar of beautiful images from SCBWI illustrators.
• Each day we invite readers to comment on the post with a 'tweetable micro story' inspired by the day's image.
• @SCBWI_BI and @Words8Pictures will then tweet the comment with the hashtag #Advent and the commenter's twitter handle. So using up characters with the hashtag and twitter handle makes it even more of a challenge but an entirely achievable one as last year proved - we had some star micro fiction authors! 

Can you tell a seasonal story in a tweet?

So before we launch ourselves in to a month of seasonal fiction fun, check out out what you may have missed last week:

• Wonderful interview with 'I don't mind a bit of chaos' Barrington Stoke author Anthony McGowan from Celia Anderson
• Mike Brownlow's essential reading for robot designers - how do you draw one?
• The free Magical MG competition from Skylark Literary
• Clare Bell's report for National Non- Fiction November on writing and researching with gloves on her non-fiction picture book about Cadbury's
• And of course Nick's blogs - now that I've reached 50k #NaNoWriMo (Hurray!) I have a whole month's worth of blogoodies to catch up on!

Anyone still going for their  NaNoWriMo 50k words, I wish all power to your fingers. I crossed the threshold yesterday morning - (yay!) miraculously coinciding the breakthrough with the end of the story. It feels good to have something new to work on.

In the coming weeks we'll be concentrating on our Advent calendar but we do have our last (for the time being) Ask a Publisher podcast and a new featured illustrator to look forward to.

A very happy chocolate tinted Advent to you all!

Jan Carr

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Jan Carr is handing over the editorship of Words & Pictures to the wonderful Nancy Saunders. Jan's works in progress are currently upper middle grade and new adult, if not adult (ooh er). She aims to blog here more regularly though she has blogged here almost every week since March 2013.