What the heck is a Penclash?
Penclash is a community-oriented website for creating, hosting, and running writing contests. That means that Penclash is the place to put your writing skills to the test, while also improving as a author. Invariably, the three most important tasks for any developing writer are writing more, reading more, and getting feedback on what they've written. Penclash gives you the opportunity to do all three through the medium of friendly competition, and gives you the chance to meet and engage with other authors.
What kind of contests?
That's partly up to you!
Monthly Penclash: A monthly site-wide contest. The site's main 'official' contest, Monthly Penclash runs, as one would expect, once each month. The nature of the contest will vary, with different prompts, story lengths, and criteria each month. Placement in these competitions will be tracked on a site-wide leaderboard. These competitions will be anonymously judged by their participants, which means you'll be getting feedback—and encouragement—from each other.
User-Created Contests: Fun with friends. Users can also create their own contests using Penclash. With a wide variety of options to choose from, you'll be able to create just about any kind of writing contest you can think of—and then let Penclash manage submissions for you. It's not just for individuals, either—if you're a publication looking for material, a publisher looking for talent, or a business looking for promotion, this is the place to do it.
Workshops: Organized competition. Workshops are user-created, self-contained groups with their own forums and leaderboards. Workshops can be organized around any given topic, and can run their own local contests—members-only.
Penclash also offers the Library, where you can search and read through an organized list of every contest entry on the site. Looking for a quick read? We've got you covered.
Other planned features include:
- Dark mode
- Integrations with popular fiction hosting sites, including cross-login
- A powerful and exhaustive BBCode-based formatting system, with WYSIWYG editing support
- Highly personalized reading and writing environments—control font, text size, foreground/background colour, layout style, fullscreen, and more
- Anonymous entry
- Two-factor authentication
- And more!
So... is it done yet?
Not quite! Penclash is still in development, but we expect to see it ready to release into beta before 2022.