During October I’ve been taking part in the ridiculously named #NaBloPoMo. With literally a minute to spare, I posted the final post last night – it was preceded by thirty others, one for each day in the month. I’m not sure that I’ve done my finest blogging over the past thirty-one days, but there have been posts I’ve been proud of, and perhaps more importantly, posts that have inspired posts on similar topics by other great bloggers or provoked discussion on Twitter. Posts that have reminded me what I love about blogging, essentially.

My other campaign in recent months has been ‘Don’t read clickbait, read this instead,’ which is my own take on #FF – suggesting Twitter accounts and bloggers that have far more to say than the majority of list posts that seem to dominate the ‘traditional press’ at the moment. At last check, my blog reader contained 119 blogs – I don’t read all of them on a regular basis, but what I like about that selection is that it’s pretty diverse – there are blogs on food, sex, fashion, beauty, parenting, disability… Essentially, if it’s good writing I want to read it, whether or not it tallies with my life experience.

To mark the end of #NaBloPoMo, I wanted to do something a bit special, something a bit like the Polished competition that I ran a few months back. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that I didn’t want to run another erotica competition – I follow and am followed by a lot of great erotica writers, but I equally want to involve people who read my blog and who would like to join in but who don’t write fiction. Or about sex, necessarily.

So the challenge is to write a non-fiction post (full rules below) on any topic that you like. Given that the competition isn’t limited to sex I didn’t want the prizes to be sex-related either, so I’ve gone down the more generic route of what I love: books.

There are 2 prizes:

Charlie’s Choice: £15/$25 Amazon voucher

Readers’ Choice: £10/$15 Amazon voucher

The Readers’ Choice will be a poll once the competition has closed, so even if you don’t enter, please do vote for your favourite post.

The Rules…

(1) You must write a non-fiction (op-ed or real life story) blog post. No fiction, please.
(2) The post must (obviously) be your own work.
(3) There is no minimum length for posts, but they must be no longer than 1500 words.
(4) You must post the piece on your own blog and link back to this post in order for your entry to be counted.
(5) You *do not* have to write about sex or women’s issues. If you want to enter a piece about food, fashion or steam trains, that’s fine by me. That said, obviously it’s fine to write about sex and women’s issues too.
(6) The competition closes at 23.59 GMT on Saturday, November 8th Sunday, November 9th. Any entries submitted after this point will not be considered.
(7) The winning entry will be the post that I like most/find most interesting. The Reader’s Choice prize will be given to the post that receives the most votes in a poll.
(8) You consent to me linking to your post in a list of all the entries once the competition has closed and reproducing your post on Sex blog(of sorts) if it wins.
(9) Should you win, you are happy to share your email address with me for the purpose of sending your prize.
(10) Your post must have been written on or after Nov 1st 2014. Please do not enter posts from your archive.

Please do read the rules above carefully. If I’ve missed anything, or you have questions, please let me know…

Charlie xx