Greetings and salutations to all our members, old and new, young and small, tall and… something else. The days are long and warm, the sun is shining but alas, the lack of The Walking Dead, and more particularly Caryl, tears at our souls. Never fear! We have a solution for all our hiatus withdrawals. The magnificent Peta and I are pleased to announce the Nine Lives Summer Survival Challenge Series has begun! *cue dramatic music*

This will be a series of challenges that we have worked out, designed to amp up our creativity and bring tons more fun to the awesomeness that is Nine Lives. Guess what we picked for our first challenge? The oh-so-popular, always delicious… MCREEDUS!

Here is the scoop: I’m gonna give you a prompt in a minute. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to write something including the details given in the prompt. Easy peasy lemon squeezy, right? Now, to the important stuff! 

• THE PROMPT: It’s ComiCon time! The story must take place at or around a con of your choosing and must include a photo op. It must be at least 100 words.
• THE DEADLINE: All entries are due on July 14, 10pm MST. Everything will be posted on July 8.
• THE RULES: Here is how you enter the challenge:
  • Send a PM to myself or Peta stating that you’re going to enter the challenge. This is very important! If we don’t get a PM, you won’t be on the list and you kinda need to be on the list for this one. ;)
  • Write your fic!!
  • DO NOT UPLOAD IT YET!! Wait until July 14 to upload your fic – we will be suspending automatic validation for that day for all authors who enter the challenge.
  • Submission Day is July 14, post your fic. It will not appear on the website, but will enter our validation queue. Make sure you submit it under the Nine Lives Challenge category!
  • Posting Day is July 15 – We will post the Master List and post all of the challenge entries so everything shows up at once. That way, we’re all surprised by what we get to read! Any challenge fics that are posted before July 14 will be deleted.

That’s it! This is a great chance for us to embrace our random creativity and see just what wild paths we can all take from the same starting point.

This is just the beginning – we’ve got lots of challenges lined up to take us through this hiatus! So if this isn’t quite your thing, stay tuned, because we’ve got more on the way!