Kinky Scribbles Congrats for 2025!

“Elle, look how big the contest is growing! It’s bursting through the proverbial ceiling!” – Njord

 

Congratulations to the many participants of my third annual September Kinky Scribble Challenge! While we can write kinky scribbles at any time of the year, it’s fun to try and make a collective effort like this. The goal of the event was to help people write and release stories quickly to help build confidence and have fun seeing what we could create.

I am absolutely AMAZED at the turnout this year! Last year we had seven participants and nine stories. This year, 31 writers worked for far more than 60.5 hours to write 33 different stories with a whopping 46 scribbles for a record-breaking total of 70,942 words!

I’d like to give some special recognition for one writer, Butcher @bitchcassidys, who had the absolutely brilliant idea to use the challenge structure to write a 17K-word story in 14 separate scribbles over 14 days. I did a genuine double-take when I realized what you had tried! It never occurred to me anyone would write a long-form story in short scribble-bursts, but I think you had a fantastic idea. I am so delighted!

Again and again, I kept hearing from people that this community challenge helped them find motivation and even break through writer’s block by lowering the stakes and focusing on fun. The deadline doesn’t hurt, either! Well. You know what I mean. Regardless, it made me so happy and so proud to witness more than two dozen people having fun with writing and sharing what they created.

Since the start of the community challenge in 2023, together we have written 112,176 words across 57 different stories.

Wonderful work, everyone!

 

Participants

Please join me in celebrating and supporting these writers by reading their work and sharing it to your friends!

If you’re able, please consider following them on social media and sending a tip, a Kofi, or subscribing to their Patreons. Now more than ever, we must support the creative people in our community!

In alphabetical order by author:

• Abigail is Nancy, She’s Fucking Canary Wharf, 3948 words
• Artful Hobbes, A Small Comfort on the Balcony., 3134 words
• Aspen, My Precious Little Tactician, 3063 words, 2.75 hours
• Bones, Stealing a Drink, 1441 words, 2 hours
• BrinBug, Smaller. Simpler., 1158 words
• Butcher, Vignette of a Shrinking Woman, chapters 1-14, 17,995 words
• Chuck Murnoe, To be his doll, 2755 words, 2 hours
• Chuck Murnoe, Marlene Mutt in: Mini Mate, 1877 words, 1.5 hours
• DiDi Star, This Little World of Ours, 1311 words, 2 hours
• Drya, Words Lost in the Moment, 907 words, 3 hours
• FifthIvory, untitled, 1000 words
• Gale, Need, 3900 words, 10 hours
• Harmony, The Shock Phase, 1437 words, 8 hours
• Harmony, A Nice One, 1288 words
• Ivy Peregrine, How Could We Possibly Hookup Anyway, 3288 words, 5 hours
• J-Cuteum, untitled, 668 words, 1.5 hours
• Jessica, Puppy girl x Puppy-Girl, 1459 words, 3 hours
• LaceyFairy, The Fairy and the Serpent, 1234 words, 2.5 hours
• Lady Huge, You Can Eat All, 1287 words, 3 hours
• Lee, For the Forest, 4600 words, 5 hours
• Liath, Take A Seat I Guess, 1117 words
• Mini Marxist, Treasure of the Frostborn, 4058 words
• Njord, Almost: A Diary, 1010 words
• Olo, Kept in the Dark, 1256 words
• Quinn, GIRLS’ NIGHT, 1198 words, 1.5 hours
• Salem, The Invasion, 699 words, 1.25 hours
• SolomonG, untitled, 1020 words, 1.5 hours
• Sophie, Cutie Collector, The Deal, 1669 words
• Storm King Yohan, Sinners at the Feet of an Angry Goddess, 322 words
• thatguy7244, Caught In-Between, 1777 words, 2 hours
• TheWriteStuff25, Go Figure, 960 words, 2 hours
• Valerie Rose, To Be Brave and Kind, 1054 words, 1 hours
• Zoe-sized, Wakeup Call, 1000 words

 

Don’t see your story listed here? Check that you followed my parameters, like including content tags and posting it someplace public where I could find the hashtag.

Something I discovered this year: Blusky may be hiding some posts from me in search results due to muted words. (I incorrectly assumed it would show me the posts with the grey opt in message, but apparently in searches it omits those results altogether if you have the word muted.) In light of this, I’d love extra help tracking down any I missed!

You can comment below, message me on Blusky or email me if you know of any stories that belong here. (Or if you spot any errors above.)

Next year I plan to figure out a good anonymous survey for people to submit titles, links, wordcounts, and hours worked. (I ruled out Google Forms this year because I didn’t want people to have to submit their emails.) In the future I will do my best to make a better system so no story gets left behind!

Reminder: this is not a contest and I have some hard limits due to past trauma, so I will not be reading all the stories. I have no way to vet all the authors or confirm the tags are correct. I will only include links to public stories, and stories that offer content tags. For accessibility and consent, if your stories include themes from the Top 16 Content Tags and you do not tag them, I will not share those until you add tags at the start of the story. I reserve the right to not feature a story for any reason.

 

Success? Failure? Progress! A flowchart

Here’s a handy flow-chart for anyone who has complicated feelings about the outcome of this year’s September Kinky Scribble challenge. Spoiler: I’m proud of you no matter the outcome!

 

Elle, where’s your scribble? A lesson learned

You may have noticed that for the first time, my own name is missing from the list of participants! Well, I wrote a story, but then I realized something that I will be incorporating into my suggestions for future years. Let me explain.

All writing is an experiment. Sometimes you write a thing and realize it’s best to not share it. Though it may not feel great because you’re not doing what you set out to do, I think there is good and healing in recognizing an internal boundary and changing your mind. We can revoke consent at any time—even with ourselves.

One lesson I have taken from this year’s September Kinky Scribbles challenge is something I already knew on some level and plan to incorporate into my advice for next year’s challenge—that it’s best to avoid quick scribbles on topics which need nuance and thoughtfulness, to avoid doing harm with stereotypes.

Have you ever heard the phrase, “first thought, worst thought”? It’s the idea that our initial thoughts are often indicative of society’s programming, for better or for worse. And our second thoughts are our own interpretation after we’ve had a moment to think for ourselves. Stereotypes are first thoughts, the mental shorthand and hand-me-down from other peoples’ prejudices. Waiting a beat, staying curious, is what allows us to judge for ourselves.

My point is that our initial surface-level thoughts are often where clichés and stereotypes live. Many people have created a lot of excellent resources on avoiding harmful stereotypes when writing characters outside your own identities.

Here’s the thing: most of those strategies involve time. We need time to research, time to pay or barter for sensitivity reads, time to incorporate feedback and make edits. Time to simply think things through.

And what’s one thing that the scribble format does not offer? Time.

This year, I found my motivation late in a very stressful month, which is not unusual for me. I plucked an old what-if concept out of my spreadsheet of ideas, added some characters and concepts I found attractive, amazed myself by churning out 3700 words, and then realized this story needed a sensitivity read. Not an easy thing to do when you’ve set yourself a 24-hr time limit.

I am very grateful to my sensitivity reader for bartering with me, for their quick and honest feedback about my genderqueer character, and for their mental and emotional labor in explaining where I missed the mark. They even offered alternative choices to improve the story.

The fact I didn’t give myself enough time to properly re-write and edit my work is my own problem, and helps me see where I wish I had made several different choices. Including the very basic “maybe don’t choose a story that needs a sensitivity read.”

While writing the story, I told myself I could eke by with just making it casual representation. (In other words, the character’s identity is not central to the storyline and if it was removed the story might need changes but the core of the plotline would still work.) I don’t think that’s a bad strategy, but it still needs to be handled with care.

In trying to play it safe, I ended up using a softer focus, adding both emotional and physical distance, and these contributed to that character being one-dimensional and lacking agency. Without meaning to, I literally sidelined them for much of the story. Remember, intention matters a whole lot less than actual impact.

Maybe one-dimensionality wouldn’t have been a problem if I had written a character without a marginalized identity. Writing a shallow character matters less if they’re held up against a cultural backdrop of millions of stories depicting a wide variety of experiences. It matters more when there are very few stories in the culture about an identity, and most of those are stereotypes.

None of us can change the fact that our writing choices are always going to be part of a broader conversation, whether or not we’re aware enough to read the room ourselves. It’s especially true when there’s not much good representation out there and marginalized writers aren’t given the spotlight they deserve.

I can imagine some of you saying, “Elle, calm down, this is niche erotica, lots of us have weird or harmful sex fantasies, what does it matter?”

It’s 100% fine for me to have fantasies that turn me on, involving a variety of people from different genders and identities, and involving “weird,” harmful, or noncon situations. Personally, I don’t think it’s 100% fine for me to always share those fantasies wherever I want, without care and thought for their impact.

As I have said before when it comes to darkside topics, maybe we don’t get to choose how our bodies respond to these fantasies, but we do get to decide how and when and where we play with them. How privately, how publicly, with how much care or carelessness.

I poured a messy fantasy of mine onto the page for a challenge that asks us to share something within 24 hours. If I stick to that time frame, my choice now is either to keep that fantasy private or to share it with the wider world knowing it will be held against the backdrop of conversations, activism, and discrimination taking place in real peoples’ lives.

If you’re reading this and having some second-thoughts about your own story, that’s okay. You made it through the challenge, you wrote words that weren’t there before and did the brave thing to share it publicly within 24 hours. And now it’s your work and you can do with it whatever you please. You can take it down if you want. You can edit it in place, too. I’ve gone back and edited scribbles just days later, or years later. I do mention in the intro that it received extra edits, just to help people calibrate expectations. But just because we published something one way doesn’t mean it needs to stay set in stone.

There are so many times when a story can be good and fun and worth sharing even when it’s slap-dash and low-quality. I’ve gotten far more comfortable with embracing imperfection thanks to the kinky scribble practice. If this were just a question of wanting more polished writing, I wouldn’t hesitate to share it as-is. But after hearing more data on the experiment of my writing from someone with lived experience, I know I am only comfortable sharing this story if I give it a lot more work. Even though it’s not possible to do that in the time frame of this challenge.

Have I failed?

Maybe I didn’t meet my own challenge this year, and I’m a bit embarrassed about that. I am proud of trying and of writing 3700 words in a day, even if they’re going on the shelf for now.

I also regret putting my sensitivity reader through the trouble of reading something that was hard and potentially harmful for them. I’m sorry, and I wish I had made some better choices.

But I don’t feel as if I have failed, in changing my mind about sharing my story right now.

I feel that I have been generously reminded of my own impact on real people in the world, I have taken time to sit with my discomfort around that, and I have made a thoughtful choice to err on the side of harm reduction. I count that choice as a success.

Hopefully, if you’ve read this far, you can learn from my mistakes, and we can both look forward to more experiments, better choices, and richer stories in the future.

Congrats!

We made it through another year of scribbles! This month (and year) ended up being a lot tougher than I bargained for. The burning 20s are really something else, aren’t they?

If you’d like a post-event pep talk full of compassion and meant to help calibrate expectations, please enjoy one from Past Elle, which you can find at the end of the 2023 celebratory post.

Thank you all for joining me on this wild ride. I’m so proud of us all! Wonderful work, everyone!