Today is the LAST opportunity to include your entry into the Spec Faith Winter Writing Challenge. After midnight tonight (Pacific time) the challenge is in the hands of readers.

In this phase two, visitors here at Spec Faith have one more week to read the one-hundred-to-two-hundred-word entries and give a thumbs up and/or comment to as many as they like. This is a type of voting, obviously, but without restricting how many a visitor may approve. However, to be counted, those thumbs up must be entered by midnight (Pacific time) Sunday, January 13 (that would be 1/13/13 – :-O ).

Come Monday, January 14, we’ll move to Phase 3–actually voting for the best entry from among the three entries receiving the most thumbs up in Phase 2.

Before we get to the finally voting, however, we need more readers. I know many of you have already made your selections, and I really appreciate it. A challenge like this doesn’t work if no one reads the entries. What I’d like to see is more readers–particularly people who haven’t entered and who have no vested interest in who wins.

The best way to do that, I think, is for you, our regular Spec Faith visitors, to invite readers. These can be your friends on Facebook or followers on Twitter. You might mention the challenge on Goodreads or wherever else you hang out on line. You might also email the info to people you know in the face-to-face world. The more input we have for Phase 2, the better:

• We don’t want good entries to languish because they came in today and most of our visitors voted by Wednesday of last week.

• We don’t want good entries to go unnoticed because an influx of voters came because of the recommendation of one or two or four contestants.

• We do what the challenge to be about good writing, not popularity.

So if everyone–writers and readers alike–invites others to come give their thumbs up, there’s a greater chance we will indeed have the best entries selected for our poll.

And I don’t know about you, but I think this is not going to be easy. There are some very good selections. Creative, intriguing, well-written, interesting characters, descriptive language. Quite frankly, I’m impressed.

But that adds one more reason it’s important to invite more readers: the thumbs-up count is close! So please, pass along the link to the original Winter Writing Challenge post, and if you yourself haven’t given your feedback, please rectify the situation. 😀

Thank you!