Hello and welcome to the first official Congregation of the Masses Short Story Contest! The title is pretty self-explanatory; in this project, users send in short stories that adhere both to the theme and word limit of the competition with the intent of winning over the judges.
General Info/Guidelines:
Theme and Word Limit:
For the first contest, the theme will be Free/Unrestricted.
All submissions must consist of 5000 words or less.
We decided that, given this is the first contest, we want to cast a wide net to allow as many people to participate as possible. We have ideas for themes for future contests which we may run depending on how successful this one is.
Contest Officials:
The judges for this contest will be: Martin, P Squared, Magikingdra, HeaLnDeaL
The submission receiver/forwarder will be: Seraph's Fire
If you want to volunteer to join the rotating panel of judges, feel free to send me a PM or VM and I'll add you to the PM where we organise stuff.
Submission and Judging Periods:
Submissions will be open between 00:00 GMT+1 on April 1st and 00:00 GMT+1 on April 28th (4 weeks). Submissions sent in after the submission deadline will not be forwarded to judges.
Judging will run from 00:00 GMT on April 28th to 00:00 GMT on May 12th (2 weeks).
How does judging work?
Each judge will submit an integer score from 1–10 which is determined according to the following rough criteria (listed alphabetically):
*(judge 1+judge 2+judge 3+judge 4)÷4
Each judge will obviously use their own systems and it will depend on the nature of the work, which means that some criteria may be added/omitted when judging. These are just generally good things to aim for when writing. If you are new to writing, I recommend spending an hour or two reading up a little on general writing theory to avoid common writing mistakes (e.g. not adhering to the principle of Chekhov's gun).
Rewards:
The winner will receive a profile banner indicating their victory, similarly to Official Mafia. This will stay on your profile for 6 months.
This thread:
Feel free to make use of this thread for the following purposes:
General Info/Guidelines:
- Stories submitted to this competition must be written in English.
- Submissions are individual; co-written stories will not be accepted for judging.
- That said, don't be discouraged from asking for feedback from peers during the writing process, and if anything I encourage it because peer review is an integral part of the writing process.
- All submissions must be sent in to the designated "submission receiver" via Smogon PM. They will then forward these anonymously to the judging panel once the submission period is over. For the sake of maintaining judgemental integrity, you may not make any changes to your story once you have sent it in, and the submission receiver will read over the submission upon receipt to ensure that it follows the rules of the contest.
- While not mandatory, we strongly recommend indicating your interest in submitting to this contest by posting in the thread. This allows us to get a read on the number of submissions to expect from this, and it means that we can send out reminders around a week before the deadline.
- Contest officials may not submit to the contest. That said, off-duty judge volunteers are free to submit if they so please.
- This should be obvious, but don't send in pornos. Sex scenes and sex as a story device is fine, but submissions containing blatant pornography will be disqualified. Judgement will be made case by case: we're people, not robots, so it isn't as harsh/strict as it sounds.
- Plagiarism is also strictly prohibited.
- It is recommended that you write your story in external writing software before copying/pasting your story into the submission PM. If you don't have software such as Microsoft Word licenced and installed onto your computer already, Google Docs and LibreOffice Writer are both good pieces of free software that you can use for this.
- While I don't expect all submissions to have perfect grammar (especially if English isn't your first language), excessively awful grammar/illegible writing will be subject to disqualification.
- Submission PMs should be submitted according to the following style guide:
- All aspects of the story count towards the total word count; this means the title, the content, all author's notes, and all author's note indicators must all be accounted for in the total word count.
- That said, the word count doesn't apply to the word count for obvious reasons.
- The entire post should use XenForo 2's default colour and the font 'Arial' (copy/paste may carry the font over from your text editor, but it is better to play it safe by setting it manually using XenForo's 'Font Family' drop-down menu).
- Exact word count: listed at top of post, left-aligned, font size 15; the word count will be double-checked, so don't lie.
- One empty line between word count and title
- Title: center-aligned, font size 26 (BBcode size 7), all caps, bold, underlined.
- No empty line between title and start of story
- Story formatting: font size 15, left-aligned, one empty line between paragraphs, only use italics for emphasis, don't vary text colour, don't otherwise apply unnecessary formatting.
- Author's notes: Given that forum posts can't contain footers, authors notes are discouraged. However, if any are necessary, indicate them with a square-bracketted number (like so: [1]) and write a corresponding authors note after the final paragraph, including a matching square-bracketted number. Format these using font size 12 (BBcode size 3) and don't apply any additional formatting. There should be no empty lines between individual author's notes.
Word Count: 119
The second paragraph of the story. This paragraph is arbitrarily written for the sake of providing a basic illustration of what the submission PM should look like at a glance.
The third paragraph of the story. [2] This paragraph is arbitrarily written for the sake of providing a basic illustration of what the submission PM should look like at a glance.
[1] Author's note. This note is arbitrarily written for the sake of providing a basic illustration of what the submission PM should look like at a glance.
[2] Author's note. This note is arbitrarily written for the sake of providing a basic illustration of what the submission PM should look like at a glance.
TITLE
The first paragraph of the story. This paragraph is arbitrarily written for the sake of providing a basic illustration of what the submission PM should look like at a glance. [1]The second paragraph of the story. This paragraph is arbitrarily written for the sake of providing a basic illustration of what the submission PM should look like at a glance.
The third paragraph of the story. [2] This paragraph is arbitrarily written for the sake of providing a basic illustration of what the submission PM should look like at a glance.
[1] Author's note. This note is arbitrarily written for the sake of providing a basic illustration of what the submission PM should look like at a glance.
[2] Author's note. This note is arbitrarily written for the sake of providing a basic illustration of what the submission PM should look like at a glance.
Theme and Word Limit:
For the first contest, the theme will be Free/Unrestricted.
All submissions must consist of 5000 words or less.
We decided that, given this is the first contest, we want to cast a wide net to allow as many people to participate as possible. We have ideas for themes for future contests which we may run depending on how successful this one is.
Contest Officials:
The judges for this contest will be: Martin, P Squared, Magikingdra, HeaLnDeaL
The submission receiver/forwarder will be: Seraph's Fire
If you want to volunteer to join the rotating panel of judges, feel free to send me a PM or VM and I'll add you to the PM where we organise stuff.
Submission and Judging Periods:
Submissions will be open between 00:00 GMT+1 on April 1st and 00:00 GMT+1 on April 28th (4 weeks). Submissions sent in after the submission deadline will not be forwarded to judges.
Judging will run from 00:00 GMT on April 28th to 00:00 GMT on May 12th (2 weeks).
How does judging work?
Each judge will submit an integer score from 1–10 which is determined according to the following rough criteria (listed alphabetically):
- Concept
- Creativity
- Effective use of language
- Emotional engagement
- Enjoyment
- Overall engagement
- Quality of writing
- Readability
*(judge 1+judge 2+judge 3+judge 4)÷4
Each judge will obviously use their own systems and it will depend on the nature of the work, which means that some criteria may be added/omitted when judging. These are just generally good things to aim for when writing. If you are new to writing, I recommend spending an hour or two reading up a little on general writing theory to avoid common writing mistakes (e.g. not adhering to the principle of Chekhov's gun).
Rewards:
The winner will receive a profile banner indicating their victory, similarly to Official Mafia. This will stay on your profile for 6 months.
This thread:
Feel free to make use of this thread for the following purposes:
- To ask questions about the contest
- To indicate to us that you intend to take part in this iteration of the contest
- To ask for someone to help you with peer review
- Anything else you think is appropriate and relevant
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