Friday, December 30, 2011

Winter 2012 Writing Contest: Sign Up!

After the fantastic success of the Autumn "shootout" at the Pill Hill Press forum, I've been given the green light to run the next adventurous writing contest!  The Wild Winter Shootout will begin January 28, 2012, and it'll be similar to the previous competition I hosted, with a few tweaks from participant comments and suggestions.

These contests are always fun, and they spur the creation of highly publishable works.  Many shootout stories over the years have found homes in various anthologies and zines, and every participant receives valuable insights into their stories during the review process.

The shootout concept is simple.  Participating writers are given a prompt and one week to write a short story based on that prompt.  The subsequent week, the stories are reviewed by the participants.  Story authors remain anonymous until the reviews are final, and the reviews are kept anonymous for fair and unbiased opinion.

Yet again, we'll be setting up a team system, where 2 or 3 groups of writers will be competing head to head.  There won't be eliminations, so each writer will get the chance to write and review in 3 regular rounds.  After those 3 rounds, the top scoring writers on each team will compete for a Grand Prize, which may involve free books and/or cash!


Contest Caveats:

Participation Requirement:  If you sign up, please be sure you can handle the workload.  You'll need to write a short story in one week and then review 5 to 8 stories the following week (number of stories reviewed will depend on the number of participants we end up having).  This will happen 3 times in a row (write then review), so do your best.

Negative Feedback:  While reviews are expected to be considerate and constructive, they're also supposed to be honest.  It is possible someone may provide actual criticism of your story.  Be prepared to receive a modicum of negative feedback.

Document Format:  Your stories/comments will have to be sent via email in either a .doc or .rtf format.  No .docx files!  Please make sure you can submit in the stated formats.

Well, I think that covers everything major.  Let's see some volunteers!

2 comments:

  1. Not volunteering since that falls so close to my next book's release, but I'll be glad to mention it in my next round of Ninja News!

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  2. Thanks, Alex. Some of your followers will no doubt be interested. Congratulations on the book release.

    ReplyDelete