Come one, come all, to the greatest competition of all! Its... EatMeReturns' Fan Ficiton Competition! Here's how it works: Competitors must write, type, or dictate a story based on the Blizzard universe/s given. The story must be within the character limit given, too. Characters can be easily determined using some tool in most word processors. The Catch: You must use the starting section and ending section I give you. Although winners will be decided by public voting, those handing out judgement should keep the following in mind: Quality of the writing, Conformity to the rules, and Creative use of the given sections. In your submissions, include a title, the story, and how many characters long it is. To submit, simply send it to me in a PM, and I will post them here anonymously. You may not tell anybody which story is yours until after winners have been determined. Also, it would probably be best if nobody mentioned whether or not they made a submission, but that is up to the discretion of the participant. Note that competitors will be allowed to vote, and are encouraged to. Depending on the amount of submissions, each voter will be required to select 1, 2, or 3 stories. You may vote for your own pieces. OMG FRIZES (not prizes): First Place: 1000 Minerals. (Thanks in advance to the promised donation by Fenix!) Second Place: 500 Minerals. Third Place: 100 Minerals. All Other Competitors: 50 Minerals. All but the First Place Frize will be provided by yours truly, so make sure your stories are high quality! I think connecting with the creativity of people similar to me is worth the few units of fake currency. Last but not least... NOTHING ELSE! START WRITING! GOGOGO! Just kidding. The information for the first competition: 1000 Character Limit. Starcraft Universe. Starting Sections (Choose 1): a) "Jimmy! Come inside, quick! Where's your father?!?" b) Arcturus rolled to the ground, shocked. Ending Section: a) His heart began to slow. He was safe here. Nothing could harm him. He closed his eyes, praying the worst would never come. *Thanks to Z-BosoN of www.starcraftzone.com for the basic idea.
I haven't had a single submission PM'd to me, and I'm slightly worried. Oh creative member-base, where art thou?!?
Reason why this will never take off: 1000 characters is only enough for approximately 200 words. You will not be able to find anyone capable of writing something decent and fulfilling with just 200 words.
*Reason why this never TOOK off. ...why hasn't the thread been like, exploded yet? Because i'll remove the character limit if somebody participates! yay!
EMR eat your heart out. I recommend you put a character limit of somewhere around 10,000. Thats about 2 and quarter pages.
It would help if you changed 'character limit' to 'word limit': this gives writers who enjoy using longer words more freedom. A guideline for a word limit would be the length of an essay you can read in 10-12 minutes. Any longer and being the sole judge of the competition will probably blow a hole in your brain. Make it as only as long as the length of time you can read a story of any quality before losing interest. Also, there's no point asking contestants to send their entries to you in PM and then not releasing them for all forumers to see. This puts all the stress of proofreading on yourself and disallows the authors to receive feedback from the community to better their work. If you're afraid of favoritism, you may have contestants send their entries to you and then you can follow up by posting it in the fanfiction forum with your account, leaving the author anonymous until you release the results.
Just ignore the limit and do it however long you want. So far your the only other person I know who has an interest in this. EMR will get back to this when he can.
I don't want to participate in a competition where I'll only be competing with myself. The whole affair demands as much labour and dedication from the judge as it does from its contestants, and so the prudent thing to do is establish an understanding between both parties before anything is done at all (frequency of reviews (if any), judging criteria (if any), length of wait before judgment). The results of open-ended contests have always been nothing short of disappointing.
I submitted my story to him a few days before you posted, but since he wanted to KEEP IT SECRET who submitted I guess we can't really do that now. Right now I feel you are taking this far more seriously than need be. Its a fan fiction contest. If you think the rules are too rigid don't submit. Don't bash the system because no one decided to participate until now. So submit, also EMR if you have read this please PM me my submission back. I think I'm going to edit it this time.
I'm just offering advice based on experiences I've had in the past, taking into account the effort required from contestants and judges to make this a more enjoyable experience. The people in charge are under no obligation to follow anything I've said here, and if EMR comes in here one hour from now and tells us 'nah, we'll stick to the stuff I lay out at the get go' I'll just accept it and move on. Like you said, it's no big deal.
Pssh. Lazy fanfic writers can't take a challenge. 1000 characters, yes, difficult, but that just means you've gotta make it count. You can write a compelling narrative in just one sentence if you want. I vote don't remove the limit!!! I'll be submitting to this soon, if not today, then definitely sometime this week!
The last post was made over a year ago, so I don't think so. You can post your story in the Fan Fiction section of the forum so we can read it, if it's any good - you could send it over to Blizzard
