I reread the post. That sounds like a good idea....

So we need some volunteers to be judges. Colonel Mustard seems to be up for the job, but how many judges would we need?

And should there be deadlines for when you have to submit a completed story?

We gotta work these things out if we wanna do this.

Other than that.....

This should be fun

Yes, a deadline and a word limit so Judge Mustard doesn't have to become a blind Moth Priest for volunteering. Also, submissions should be properly edited.

Bahahahaha!

I wouldn't mind entering. Or helping. Whatever is needed.

There could be a theme decided by either vote or the judge too, guidelines for the content to be written about so we could see what each of us do with the same instruction goals.

Please yes to all three of those.

For a short story competition, I'd say that the best word limit, that's typically used, is between 1000 and 7000 words, maybe 8000. Plus that should probably take me half an hour or so at most to read and make a judgement on, so if we get a lot entries (considering forum size and the size of the fanfiction gropu here, I'd predict something in the region of 10 or so entries) I can get that done in a reasonable timeframe.

As for a theme, I'm not sure if that's necessary, to be honest; so long as we have it fit the general bracket of being set in the TES-verse, then that's all we need.

Maybe contact Stargelman about it and let him know that people are interested in doing another one? He was on just two days ago and is one of the site admins.

Unfortunately it seems as if almost all of the old mods and admins have gone inactive aside from him.

I saw Rane on here the other day too.

I'll contact Stargelman. If he doesn't reply, we should follow through with mALX's suggestion. But before I send him a PM, do to guys want a big fanfic competition, or a short story competition?

I vote short story.

Short story. Mustard doesn't have unlimited free time, lol.

And I don't know if I would bother Starge with this, it doesn't need an Administrator supervising it. Starge already gives this site for our use free of charge out of his own pocket, and without advertising on this site he makes nothing off of it. We can certainly handle a small short story contest on here without putting more on his shoulders than the running of the site. It is done over at the Bethesda Official forums all the time without any Bethesda Official running it.

To be honest, it would probably be pretty easy to sort out with just one thread; I make the announcement thread, get people to PM the entries, pick a shortlist (five? Does five sound good?) and then post them up. I either stick a poll on the thread to vote for the stories with a deadline, or have people PM me votes, and then announce the winner on the thread.

Also, it does have me throwing around ideas for a Chorrol-based Read In a Rush competition, a monthly contest where people post up stories between 900-1100 words in length, based around a chosen theme such as as hunger, vengeance, redemption, night and that sort of thing. Maybe we can discuss that after we've got this first competition idea sorted out, but it might be worth doing.

Edit: Also, while I'm here, I'd vote for a story length between 1000-7000 words. It gives the writers plenty of room to play with but still means I should be able to judge all the entries within a reasonable timeframe (provided I don't get completely inundated by them).

Ok, how many judges should there be? Should Colonel be the only one?

Is this going to be awkward? Because we ARE reading each others' stories here, lol

People are reading your fanfic, aren't they? Is that awkward for you?

No, I mean that we can see who the poster is simply by looking at how they write.

I entered a story in the Feyfolken at the Official Bethesda Forums and not even Acadian knew it was mine. All my friends voted for another story.

Ah, gotcha. Maybe I just need to change my writing style then, lol

Not have my character grin and shrug so much XD

How will we manage to keep the story anonymous though?

You send them to Judge Mustard and he posts them all under his name.


@ Elisabeth - Exactly - since the story won't be about our regular characters, it won't have the same mannerisms. Example: If we see one about vampires or werewolves, we will suspect it is DE or KOB immediately. Someone else could slip one in and fool us, or they might write about something else and fool us.

For the Feyfolken, I wrote a very dark piece - no one knew it was me at all. Acadian has been reading me since forever and didn't know I'd written it. He hated the story, lol. (it won the contest though).

-giggles- Now I'm excited! Squee! Having writer friends is AWESOME!!!!

I had a ball doing that Feyfolken, deliberately did everything completely different so no one could guess. Rachel the Breton did the same thing, she won it like 6 years running and every year you'd try to guess which one was hers - couldn't tell which one was her at all, I was surprised every time. I broke her winning streak with that dark story (about the 6th House in Morrowind) - see, I only write about Oblivion, so no one guessed. People see what they expect to see.

I'm exciiiteeeed!

I wanna write! I wanna participate!

You guys will never tell it was me who wrote my story

Anyway, so the entire story has to be how long?

3,000-7,000 words tops usually, I think Mustard said he'd consider 8,000 but let him tell you.

HEY KOB, you can't start writing the story till the contest starts, that would be cheating.

I haven't started yet. I don't even know what I'll be writing about

That is one of the reasons why in these contests they usually give a subject like "A day in the life of..." so no one knows what it is going to be about till the contest starts so there can't be any cheating. (We all have the same amount of time to write the same number of words about the same relative subject matter).

I'm happy that there is a theme. My story would never get finished if a theme isn't come up with. I have a really bad case of writer's block.

I've got (what I think is) a pretty good theme for the competition, which should hopefully allow for plenty of room for creative manouevre whilst still giving a reasonably useful/clear guideline.

Actually, shall I go and post up the competition thread? Give people a timeline of a month to write a story between 3 and 7 thousand words and then announce the winner two weeks later? Seems to me to be a reasonable timeframe to do it all in, but I'm willing to listen to ideas.

I like it.

A month to write sounds great, that allows for RL issues to still be handled.

Go ahead. The sooner we start with this, the better

He's already started it, it is in the FanFic section.