It’s Halloween and I’d say I won’t be able to join the Fictioneers tonight for our regularly scheduled show, but as you know if you’ve read my post, The Weenification of All Hallows’ Eve, I have nothing better to do. So let me take a moment to announce the opening of what I think will be my personal favorite #ConflictPrompt Contest: Man versus Society.
This is your Farenheit 451, your Brave New World, your Hunger Games, and for Hulu Originals fans, your Handmaid’s Tale.
Hulu? Really? Read the book!
This Conflict Prompt will be a bit of a departure from the norm. For one thing, we will be expanding the allowable word count to 750, rather than the 500 we’ve been sticking to. After discussing it with our super-special guest judge, I agreed with her that the level of world-building necessary for even flash fiction of this nature warrants a somewhat higher limit. 750 is still tight though, so take advantage of the resources at The Writers’ Block Fiction Workshop to help make every word count.
Oh? The super-special guest judge? That would be my dear bestie, @Nayzer, whose blog likely consists solely of tumbleweed these days because she’s so busy being a Professor of English Studies. And since she wrote her Master’s thesis on the role of language controls in dystopian fiction (did I mention her minor was in linguistics?) I thought she would be the ideal judge for the Man versus Society prompt. I--of course--will not be competing.
Mainly so I don’t discover that our friendship does not extend to rigging the results
Also, you’re going to have longer to write. The submissions window will not close until 11:59 pm (EST) on Friday the 17th of November. I would advise holding on to your submissions until Wednesday or Thursday that week, so when we announce the winner and discuss the post on the following Tuesday’s Fictioneers broadcast, there’s still time for a payout bump, modest though it may be with our limited fan base.
Fair warning: @Nayzer is a harsh taskmaster so take time to be critiqued. Use the Fiction Workshop, for realsies. Please. Not just for your own sake, but because in exchange for her spending her very little free time judging this contest, I really want to provide @Nayzer with more entertainment than her sophomore essays, 85% of which focus on how well Grey’s Anatomy prepares one for a career in nursing. Since the other 15% focus on how much Game of Thrones has to teach one about the history of that time period, she really, really needs this.
Actual footage of a college sophomore learning that GoT is set in an entirely fictional universe
Okay, back to the contest! Rules are:
- Entrants must upvote and resteem this post to help our future payouts in the contest.
- Deadline for submission is 11:59 EST, Friday, November 17th.
- Submissions must use the tag #conflictprompt so reviewers can easily find submissions. You may also link your submission in the comments, but if the tag #conflictprompt is not used, we cannot guarantee it will be included in the judging.
- Must be a complete work. While the entries will be judged according to @SFT standards and @SFT does curate parts of longer works, entries to this contest must be stand alone.
- Word count may be no more than 750 words. This allows for careful review, and challenges writers to make every word count.
Listen to last weeks show here!
