Winter Writing Contest 2014

The time has come again for the FAKKU! Writing and Fanfiction section's annual Winter Writing contest. If you believe your literary abilities are exceptional, then it may be worth your effort to try out and submit any kind of original written work from poetry to prose. Winners will receive some unique prizes this year, in addition to fame and respect. You can discuss the contest and find the rules and guidelines to the contest in this thread.

The contest will accept entries until its deadline which is 00:00 of New Year's Day, the 1st of January, 2015 (EST, GMT-5). Submissions posted after this date cannot be included, so please hurry to submit your entry and join in on the fun!

It is my honor to have the privilege of hosting this competition alongside one of last year's winners, xninebreaker, in addition to our resident Ojou-sama, Cinia Pacifica aka Rise-chan. So, please participate, prepare your submissions, and remember to have fun in this most exciting and activity-filled time of the year!

Rules

1. 2000 word limit.

2. The theme this year will be: Morals. Provide the judges and your readers with a lesson learned because of your entry. What kind of moral you decide to write about is entirely up to you and they don't have to be only positive messages either. A moral of charity and a moral of frugality are equally valuable in teaching us life lessons.

3. It can be any kind of creative writing - stories and poetry are welcome.

4. It must be your own work. We will be looking very closely at your words for anything that has been plagiarized.

5. Please avoid having someone else edit/improve/fix errors in your entry. It goes against the spirit of the contest in questioning whether your submission is truly your original work.

6. Keep posts in this topic relevant. Comments are allowed, and submissions should be posted here as links to separate Writing and Fanfiction forum threads. Details can be found in the post below.

7. Please try to include the following tag [Winter Contest Entry 2014] at the front of your entry's thread title. An example would be "[Winter Contest Entry 2014] Fakku's Wonderful Christmas".

8. Each contestant is allowed to submit a maximum of one (1) entry.

Deadline

The deadline for entries is 00:00 of New Year's Day, the 1st of January, 2015 (EST, GMT-5). Entries after this time will have to be disregarded.

Judging

A panel of three judges - xninebreaker, Cinia Pacifica, and myself - will analyze the submissions very carefully, select the ones we find the most exemplary, explain the reasoning behind them, and declare the winner of the Judge's Choice award. There will be a runner-up selected for this award who will be commended for their close placement.

There will also be a public poll on the selection of top picks come January so that everyone gets their say. The winner of the public opinion on Fakku will receive the Reader's Choice award. The user receiving second in the polls will be a runner-up for this award who will also be commended for their close placement.

Prizes

Due to popular demand and the fun of it all, I will be returning with my personally written 3 stanza poem dedicated to the winners, and a limerick to the runners-up.

But seriously, and additionally, the winner of the Judge's Choice and Reader's Choice awards will each win up to $25 in purchase value towards items on the FAKKU Store, J-List, or other online retailers within reason.

Those in the runners-up positions will win their choice of any one (1) current or future digital FAKKU publication, a $10 value. For a list of current and planned releases, check this spoiler:



Of course, the winners will also gain the praise of the Writing and Fanfiction section.

_________________________________________________________________

Ask any questions you may have in this thread. You may PM one of the judges instead if you would like.

Also, please try to leave some comments on the entries of the participants, whether constructive or supportive. It doesn't matter whether you're a fellow writer, a participant yourself, or someone who barely writes and just reads; writers enjoy comments and feedback from almost anyone.

So please give it a shot and get your ideas out there; we wish you the best of luck. And of course, happy holidays!

F.A.Q.s
_________________________________________________________________

--How do I submit my Entry?

Make a new thread for your entry in the Writing and Fanfiction Section. Then, copy the link of your entry and post it in this thread.

You MUST post the link of your entry in this thread or else, we will NOT count it.

--Can I submit multiple entries?

For every users' entries, there will be a limit of ONE (1). It is not yet known how many will be participating. However, each judge has to read every entry. In order to avoid potential eye strain, please limit your entries to one piece please.

--Does it absolutely have to be under 2000 words?

Yes. If people could make do with 1000 words in the first contest, then 2000 words should be more than enough.

--Can I change or edit my entry?

Sure, but please announce and let us judges know. You can change or edit your entry up until the deadline - 00:00 of the 1st of January, 2015 (EST, GMT-5).

--Can I take ideas, or have a parody from an already-existing work?

Sure you can. However, you need to explain it to us that you did and have permission from the owner of that work if it's a work located on these forums. We may suspect plagiarism otherwise. Just leave a footnote regarding it in your thread.

--Do I have to include adult/sexual contents in my entry?

This is purely your choice. We don't mind if sexual content is present. We don't encourage or discourage it.

--What is this poll and how is it going to work?

Depending on the number of entries, we may have multiple polls. The top users in each poll will move on to the Final poll. The winner of the Final poll will receive the Reader's Choice award. The second highest will receive the Runner-up award.

_________________________________________________________________

Polls

Closed: You can view the first poll here.

Closed: You can view the second poll here.

Closed: You can view the final poll here.

Each poll will be open for 3 days, except for the Finals which will be open for 5 days.

If you do not see your name or the name of someone you wish to vote for on a particular poll in the near future when a poll is ongoing, it is because they are either going to be on a future poll or have already been on a previous one.

Winners

You can view the Winners declared in the thread here.

_________________________________________________________________

List of entrants and their submissions:


If your name is not on this list, it means:

- You did not post a link to your submission as instructed by the rules above.

- Your entry did not follow the rules: Under 2000 words or not somehow related to the theme.

- Your entry was not posted before the deadline.

- The list is yet to be updated.

If you've made an error from any of the infractions described above, then your entry may not be included, but you will be notified of such and given the opportunity to fix as appropriate, unless the deadline has passed.

I am both honored and very glad to be judging this year. The seasonal writing contests have always been phenomenal events that bring together some of the best writers and their stories. This year should be no exception!

To all participants, good luck and have fun!

Good day, dear writers.

It had been a long time since I had been asked to judge. Such contests were the only events where I could eventually get off my laziness (lol) to read some quality writing.

And getting to reading-mode takes some effort, so... I am hoping for some good submissions this year. Hopefully, we get more participants this year - the more the merrier, they say.

Good luck, everyone.

Honestly, I was more worried about there being a minimum length requirement, those always troubled me in school. Haven't written anything in a long time, but I rarely managed to break 500 in my more active days. We'll see if I can come up with anything for this contest, then.

I will start the show with this then: https://www.fakku.net/forums/writing-and-fanfiction/winter-contest-entry-2014-deception#4329672

It might seem odd to post it this early, but things just clicked the right way when I wrote it. The theme is the effects of lying, which I believe fits the moral theme rather well. I hope you will enjoy it!

Yes, there is no minimum word count. In fact, we used to have a user who would submit a single haiku for the contest each year and it was always delightful to see.

Best of luck to you in figuring it out.



Not even ten hours in and we have our first. That's quite impressive, thank you for your submission. As a note of etiquette, I'll reserve my commentary on submissions as a judge until the contest ends, but feel free to comment on each others if you would like.

I'm still not done with feedback on the entries from the other contest, but I hope I can catch up on things over the holidays. I will try my best to enter.

Good luck to everyone.

Mod Note: I believe sticky-ing this particular topic will provide more exposure to users and attract potential participants.

Thank you and sorry for the inconvenience caused.

Oh, that's nothing to worry about, we usually have a handful of people enter with few posts on the forum. Fortunately, we don't require a post count to enter, so you're just fine.

Sounds interesting, thank you for your submission.

Huh. Maybe I'll dig out my thinking cap and take a crack at this.

ah, it's that time again. i may not be able to do much this year beside giving some entries that catch my interest a read :D

that aside, good luck for this year's participant :) /

My entry: https://www.fakku.net/forums/writing-and-fanfiction/winter-contest-entry-2014-strike#4336836

I have question about how you judges will be measuring word count. My entry is 1990 words, but if you count the ellipses used to separate scenes, which MS Word does, it cracks 2000. Is this okay?

Splendid of you to develop an entry.

Anyway, to address this word count issue, I've moved your entry over to my MS Word program (2007) and it is tallying 2,019 words including your title. I looked into this and it is in fact counting your ellipses in that overall count. Not only that, but because of the way you type your ellipses to have spaces between each period, it is actually counting them as three words. You use a total of ten ellipses in the piece. That's a total of thirty extra words it's counting.

I don't think it's really necessary to be counting ellipses in our ideal word count, especially when you are using them as a change of scenery. Traditionally, formatting isn't really addressed in the contest because the forum code only allows us to change it so much.

So, subtracting 30 words from 2,019 and you end up with 1,989 including the title. Fortunately that puts you much in the clear. However, if we count the little summary you gave outside the spoiler, that increases the count to 2,010 including the title. My question to you is if you want that little tidbit included in the entry or if you want us to skip it.

The idea of the word limit in general is to provide you (the participants) equal footing when it comes to producing a work inside a standardized length more than it is for the judges to analyze each piece in an appropriate amount of time, so consider it that way.

It's there to give people an idea of what they're about to read, like the blurbs on the backcovers of books. I don't count it as part of the story, but if this is an issue for you and the others, I'll remove it.



Thanks.

It's fortunate that you don't because it already contains a typo. Not a good omen.

Don't look at me. It was Leonard.

Google doc count says 1988, so I guess that's another viable form of word calculation.