THE INAUGURAL PROSE THAT BLOWS 500
I propose a challenge to all writers and would-be-writers.
Write an inflation story of 500 words or less and submit it to this site.
I hope that this will encourage many who have never written a story before to take part as surely anyone can bash out 500 words, if you hit a rhythm you can do it in a few minutes and I suggest the deadline as the end of June, which gives you a good 3 months to work on it.
1) The story must involve some form of expansion. The hows, whys and wherefores are entirely up to you it just has to go along with the whole reason why we're on this site in the first place.
2) The story must have a start, a middle and an end... in other words, it must be a story... no 'exerpts'
3) 500 words limit. You don't have to use them all, but go over at your peril. Your story won't be disqualified, it'll just have a big sign on it saying you are a tool and went over the limit even though you had a wordcount and 3 months to make it right.
There is no rule on explicit material. You are free to be as explicit as you like (unless Luther objects to me posting links to explicit material in which case there will be a rule.)
There is a limit of one story per author. If I allow people to submit as many as they like then I can easily see a few indivuduals making the vast majority of submissions... and we don't want that. Also does anyone really want to judge over a hundred stories?
Please do not post stories in this thread, quite apart from how confusing it would be if people had to sift through pages and pages of discussion looking for stories and how long the thread would get; Luther has a story archive which he moderates for a reason and I wouldn't want to encourage people to circumvent his authority by posting stories elsewhere.
If you submit your story to the story archive on this site it would be useful if you could prefix the title with '500 WORDS - '.
Luther has to moderate every story submitted to this site himself in his spare time, so there is usually a considerable delay between an author submitting a story and it appearing in the archive. Any story which is not available somewhere on the internet by deadline day will not be put forward for voting, so don't expect a story submitted to this site to be available in time for voting. In order to ensure your story can be read and voted for, and protect Luther's sanity, you should submit it to a third party site as well. Deviant Art, Rapidshare, Writing.com... anywhere's OK as long as it can be linked to.
Submission will take place during the last week of June... the 24th to the 30th.
Stories made available on the internet before the Wednesday the 24th of June will not be eligible
Stories not available on the internet after Tuesday the 30th of June will not be eligible
The reason why there is an earliest date for submission is that we want all stories so be submitted in a short space of time, so that they can all be considered equally and early birds don't get an advantage.
In order to submit a story, you must make me aware of it's existence and location. The best way to do this is to PM me on this site. I can't take responsibility for hunting down messages sent to me via obscure means (e.g. I have an account on FIR but rarely check so might not notice that someone has posted a submission in a forum on that site).
As soon as I can after the deadline I will post a thread on this site containing links to all the submitted stories. I haven't decided how long judging will take
Judging will take place democratically on this site (if this is logistically possible), and there will not be an award for overall winner... instead there will be a number of awards giving everyone a fighting chance of winning something.
Some awards will be automatic (shortest story is an obvious one) and there will be no voting for that award.
Some awards will be via nomination only, e.g. best metaphor. So I don't have to trawl through all the stories and pick out every single metaphor. After an as yet undecided nomination period, voting will begin.
For the majority of categories all stories will be automatically nominated.
Here are some awards I have thought up, feel free to add other ideas if you like.
- Shortest story (that still meets rule 2)
- Most original method of expansion
- Best metaphor or similie for expansion
- Worst use of deus ex machina
- Character you'd like to f**k
- Best introduction
- Best conclusion
- Sexiest story
- Most deviant setting
- The 'were you on drugs?' award
- Story that most makes you think 'that could actually happen'
- Largest expansion in volume per word
- Most expandees
- Most epic plot crammed into the limited space
- Story that most reads like a cheap porno
- Stephen King award for most disturbing story
- Most blissful expansion
- Best use of tension
- Best sound effects
- Most believable expandee reaction
- Story that best makes you feel as though you are there
- Most gratuitous 'crowbarring-in' of Al Gore
- Mills and Boon award for most cringeworthy erotic writing
- PJ and Duncan award for 'moral of the story'
- Most florid writing style
ah thanks... well in the top left menu you'll see an option saying submit a story... so do that and then link to it here, or PM the link to me it doesn't matter, so long as come the deadline all the submitted stories have been recorded by me and are all accessible to everyone somewhere on the internet (but preferably here).
If you wanna make things even easier I recommend prefixing the title with '500 WORDS'
lol and thanks for the lip service :) glad you enjoyed it
Couldn't we also post it in this topic to be judged as well?
well the topic would get a bit large then, it would be difficult to find them all amidst the other discussions... what I will do is make one post at the end containing a link to every story which has been entered.
Ah, ok. Are multiple entries allowed?
Ah, ok. Are multiple entries allowed?
I wonder, Multiple Entries would kinda sorta make the judging a little harder. Because you have more than one entry they would have to take more time to judge that one as well. It would also bog it down. Dont Quote me on that though as I am not the one creating it.
Anyways count me in!
Is there a rating max on this like pg-13 or can they be as explicit as the author wants?
I like this idea, but you have accidentally created a bit of work for LVKane. The "Submit a Story" link is not automatic; he has to process those by hand. I wonder if we can either post them to a thread, or if you want to keep them all private, send them to you in a) an email or b) a private message.
Fun challenge -- I'd like to take part regardless of how the logistics get worked out.
Shortest Story:
Sarah saw the ground fall away as she rose, her body growing tighter and rounder as she swelled.
:-D
On a side note, I believe the shortest work of fiction is "When he looked up, the dinosaur was gone."
lol disqualified for being an excerpt :P it's harder than it looks.
OK, clarifications...
1) post your work elsewhere and link to it in this thread. You can still upload it to this site, but there's a good chance it won't appear till long after the deadline so don't bank on it as your only way of entering the competition.
2) You can be as explicit as you like, unless Luther raises objections and doesn't allow links to explicit material to be posted here. That's in his hands.
3) Multiple entries will not be allowed, feel free to write as many stories as you like but only one can be put forward for judging. Otherwise the amount of stories might get a bit out of hand (I envision that some individuals might write 20 or so and completely swamp newbie writers who've only written one)
Also, if people could hold back for the time being on submitting anything anywhere. I might make it a condition that you're not allowed to submit the story more than a week before the deadline. As voting might favour stories that have been around longer. I wouldn't like to think that come deadline day people are still submitting stories but voters' minds were made up weeks ago and people can't even be bothered reading new stories. But this might be relaxed if I decide it won't affect voting.
I'll append this information to the original post
Cool! I have a couple of ideas I could work on writing up. They're a little on the adult side, though, so... I hope that there's not a restriction put on how explicit we can be. If there is, I'll just have to make a few changes, I guess.... Keep the original for myself or something, then... ;)
On a side note, I believe the shortest work of fiction is "When he looked up, the dinosaur was gone."
Actually, I think that it goes to Ernest Hemingway for his famous tragic tale, which reads thus:
For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.
dragon_6860 wrote:
On a side note, I believe the shortest work of fiction is "When he looked up, the dinosaur was gone."Actually, I think that it goes to Ernest Hemingway for his famous tragic tale, which reads thus
Quote:
For sale baby shoes. Never worn.
WOW. That's Epic. 8O
dragon_6860 wrote:
On a side note, I believe the shortest work of fiction is "When he looked up, the dinosaur was gone."Actually, I think that it goes to Ernest Hemingway for his famous tragic tale, which reads thus:
Quote:
For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.
Yep. And it in turn inspired a pretty neat collection of six-word sci-fi stories in a recent Wired article. Alan Moore's is my favorite, but several are downright brilliant.
If there's some significant interest in doing this, then most of the logistics aren't that tricky to sort out.
-Create temporary forum for the contest.
-Designate one post for contest rules, one post for contest discussion, mark both as "sticky" so they're always at the top of the forum.
-Contest entrants post their stories to the contest forum.
-All other posts to the temp forum are mercilessly deleted.
The hard part is figuring out how to vote on so many categories. If you could trim the list down to a dozen, we could attach a poll to each submission.
On a moderately related note: Since I suffer from a peculiar variety of deviance that I'm sure most of you can sympathize with, I often read inflationary intentions where there may or may not be any. Years ago, two entries in The Onion Horoscopes caught my attention.
Pisces Feb 19 - Mar 20Your feeling that the people you work with are dragging you down is borne out by the Norstar Telecommunications rope you'll find wrapped around your ankles.
Capricorn Dec 22 - Jan 19
Years from now, when most of the old onomatopoeia have gone out of style, the unique sound of your bursting body will still be in daily use.
Well I was going to have a poll for each category rather than for each submission and didn't think the number of categories would be a problem.
How would it work with the polls being attached to the submissions? Would people vote for which category they think this would win in? Some polls (for example Character You'd like to f***) would be on a per character basis rather than per story.
The reason there are so many categories (and I had envisioned people suggesting even more) is that it gives everyone a fighting chance of winning something. Important if you want people who've never written before to have a go. You remember whenever you used to have mock awards ceremonies at school where there were so many awards that everyone won at least one. I'm not suggesting it be that extreme but something like that.
The problem is with the poll system. Polls are limited to twelve options.
One possibility: If the polls are attached to the individual submissions, then the author could set up the poll himself and pick twelve categories that he wants to compete for. So if you didn't manage to include our illustrious former VP, then you could bow out of the "Most gratuitous 'crowbarring-in' of Al Gore" award. The could include several where applicable, e.g., "Character you'd most like to fuck (Susan)". Potentially feasible, but it's still just a hack to work around software limitations. I'm certainly open to other solutions.
that's a good idea... but I'm still not entirely sure how voting on a one-award-per-story basis works. I take it the person with the most votes for that award wins the award... but it might mean people vote unevenly. I mean I think people will gravitate towards the awards the see as most valuable, or be more favourable towards which-ever story comes up first with voting.
If they vote on a one-story-per-award basis I think it will match the way people think of voting better. So you say there are 12 options allowed per poll. hmmm.
I could always make 2 or 3 polls per category and trust that people won't abuse this by voting for a story in each poll. The thread with the list of links to the stories (even if submissions are entered into the forum there will have to be a list of links so people can find the story they want) will also tell you whether each story is in poll 1,2 or 3
alternatively voting could be handled by a 3rd-party-service such as my3q.com or kwiksurveys.com
I love those award categories! (Has anyone but me crowbarred in Al Gore? My story "Practical Balloon Magic" has a character that wears a Gore Holloween mask. Probably over 500 words, tho...!)
Hmmm.... Sounds intriguing.
Wow, this is harder than I thought. My first effort was 655 words; I managed to trim it to 573, but I'm not sure what else I can remove without making the story disjointed.
Carnatic, regarding rule 2, is it acceptable for the story to reference another one? My entry is a sequel to one of my other stories, and while I think it stands alone well enough, reading the previous story helps to understand exactly why the main character is inflating.
yes that's allowed... just so long as people vote on just this story and don't subconsciously take both stories into account.
I wrote a story and will spend some time before the deadline trying to polish it and remove as many words as I can -- I really, really like the challenge of a word count (even though I am bound by them every day at work). That rule breeds efficiency in storytelling. I think we're going to see some really great entries.
I totally understand the one-entry-per person rule, because it will force people to really put their best work together -- but I did have to choose between ideas, and I found myself wanting to write more like this. So as a creative sparkplug, this contest itself already wins!
I hope others are finding this similarly inspiring.
June 24th, eh? I think I could write something that people would enjoy :)
This sounds like fun.
To give you an idea, LVKane's "Stargazer", which I consider to be a pretty compact story, is 1131 words. Sheez...
Time to get cracking.
I've been going over a few stories, trying to get my brain around the scale of this.
"The Ringmaster", a story that I'm quite proud of for its conciseness, weighs in at 1002 words. Crikey.
But wait, there's more.
I tried to recall the briefest inflation story I'd encountered that I considered an actual story and not some incomplete fragment. I came up with "Eating Light," by Inflate123.
The count: 580 words. This ain't gonna be easy.
Good luck.
Yah, it's really tricky...I've got mine done, more or less, and it runs in at 490 about. It's really tricky, you can't write a standard story, you've gotta do something different. It's like you're a painter, and then you enter a contest for only charcoal drawing. Have to change all your normal tricks and whatnot.
Eating Light was my very first story; it was essentially just "getting to the good bits." So try to get your money shot down, then build around it.
FWIW my current word count is 378. I think it's done, but I might try to clarify things or paint a more complete picture of what's going on, so maybe I will creep closer to the limit.
Oh, and as the saying goes, show, don't tell. :) Exposition will bog you down; you can say a lot without having a character come out and say it.
First draft: 497, and pretty happy with it.
Booyah.
I'll certainly contribute a story.
Awesome :) The more the better :)
This sounds pretty interesting. Maybe I can come up with something by June.
I've finished my story, juuuuust managed to squeeze it down to 500 words.
Currently at 488 words, and I think it's pretty much done. Now I can spend the next two months thinking of a title.
I have a proposition.
Since some of us may be biased towards certain authors, what if all of the submissions are kept anonymous until after the voting? That could make things interesting.
That's a great idea DI, I think that would be more fair and people would judge on the quality of the story, not who wrote it :)
Another thing is that it would be cool to see if you could recognize other writers' styles.
That's a pretty good idea. I wonder how we could pull it off though.
Dunno, I'd think that you'd have one person you'd submit the stories to, that person would keep a record of who wrote what, and then you'd have a list of the stories at the voting place, sans authour. That way, you'd vote, and then at the end, you'd reveal who wrote what.
Dunno, I'd think that you'd have one person you'd submit the stories to, that person would keep a record of who wrote what, and then you'd have a list of the stories at the voting place, sans authour. That way, you'd vote, and then at the end, you'd reveal who wrote what.
Here's what I'm thinking:
- Have a web script running on a separate server, where people will submit their entries. Have just four fields - author, contact e-mail (if there's a problem with the submission), story title (if desired), and story body. The script assigns each story a unique ID number on the backend. For that matter, the script could even check the story's word count.
- Once all the entries are received and the contest is closed, then they can all be linked to from a thread here, and the stories will be presented with no identifying information, just the ID number and the word count. People vote by replying in the thread, or by secret ballot via PM or e-mail.
- After voting ends, someone (maybe a non-voting third party, except in the case of a tie) tallies up the votes, matches a number to a username, and declares the results.
I will volunteer to write the code - it's not going to be that difficult. I can even host it if necessary.
really... you code? that would be good if you can get it done before the start of the submission period... one of the other problems we face is a voting system. As I was wanting something akin to a thread on this site for every category and a list of stories so people can vote on their winner for that category... but this site is limited in how many options you can have for a poll.
I think we may need a separate site or something set up just for the contest, with hidden poll results, hidden authors, and ease of reading. No idea though, hehe, I don't know HTML or whatever :)
really... you code? that would be good if you can get it done before the start of the submission period...
Shouldn't be a problem. Compared to other projects I've done, this is easy.
one of the other problems we face is a voting system. As I was wanting something akin to a thread on this site for every category and a list of stories so people can vote on their winner for that category... but this site is limited in how many options you can have for a poll.
A voting system is also doable.
It would be kind of fun if this system could be used for future story contests as well.
yes... we could run them regularly, with a different twist each time. Keep me informed on your coding efforts... this should help loads.
I know you called it the Prose That Blows, but since all the stories are heavily compressed, I keep thinking of this as the "High PSI Short-Story Challenge."
I'll use that for a future contest :P
I'll compete and do a story. ^__^
I know we're still a month away from the deadline, but have we determined the process for submitting stories? A few ideas were thrown around but I don't know if there's one set.
You could just start another discussion thread (SUBMISSIONS)and have the contestants post links to their entries.
well I'll hold fire on that as double-integral is looking at creating and hosting a submission-voting system.
Otherwise, submission on here or DA isn't perhaps the best due to the new idea that submissions be anonymous. As suggested we could nominate someone to recieve the stories by email. you could even create a new e-mail address (or use one unknown to the community) to send the story from so that even the reciever doesn't know whose is whose.
We'll sort something out.
Where do we post them? Here, or do we upload them? How is this done? I'm a noob when it comes to this, but I actually wrote a story for a member on here has part of a trade, so I might submit it for the contest for $h!ts and giggles. (which btw was a great art set of yours)
if any ladies would like to rp, pm me anytime here or on yahoo