Short Story Contest 2 - Spring Theme

Eckhart Aurelius Hughes · Post by **Scott** » 15 Apr 2008, 21:00

BookCloseouts has chosen to sponsor a short story contest with a Spring theme. The winner of the short story contest will receive a $25.00 gift certificate to BookCloseouts.

To participate, please submit a story to me privately via PM before the deadline, June 1st. Make sure the story is related to the Spring theme.

Do not post your short story elsewhere, and do not tell anyone except me that you are the author of the short story. That will help keep the judging fair. However, all authors of all stories will be made public once the contest is over, no exceptions.

You must have at least 25 posts to submit a story. Even if you have no posts yet, it will not be hard to have 25 posts by the deadline. Your post count is displayed in your profile and on the left side of all of your posts.

Other rules:

-must be between 400 and 3000 words
-must be fiction
-no poetry, no essays allowed
-must be original, not published elsewhere, not written by someone else
-only one submission per person
-correct spelling and grammar required

You can submit stories anytime this month or anytime in May. The deadline is June 1st, meaning that you must submit your story before June 1st to participate.

So go ahead and start writing your story.

In the next week I will announce more details regarding how the stories will be judged.

Finally, I want to thank BookCloseouts for sponsoring this contest. You can shop on BookCloseouts to buy good books at bargain prices. Remember, when you make a purchase by following the links that I post to BookCloseouts, then some of the revenue helps fund OnlineBookClub.org.

Good luck, and have fun!

Tracey Neal · Post by **Tracey Neal** » 15 Apr 2008, 21:34

This should be fun!!

Can't wait! Thank you BookCloseouts

Eckhart Aurelius Hughes · Post by **Scott** » 23 Apr 2008, 14:11

Anyone who has at least 25 posts and is not submitting a story can be a judge. Tell me before the deadline if you want to be a judge. To be a judge, you will have to read each story and rate it on a scale of 1-5.

The story that gets the highest rating will be the winner. If there is a tie, then the judges will vote for which of the tied stories they think is best.

Remember, the winner gets a $25 gift certificate to BookCloseouts!

If you have any questions, feel free to post them. Also, try to tell any of your friends or other people you know about the contest if you think they might like to write a short story for it.

bernadett · Post by **bernadett** » 28 Apr 2008, 04:36

To be able to submit a story, you must have at least 50 posts. Well, even if you say that's not difficult, I don't quite agree... Nor do I understand the reason for this rule... I find it rather off-putting...

Eckhart Aurelius Hughes · Post by **Scott** » 28 Apr 2008, 15:23

Well, 50 posts is not even 2 posts a day. The reason for the rule is so that people actually have to be participants in the forums to take advantage of the contests. But I'll lower the required amount of posts to 25. That leaves over a month to make 25 posts.

For many of us members, it would be hard to go a month without making 25 posts.

blue_diamond21 · Post by **blue_diamond21** » 01 May 2008, 13:28

Join the 'count to a million" thread! V easy to get 50 post there!!

Dori · Post by **Dori** » 18 May 2008, 17:01

Could you elaborate more on the "spring theme"? I'm not entirely sure what that entails.

Eckhart Aurelius Hughes · Post by **Scott** » 20 May 2008, 11:25

Dori wrote: Could you elaborate more on the "spring theme"? I'm not entirely sure what that entails.

There's no specific guidelines for how to match the spring theme. You can do it in whatever way you want. The stories will be judged based upon how good they are not on how well they match the theme. Just make the story match the theme in some way.

I don't want to stifle anyone's creativity with too many guidelines.

Thanks,
Scott