Writeoff has started! · 7:11pm Aug 16th, 2014
You've got about 23 hours from the time of this post to enter the August Writeoff — a mere 400-750 ponyfic words on the theme "Famous Last Words."
As previously mentioned, I'm ponying up some modest prizes this round — there could be as much as $15 $35 in it for you! (UPDATE: Thanks to an awesome additional donation from yamgoth, prizes have been increased!) And completely aside from prize money, historically every story entered has gotten some excellent reviews and constructive critiques; watch this thread for discussion and feedback.
EDITED TO ADD:
This post is getting some signal boosts, so here's a little more detail. Rules are here. You submit the story at the writeoff.me website — you'll have to create an account there, which takes just a minute or two. At the time of submission, you can put what name you'd like the entry to appear under, so it can be either anonymous or nymous.
Entries will be judged by the community over the following week — anyone who wants to register a writeoff.me account can read and rate the entries (including contestants, who are prevented from voting on their own stories). Stories are presented anonymously during the judging period — you must not reveal what you wrote (or post it elsewhere) until judging finishes on Sunday, Aug. 24.
I'm starting to feel self-conscious about offering such tiny prizes, but I'm not sure how much more I can budget. If you think this sounds like a cool idea and don't plan to compete yourself, a bigger prize pool would be kinda neat. Feel free to post in the competition discussion thread (or PM me as the current prize offerer, I guess) if you want to up the ante. 
Fame, Fortune, and Fifteen Bucks!
I think I might have been the one who submitted that prompt. I can't remember. I almost always submit prompts and then forget when the actual contest is.
LET'S DO THIS!
2375186 It was one of mine, actually. Likely the only thing I'll contribute this time around, as my brain hurts trying to come up with something for my own freaking prompt.
I see nothing in the rules about it having to be ponyfic...
Submitted! I have no idea how well this is going to go!
2375201
(*skims the rules*) This is true, but also, it's a community-judged event, and given that every story ever submitted to the writeoffs has been MLP fanfiction, original works are likely to be looked at quite strangely.
I'm not sure whether the rule omission is an oversight or whether it's by design. RogerDodger would be able to answer that if you're curious enough to ask here.
2375270
Hurrah!
y'know, I could probably donate some sort of prize to your contests once in a while too...
That's, like, sixty McDonald's chicken nuggets worth of dollars!
Now I just have to write something.
2375577
But if you want to chip in with the prizes, that would be awesome — it might even boost the prizes up from "coffee money" to "pizza money"!
They're not "my" contests — writeoff.me is run by RogerDodger, and I've just enjoyed it enough that I want to give something back to it and give it a little signal boost.
Here's the current prize breakdown. Another $5 would let me double First Place. Another $10 would let me double First Place and Bouquet Place. Another $25 would let me double all the prizes. Beyond that, I'd start thinking about offering second-place awards. That would be my suggestion, but of course, if you're chipping in prizes you get full control over what they're earmarked for.
And it doesn't have to be cash! I know you've got cool merch people need to know more about.
2375738
That's two whole months of one McNugget per day!
I just cranked out a bunch of entries. :B Some of them are even under the word limit!
Ooh, thanks for the notif. I always manage to miss these things. I'll enter, if I can think of anything.
(750 word limit? Yikes.)
Sadly, that prompt isn't really sparking any ideas, especially since I tend to like twisting prompts if I can when writing for them. There's plenty of other stuff I should be writing right now anyways, though.
--arcum42
Well, what I did to get ideas was to skim examples from TVTropes, starting with the Famous Last Words page, then the Sedgwick Speech one, Tempting Fate, and then branching out. Got about nine early drafts in a couple of hours that way, of which I could then choose the best ideas.
Warning: if you try the same trick there is a chance you will be stuck in a Wikiwalk for the rest of the weekend
2375751 Heh, well I mostly see your pings about the contests!
And, well I'd probably offer merch, but it's actual pony stuff! like say a tie, or a couple of pins (or both as separate prize tiers), and I'd handle the shipping too. Not sure if for this contest, since you seem to be set with prizes, but I am definitely up for tossing stuff in.
I've chipped in with prizes for several contests on reddit's /r/mylittlepony board, and it's something I like doing, so why not help out a bit on the community contests here too.
I had a what is either a stroke of genius, or more likely, a terrible, awful idea for this that I could not resist. I owe someone advance apologies.
I was really disappointed that I missed the deadline for the EQD summer contest thing that closed yesterday, since I'd been out camping for the past week. But this contest at least gave my muse the proper kick in the plot and forced me to get something out there. So thank you very much for pointing this out! I mean it!
But oh god, 750 words! I spent like 45 minutes writing the story, and three hours trimming it down to fit under the limit. I swear, anyone that says novels are hard has never done a properly short story!
<nerd>As a side note, I was ALSO inspired to spend hours debugging the courier mail server due to this contest. Seems writeoff.me uses an SPF record that "include"s mlpchan.net, which uses an "mx" mechanism in their own SPF. Courier's implementation apparently doesn't recurse properly, and so I couldn't register an account at writeoff.me with my email address. Sure, I could have just used my gmail account or something, but no... I spent four hours digging through source code and gdb traces to find the problem because I'm a stubborn jackass (I can use that word, some of my best friends are donkeys.)
On the plus side, I did eventually win, and I now have a working patch against Courier 0.71 that I've submitted upstream. Oh, and my contest entry is submitted as well!</nerd>
2376881
We may need to get some sort of special award established for Most Yak-Shaving Involved In Submitting An Entry.
Heh, that's pretty awesome.
And, yeah, I know exactly what you mean about trimming to the word limit. For the first time this month, I submitted one which wasn't desperately struggling to suck in its belly in order to just barely cram itself into those 750 pants, and that's because I had to desperately drop it in with two minutes left on the clock. Everything else I've done that short, I had to cut down to the bone.
Thanks. Sorry I didn't think of plugging this in time.