Before I begin, let me thank you. Let me thank all of you.

Over the past week, the judges and I sat down wherever the Wi-Fi was good and we weren't being chased out for "being riff-raff" or "odiferous". Then we held our heads in our collective hands once we realized we were looking at 109 entries, encompassing 675,755 words in total.

That's an average of 6,200 words per fic on the nose. The time and effort each of you put into writing something for this contest could never be so clear. As I read through your submissions, I was blown away time and time again by all the ways you tackled, bent, and conquered the contest prompt.

It's been fun -- the most I've had reading fic in this fandom for quite a long time. So, thanks. Thank you so much!

Now -- as these things go, we had to disqualify some entries right off the bat for dipping into a pony's point-of-view, which was not allowed by the contest here (question 5). Many of these entries were more than competently crafted, which made them all the harder to send away. Likewise, a different subset of stories were turned down because they went too far in the "non-pony point of view" direction without doing anything with the "story about ponies" part.

To get to where we are right now, stories passed through two screening rounds -- and we just finished the latter of those tonight. Many stories wound up relegated by the slimmest of margins, and I promise you the judging chat was alive with debate every day for this past week. In the end, we have narrowed the entry pool down from 109 stories -- to 23.

In no particular order, here are the finalists of the Equestria Daily Outside Insight Summer Fanfic Contest. If you're reading this post, you should go read these, too.

- Little Apple by Oroboro
- I Am Demon by Aquaman
- Moonlight Palaver by Carabas
- Hello, My Name Is by LoyalLiar
- Queen of Queens by JawJoe
- Cranky Doodle Donkey's Bad Asssssss Day by Einhander
- Pride by Inquisitor M
- Gazebo by NotARealPonydotcom
- Her Scarf Fluttered in the Absence of Wind by ArgonMatrix
- Veni, Vidi, Mutatio by thesecret1
- Sylphidine by RazgrizS57
- We Who with Songs Beguile by Loganberry
- Let Them Eat Grass by Cloudhammer
- An Outsider's Perspective by Kavonde
- Not In Bluff Nor Bravado Nor Loneliness by Vivid Syntax
- Changeling: The Movie by Obselescence
- The Last Trumpet's Call by Cold in Gardez
- Rise by Blueshift
- That Orange Colt With The Bare Wings by BlndDog
- What Do Ponies Call Stockholm Syndrome by CogWing
- Au Naturalligator by TantiMount
- Old Friends by Bad Horse
- Wisp by rockyrobben

Congratulations to all our finalists. Expect to hear back from us next weekend!

Let the battle begin.

I will not stop in my efforts to murder all of you.

On an altogether-unrelated note, free apples for everyone competing with me.

Huh. Well that's a thing. Am now some creepy combination of excited and terrified

3571592
Thanks, but I already ate
Please don't hit me.

3571592
You cannot murder a man who is already dead.

On an unrelated note, can you hold these copper wires for me?

3571613
All of you just keep talking and stay where you are.

If you hear a beeping sound, ignore it.

3571618
That wouldn't happen to have anything to do with these copper wires, would it?

You all do whatever you want. Deadly neurotoxin will soon fill the entire building.

In the meantime, I'll be serving some cake. It's a party. I've invited all of your friends. Come join in.

Oh, well I had fun even if I didn't get in this portion. Next time: Consider my A game brought!

Congratulations to all the other finalists. Be sure to leave your cell phones turned on with the GPS activated in an open area, and keep it on your person.

3571613
3571618
3571679
3571889

Geez, guys, all of you going 'round with these elaborate murder attempts and I'm just sitting here offering everyone free apples.

I think we all know who's morally deserving of the win here.

Congratulations to everyone who made it!

3571924 Since when do morals have to do with anything?

I would just like to reiterate on behalf of the other judges and myself, that your story not being in the finalists does not mean it's a bad story. It's just not quite as excellent as the finalists

3571924
I know, right? Good thing I'm a Plum, and can neither be murdered, nor eat an apple.

A very good list:

I'd like to apologize to the other judges, though, for not being able to get involved in the chat debates. Not that I'm much of a debater anyway, but I'm sure it would've made fun reading...

But on to the stories!

Mike

3571924
I'll do you one better.

Here, judges, here! Get your free* cookies here!

*I expect... certain favours in return.

3572218 Resorting to bribery? Tsk tsk tsk. What would your grandmother think? (If she's anything like mine she'd criticize you while beating you senseless. She's a spry old girl my grandmother )

3572411

3572527 A cheap trick. (but effective) I'll go. In the corner. Away from everything.

I intend to stand above the fray while you guys all kill each other, then I'll emerge from my hiding place to claim the crown. (I'm hiding on top of a mountain, yes.)

Or perhaps everyone else will kill me first. Which would rather ruin the plan, but there y'go. Don't say I'm not a risk-taker.

Seriously, though: I have no idea what I'm doing here. This is my default state, so don't worry too much. The best to everyone, because I'm like that. Usually.

3571583
Oh, excellent! My joy in having made it to the list of finalists is only slightly undercut by the sense of doom I feel when looking at the names amongst the competition. Congratulations and best luck, everyone. I'm sure we'll all be able to keep it entirely sporting and above-board.

To the judges, morituri te salutant.

Congrats to the finalists! Definitely a fierce contest on our hands here.

Quick question though, is there any way we could get in contact with the judge(s) who read our stories to get some feedback? I'd like to know what they liked or didn't like from mine, and improve on it for the next go.

Battle is joined. Good luck.

You'll need it.

3571679 For science, you monster.

3571923 That would be me. I'm pretty much evil incarnate. It's a job.

-M

...huh.

So, uh, speaking as somebody who came here from the Equestria Daily contest website, I had no idea that

Now -- as these things go, we had to disqualify some entries right off the bat for dipping into a pony's point-of-view, which was not allowed by the contest here (question 5). Many of these entries were more than competently crafted, which made them all the harder to send away.

was even a thing. Seriously. I was watching the rules from EqD and didn't think to look for changes here. I'm... not really sure what to feel right now.

3574620 I think this is a valid complaint.

At first, I'd assumed that folks would see "write a story from a non-pony's point of view" and arrive at the conclusion that pony POVs were not what this contest was looking for. I started getting all sorts of questions along the lines of "what if I only write from a pony's perspective for a chapter?", which got me to draw up the FAQ there a day or two later. Vetoing pony POVs in any part of your story was included in there from the start.

Should a crucial contest condition only be included in the FAQ and not the rules? I know the answer to that question now. I even went to update the rules here on FimFiction, though that only happened about a week or two after the contest was already underway. My mistake was thinking that everyone participating in this contest would at some point think to browse the forum topics, and I thought I'd called enough attention to the FAQ on the contest group main page to get people thinking "maybe I should read this."

This contest didn't have much choice but rely on participant initiative to get informed. FimFic only allows updates from groups if someone adds a story, or if a new forum thread gets created. You can't "subscribe" to threads when other people post to them, though. I have less than 300 followers here, so I can't pull an Obselescence and update most everyone via one of my blog entries. And there isn't much room in Equestria Daily's posting schedule to make update announcements relevant to a minority of the readership there -- it's an all-interests blog.

I hope this explanation cleared a thing or two up. Much as I would've liked this contest to go perfectly, this was the first time I've organized something like this, and I was going to slip up once or twice. You have my apologies.

3574725

I understand and agree I should have caught that. I'd finished my story early, and pretty much sat back for weeks twiddling my thumbs and reading other submissions. Nothing but confidence I suppose kept me from browsing the FAQ.

You folks are doing a wonderful thing here, and unless the bribes are more than metaphorical cookies, I'm fairly sure there's not much in the way of a payout for the effort you're putting in.

It's just a bitter pill to swallow when I had such hopes for my entry. A month of eager build-up to see how it fares against the writing elite, and it dies without a sound because I used a pony for a dramatic reveal.

Regardless, I appreciate the apology and I will try to frequent the forums more often in the next challenge. Thanks for your response,

-Hack

3574620 3574725 I almost made a comment last night, but as someone who really had no concerns regarding either the prompt or making the cut, I didn't think it would be the right time and I'd wait for it to play out.

Since it has come up, though, I marked down an awful lot of stories for particularly weak prompt use, several of which made it into the cut. Now that I look over the FAQ in full, I see that the prompt was intended an awful lot looser than I could have ever imagined. On the one hand, I am a very precise, literal guy when it comes to these things, but on the other hand, the very issue raised here is the reason why I have come to incline myself towards that mindset.

As much the it doesn't affect my story's eligibility, it does affect me with regards to judging. I mean, I'm not saying that anyone ought to be taking an amateur competition about ponies overly seriously, but it is something that people have invested time into in good faith, and when it turns out that the yardstick they're being judged against doesn't look a lot like what was presented at the start, there's a lot of room for bad blood. Of course, we can't know if that's really an issue until the results come in, but there are at least six stories up there that give me cause for consternation, and I've seen more than a few people comment along similar lines before the cut was made.

I'm not saying I think anything could or should be changed, just that it bears serious consideration for future events. I know that the weight of other people's investment is burdensome, and I don't mean to trivialise the effort it takes to manage a competition like this in any way, but I'm a firm believer in prevention over cure.

-Scott

3575142

I guess part of the question on that end is whether you consider the prompt to read as "Write a story about ponies" which must be from a non-pony's perspective, or as "Write a story about ponies from a non-pony's perspective."

It's kind of possible to read it either way, and your impression of how well stories did re: the prompt will probably depend on whether you read the about-ponies as more important or from-a-non-pony perspective as more important.

Which, I guess if indeed the stories are being graded based on trueness to the prompt, it's difficult to tell aforehand which metric the judges are using here. And that may or may not have some knock-on effects for anyone who took the other reading of the prompt. That... might be unfortunate. Hard to say without further clarification from Couch on that.

3575394 But that's kind of what I mean. It is how it is and for the one competition it's probably not worth making a fuss over. I know that prompts aren't a big deal for the write-offs and stuff, but a little bit of brainstorming in advance might save someone a bit of heartache next time around. You know, live and learn and all that.

As a multiple-time CCG playtester and rules lawyer, I have seen the same things crop up over and over again, but in most cases that's because game designers aren't known for linguistic talent or precision. (Anyone who has read a rulebook from Fantasy Flight Games will know what I mean)

We don't really have that excuse. But I'm not trying to lay blame on anyone – just shine a light on an avoidable future problem.

3575394

That second reading didn't even occur to me before. Good catch.

This is definitely a topic the judges have brought up with me before. Stories with any pony POV in them couldn't advance, we agreed on that much. Then the question turned to "what makes a story about ponies?", and to this minute I can't come up with any other answer but this:

The prompt itself is rather open-ended -- hard to base any judging criteria on that. There's no good point at which I'm comfortable saying "all stories must have this much pony presence in it or it isn't about ponies," because I wanted to see if any entrants would tackle a story where ponies play into the plot largely via their absence (spoiler: they did. And their stories were awesome).

Stories that do well in this contest use ponies exactly as much as the story needs them to be around. Some people chose to write about pony civilization on the whole. Some chose to constrain ponies to a few individuals, intimately explored. I only came to this answer after reading through the entries -- I think it'd be unfair to expect me to provide rigorous expectations of my judging criteria when I wasn't even sure what I'd be judging.

So to that end, I'm much happier exploring a diversity of fics that may or may not play into someone's senses of "following the prompt". Lots of folks got their first shot at writing something for the fandom here -- one of our finalists only created an account here this month! Above this contest and above the prizes, that's exactly what I set out to do here: celebrate the inspiration and talent of the fic community, veterans and newcomers alike. I understand that a few folks may be unhappy with how this contest turned out for them, but I can't have messed it up for everyone, right?

All these high-profile authors trying to kill each other, and I'm just sitting here writing the next chapter of Of The Last Millennium.

Life at the bottom ain't so bad.

3575511

Sounds like a good answer to me. Good luck again to all the other finalists!

3575604 Amen brother.

Hey, so I never got my question answered... It's the one up there with the owl next to it and has at least three people agreeing with it...

3579313

That's really up to the judges who read your fic. I brought you up with them, but please bear in mind that this event is a contest, not a review or editing group. We set a fairly aggressive timeline for determining who the top ten entries in this contest will be, and lots of us are wishing we'd offered twelve, even fifteen prizes because so many of the entries are that high in quality.

I understand where you're coming from, but give us a little more time to wrap things up on the front end first.

3580899

Alright sounds good, just wanted to make sure my question wasn't missed. Good luck with the rest of the judging!

3575142

Inquisitor, I saw your comment on my story and was very confused by your "poor" prompt rating. I honestly didn't understand what I'd missed. Now I get it. Your more literal interpretation of the prompt didn't even occur to me. This is why I'm no good at CCGs, I guess.

Anyway, I'm honored to be included among the finalists! I look forward to seeing who gets the shiny, pretty pictures.

3589316 Yep, and to me the less 'literal' interpretation is essentially 'bending' the prompt. Even now, I don't know how to see it any other way.

3575511

Just to add to the point of 'it's hard to get the information out there unless people manually check the forums', I had no idea I was a finalist until someone pinged me.

Hooray for everything!

... What happens next?

3590071
We'll be posting the results in a day or so. Until then...
uh...
I dunno. Play video games and stuff.

3590262

Done and done.

3590262
Or in my case, recover from the semester's first hangover.