As a part of my upcoming birthday this year, I have decided to sponsor a contest with prizes, and I have been granted permission from the group's moderators to host it right here within this group. I will be judging the entries alongside princeps and diealein.

Prizes:

1st place - $75 USD
2nd place - $50 USD
3rd place - $25 USD

Arrangements can be made to bestow the rewards upon the winners of the contest in their preferable method of payment.

Contest Rules:

Entries can be of any length (even 300,000 word epics are welcome) so long as they follow the site's minimum word count guidelines. The contest is open from now until 23:59 on 30 Sept (Central Time), at which point we will close the contest to review and determine our winners.

Entries will be submitted to the Amore's DiamondBloom Shipping Contest folder, which is located under Group Activities, once the contest is closed. We will announce the winner the following week after the contest has closed (subject to change to match our schedule).

Mature stories are not permitted, but all other tags are welcome. The Romance tag is expected, but it is not mandatory for the purposes of this contest. We request you not enter any troll fics.

The focus of the story should primarily be Diamond Tiara and Apple Bloom, but other characters are welcome as well, wherever appropriate in your works.

Standard guidelines and rules used by most contest apply: Use proper grammar. We reserve the right not to award all three prizes if fewer than three stories meet our expectations.

All entries must be marked 'Complete' by the deadline to be considered, and they must be new stories; stories written prior to this contest are not permitted regardless of whether they are currently 'Incomplete' or not.

Human/Equestria Girls/Anthro tags are all welcome as well. There is no bias toward ponies only. Crossover and AU tags are welcome, but please keep in mind that we may not be aware of the source of Crossovers. We cannot properly judge a story's merit if we have no idea what is happening, regardless of how well-written it is.

Anyone is welcome to enter. There is no limit to the number of entries one author can make. Co-author/collaborations are also welcome; in the event of a shared story placing in the top three, it would be up to the writer's discretion on how to split the prize.

Please reply with questions or PM Princess Amore Dudette or princeps for questions. Entrants are also welcome to post here to alert us that a story has been submitted.

If and only if a story is tagged Complete before the deadline, we will accept requests to look at it early. This is only for the purposes of determining whether anything blocks the story from prize consideration. If one or more of us have the time, we will skim it and look for issues. If we find any, we will send a PM to alert the requestor of the problem. Please note that a message stating there are no significant issues is not a guarantee of earning a prize! We would only be noting problems such as poor grammar, unrecognizable Crossover/AU, lack of obvious shipping, and similar.

We look forward to reading your entries! Make sure to have fun. If you aren't enjoying the story you are telling, it will show.

Edit: October 12th, 2017

The results are in!

1st Place: Amour Fragile by Quillamore
2nd Place: Bleached Blondes Beach Bond by Cryosite
3rd Place: Diamond's Diary by chillbook1

Congratulations to all the winners of the contest, and a special thanks to every participant. This has been a wonderful event, and I look forward to reading more from all of you in the future.

I'm in. One of my low-key favourite ships.

This sounds fun. Let's see what I can come up with.

I'm tempted as well.

Ooh... this sounds tempting...

Question. Do Apple Bloom and Diamond Tiara have to end up together for the story to be accepted?

It's not diamondbloom it's appletiara.

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That is generally the intent with shipping.

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I already had cover art commissioned.

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I always thought of shipping as an outsider's desire to see the characters get together, whether it actually happens or not. But, this is your contest and I can accept this as an excuse to write another chapter.

Well I'm two months free of writing about the best filly! And I really should get to it, shouldn't I? We want to avoid withdrawal!

And, that filly is just so great she's perfect to write.

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Just learned about this little thing, and just submitted my story to the folder.

Worth a shot!

Will be adding mine soon. Couldn't resist one of my fav ships and so much thanks to everyone involved for more stories to read about these two

and Happy Birthday in advance, Amore!

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Out of curiosity, checked the featured page for chillbook1's recent addition, and it's there as well~

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Huh, I didn't think my story was featured at any point in time?

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FimFic has an auto-populated list of all featured stories (well, all stories featured since the feature was implemented, anyway). Here's the list filtered for DT by date of approval: https://www.fimfiction.net/bookshelf/1/featured?q=diamond+tiara&order=latest

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Yup. It's definitely seen the most DT stories popping up on the list within a given time period.

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The contest has officially closed. Over the next few days, the other judges and myself will be reviewing all the entries to select our winners. Thank you for your time and effort you put into creating them.

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Entries will be submitted to the Amore's DiamondBloom Shipping Contest folder, which is located under Group Activities, once the contest is closed. We will announce the winner the following week after the contest has closed (subject to change to match our schedule).

Any update?

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The final judge has finished reading all of the stories. We will be discussing the results this afternoon.