Event overview

Note for newcomers: While many participants choose to review others' entries, doing so is by no means required nor expected.

Please refrain from saying anything that might compromise your anonymity. Doing so is grounds for disqualification. It's recommended you do dummy reviews of your own stories should it otherwise be easy to deduce which you wrote.

It begins again.

Not sure if I'll be playing this time -- got a lot of big stuff going on. Good stuff! But it's gonna keep me busy through the new year.

Have fun, everybody! Hope to hear about some good stories coming out of this. I'll be sitting it out, though.

No Gardez? No Pascoite?
Maybe I should finally enter this time, when my ego is less likely to get bruised by the final results!

(Was thinking about it anyway, but with end of quarter here, I don't know whether I'll be able to grab time this weekend. It'd be really cool if I could, though!)

Submitted my prompts~ Hopefully they'll be interesting to folks. We'll see though.

Title Drop turned out quite good despite its silliness.

I'm looking forward to this.

3848383
One of us!

One of us!

I'm intending to have an author guessing thingy implemented for the onset of this event.

You'll have the list of entrants, but you won't know how many entries each person made. The most accurate person will get some kind of sleuth award.

It'll look and act pretty much like the vote form, having the ability to periodically update it as you go. Only difference is instead of a series of radio buttons it'll be a single dropdown will all the entrants.

When results are up. I'll have each story list underneath it who was suspected of writing it, so you can see who people thought you were.

Also, since I'm sure Bad Horse will ask:

Using computer analysis on the stories is allowed. The tools are available to anyone, so it's not really an unfair advantage to utilise them, and I can't exactly enforce any rules against using them anyway.

3848420
Out of curiosity, have you ever actually seen that movie?

'cause it's kinda creepy.

3848446
Yes, yes it is. :>

And no, I've never seen it in its entirety. I've seen some parts, but never the whole thing.

3848438
Awesome! Incidentally, wasn't there some discussion at some point of reducing the number of prompts each person submitted from four to 1-2? Did we not decide to do that, or is that something we'll consider doing at a later date?

3848453
Right. I totally forgot about that.

I've limited the prompts to 1 and deleted everything except people's first prompt submission. Apologies to people that will surely end up confused by this.

3848483
That wording implies the number indicates how many you are permitted in total, rather than how many you have left.

Hopefully the prompt this time won't be a meme

3848536
Title drop is more of a trope than a meme.

It also actually ended up producing pretty good results, honestly, even if it was a troll prompt.

3848438
Oh, this ought to be fun to see.

Submitted four prompts, as always. And as always, they are Five Iron Frenzy titles.

LONG LIVE THE SKA

EDIT: Oh, hey, three of my prompt submissions are gone. Any specific reason?

3848484 Ah, well that answers my big question. Cool - it'll be interesting to see what people come up with prompt-wise with that limit...

Will we be able to delete our current prompt if we decide to change it before the voting period?

3848654
If you go to "My Submissions" you can delete your current prompt and resubmit a new one.

3848630
See above.

Sweet stars, already? D: I may have to sit this one out too. I thought I'd have another week in between.

Piling a short-story contest back-to-back with "Polished", especially with only a week since the end of the last one, is a rough turnaround. I could cram in a minific, but ...

Looking forward to this one.

Ah, I might be able to participate. It should be good practice, whether I make it within the time limit or not. (I always end up writing something anyways.)

I'm looking forward to the chosen prompt! :)

3848670
Ah, I see.

3848438
You are my hero. Don't ever stop being awesome.

3848375
Not going for the three-peat? Scandal!

Oh wow that felt fast. But hey I'm not complaining (unlike some people...) Oh wait, I work extended hours this weekend don't I? FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF who cares still gonna shoot for it. Hear that, 3848375 and 3848692? IMA BE STUPID BUSY BUT STILL GONNA TRY IT >:I

I now feel awful for being one of the only free people here, or at least it seems to be...

On that note, the past two writeoffs I've participated in have yielded awful results, but perhaps I could try again now since I've actually had free time since mid November...

(And I'm probably going to just shit away my time on gaming and YouTube if I don't give myself something immediate to do, so why the hell not?)

As someone who's more likely to try to vote on everything than to write, I'm okay with what looks like lower participation on a short story round -- I won't get as many stories, but I won't have to rush to read them all!

I have a few chapters of other fics to tidy up, but I'm in.

Lets do this! Eventually, I have to win one of these things.

I'm new to this and have no idea what's going on or how all this works. I Think I might be in over my head...

3849067
You'll be fine. The worst thing that can happen is everyone suspects your story was written by PresentPerfect.

3849067
'Sall good, I'm pretty new too. I'm sure somebody official'll give you a more thorough introduction soon, but right now there's not even any stories for you to spoil.

ETA: Negative twelve seconds of soon.

Well, I submitted my one prompt, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to participate. After the run-up to and recovery from Thanksgiving, I've still barely touched Appellation Mountains. This will depend on if and how the winning prompt inspires me. (That said, I would like to write something for this one. We'll see how it goes.)

Hmm, this seems neat. Something to do this weekend, perhaps.

3849071
My writing is sub-part at best, so I'll probably just read stories and put in my "two cents" on them; I looked at the user/member list on the writeoff site, and was extremely intimidated. I'm not college educated, so my writing is "simple", for lack of a better term.

And this is now my biggest complaint about the polished fic contest. Like 3848692 said, we've just finished a writeoff, and here we are starting another. There's no better way to increase burnout.

3848438

sleuth award

Ooh, like a cool pixelly dark glasses-under-fedora getup? :D

3848484
Nooo my ability to manipulate the prompts toward story ideas I want to write! D:

3849071
hey :(

Oh wow I responded to Roger three times in a row what do I win

3849187

we've just finished a writeoff, and here we are starting another. There's no better way to increase burnout.

I had actually thought it would be a minific contest, given the original schedule suggested in the Schedule thread before the "Polished" fic contest even started. Not sure why it was still a longfic contest after a previous one. =/

3848484 Can we use HTML markup in prompt titles? For example would

Do <i>Not</i> Pass

show up as

Do Not Pass

?

3849324
No.

3849229
The Polished contest was an interjection into the schedule. Short story was next up.

Well, it noted it was going to be a short story in the schedule thread, which apparently none of us bothered to actually read.

School permitting, I'll try to take part in this one

3849443
Uhhh....I did! Just me I guess?

3848375

With you out of the way, now's the time for us true amateurs to really shine!

Just submitted my first prompt! Hope I'm able to participate in this round.

3848375
3849639
Bah! It is much more meaningful when you bring down the titans!

Plus CiG is pretty much guaranteed to submit something good if he does, which is good for everyone.

3850294
I hope so too!

I'm planning:

To don my bunny ears once more and see what comes dripping out of my fingers.

Hopefully something not as grotesque as that image...

Mike

So, the prompts are up, and somepony submitted "A Perfect Present". Why do I have the suspicion it was
3849187, and why do I have the suspicion that prompt will win?

3851438 I was joking on TD's blog about how we'd have to get a prompt even more trollish than last time to get entries as good... then someone posted "A Prompt Submission". (It wasn't me, I'm not that clever.)

ETA: Also, there are 37 total prompt submissions as of this writing, which with unique prompts means there are nearly double the number of participants as voters last round. Maybe we'll get a round with only a few authors, but a lot of eyes. I ain't complaining, the less chance my more arbitrary ballot choices have of nuking somebody the better!

3851438
You suspect wrong, I hate that prompt and have hated it for two contests now.

Also if it was me I would have resubmitted A Perfect Preseb get on my level

3851438
I believe I spy both a Pokemon and a Game of Thrones reference in two of the entries. Well played lads.

Been fighting a nasty flu for the better part of a week now on top of being bogged down by end-of-the-semester affairs. I'll have to wait and see how things even out over the weekend, but I'll try my darndest to get something in.

3848905

Well, every prompt is a fresh start! You never know how well you'll do until you sit down and write. :)

3852835 True, I guess. :T

3853037

Plus, I don't regard writing anything as either useless or a waste of time. I've always been of the opinion that every time I sit down and type out something, I learn something or reinforce a skill I've already learned even if the end result is--as I like to put it--cancer in written form. But that's just my two cents.