Hi all! I’ve participated in some past discussions about tweaking the word counts of FiM Writeoff rounds. Long story short, there are two differences that I think it would be nice to see:

1. Longer minifics: How many times over the years have you read (or written) minific reviews stating something to the effect that the story felt squished pretty badly by the 750 word limit? I feel like the limit just isn’t leading to as many satisfying stories as it could. Plus, it’s a hard mismatch for FimFiction’s word count minimum of 1000 for standalone stories.
2. Shorter shorts: While this is less of a recurring problem than the above, we also sometimes get short stories where you can just feel the author stretching to reach the 2000 word minimum. We also get stories that feel more like novelettes slamming up against the 8000-word max.

Now, I don’t say this to argue with Roger about changing the existing contests. Roger has actually been so gracious as to add a new groups feature to the Writeoff site as of today! I am in fact trying to start a new group on the Writeoff site that would hold contests incorporating the above ideas.

But I need your help! I need to hit a minimum of 15 group members to get this off the ground. If you’d be interested in seeing contests along the above lines—or just more FiM contests in general—please check out the group and consider joining!

Unrelated, I'd like to see Jaxie's thing integrated with writeoff.me. I might be more willing to participate in it again were it to contain a bit less of the jank.

Also it would be nice if these group threads notified you when somepony posts in a thread you commented in, because they're pretty freaking worthless for extended conversations for the most part.

Okay, now to get back OT. I dunno about word counts being an issue. I used to agree with you here, but there will always be issues with word count. The Writeoff isn't for writing entire novels (yet) so 8000 seems fair. If you can't write 2000 that's a problem with design, and maybe you shouldn't be competing with the 8000 word entries if you only have one kay and change.

I'd prefer the 750 be 1000. horizon also agrees with this unless he's changelinged his mind. Not being able to post a well-written entry on FF is annoying and the limit isn't that far off, and whether or not you're a writeoff.me purist most of us use FF to post our poni stories here and sometimes our initially-nonponi stories.

Thanks to those who joined! The group has become established, and I’ve got its first event scheduled for the weekend of 9/21-9/22!

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I respect your opinion, as well as horizon’s. For this first event, though, I think I’m going to give the 750-1250 limit a go. My hope is to attract a similar group of people and style of stories as the Minific rounds get, but to provide enough wiggle room on the length to make the entries less cramped.

Put differently: I’m thinking I wouldn’t want to turn away the perfectly good 750-word Minifics of today, but I also know that there aren’t a ton of these. Most minifics need just one more scene, or less aggressive compression. I’m hoping that’s what this range will give us.

But I’m also doing this as a one-off, and not yet as a recurring thing, because I want to see how it goes. If it doesn’t end up feeling like a lower-pressure Minific round, I’ll be completely open to adjusting it.

Joined; I'm quite curious to see how the extended-minific run goes compared to the existing ones. I'm not sure how I feel about short-short stories, by comparison. We'll see, I guess!

(Note to self: this site is surprisingly lenient with letting you accidentally spacebar-on-the-Post-button a bunch of empty comments into existence. )

Glad to see this group made it off the ground! I'm looking forward to the new challenge.