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It's now Tuesday in the UK, so this is the results post!

First of all, thank you to every single one of the 18 people who entered. Whether you're a hardened veteran or completely new to this sort of thing, I'm grateful to you for taking part. Should any of you wish to enter again next month, you'll be most welcome -- the format will be much the same, with just a few tweaks here and there. Even if you decide this isn't for you, I hope you got something out of it.

Apart from the truly disgraceful lack of Fluttershy in these stories, I had a good time reading them. So much so that I've decided to name two runners-up as well as a winner.

The first runner-up spot goes to Trick Question for Burning Up. It's a bit on the brutal side, but I have to confess that I laughed (guiltily) at the end. That's enough to get this fic a place.

The second runner-up spot goes to SweetAl Belle for their untitled shopping story. Subverting the prompt is dangerous, but if you amuse the judge enough then you can get away with it!

And the winner is... Pascoite for Second Draft. I loved this one, which gave me a lovely insight into Celestia's character and feels satisfyingly consistent with what we know from canon.

Congratulations to the three of you. Trick Question and SweetAl Belle are awarded the Willy Wonka Prize -- ie "You get nothing!" Pascoite receives the dubious honour of choosing next month's prompt and then enduring having that idiot Loganberry judge it. Pascoite, when you've decided on a prompt (take a couple of days if you feel like it), please post it in this thread. Then on 1st May, I'll start the thread for the new contest.

5916453
Congrats on winning, man.

5920670
Yay, second runner up!

Funny thing is it's sorta halfway between a subversion and playing it straight, since it's getting warmers to get warm.

Second Draft would've been my pick, too, though. And Burning Up is certainly memorable.

--Sweetie Belle

5920670
I am humbled, neigh, honored, by your laughter at the horrible death of a child. That said, I don't think my story was as good as CoffeeMinion's.

Congratulations to Pascoite, who resembles the Celie he writes in no small part.

5920670 5920925 5920877
Yay! Congrats to the winner and the runners ups!

5920925 It's bad and I should feel bad for liking it. But there you are.

Since you mention CoffeeMinion's entry, I'll mention that it was in the running. However, the fact that I've never read the story it's a prequel to did ultimately count against it. Although it's good, I just felt a little too much like I was missing something.

Oh, and on the feedback issue: next time, I think I'm going to try just asking people to add at the bottom of their entries whether they want feedback or not. It's not perfect, but it does have the virtue of being very simple.

5921213
I wasn't aware there was another story related to it? It made perfect sense on its own.

5921290 Above CoffeeMinion's story, it says this: "I didn't see a restriction about not writing something connected to an existing story, so I did a little prequel blurb to my long-running fic, To Serve In Hell." As I said, I still liked it as it was. But I had a nagging feeling that I wasn't getting the full value from it. Looking back, I see that Pascoite made a similar point to me (but better) in saying: "The natural reaction is going to be wondering where Twilight is." There still wasn't much in it, but I think that explains my feeling that something was missing.

Also, if you expect my judging to be entirely logical, you really are in for a shock.

5919629 I suspect we do disagree, but the bigger problem for me is I don't even understand your position. I don't mean that I can make sense of your argument but can't figure why anyone would think that. I mean I literally don't understand what you're saying. Take this:

framing device serving double purpose as ultimate purpose, juxtaposed with the experience, understanding, and immediate reaction

This sounds very jargon-y and advanced, and I don't know if it's just because that's how you explain things or if it's actual technospeak that you'd hear an English professor use with his graduate students, but it's lost on me. Like if I tell a newbie author that his prose is way too telly and just leave it at that, it won't mean anything to him unless I explain it in language he can understand. Keep in mind that all but a tiny minority on FiMFiction are completely untrained amateurs, myself included, and as much as an author must write to his intended audience, so must a critic. It sounds like you're trying to make a concrete statement, but then you tend to back off into vagueness like "maybe it wasn't the strongest choice." That sounds more like a personal preference than something grounded in best practices, but even if it's the latter, I don't know what you'd suggest to fix it (beyond the one time you said to stop the story at the hug), and more importantly, why that's an improvement.

5919804
By all means, you're fully justified in choosing whatever story you like best, but you did invite feedback, so if this isn't the kind of feedback you wanted, then you might need to put a disclaimer on it saying to keep comments very short, maybe just a "hey, I liked this one." (And I see you're considering doing just that.) For that matter, it's also your prerogative whether you care about there being a complete story arc, but even if one isn't required, I'd still think a story that does so is more impressive. One advantage I do think this one has over the write-offs is that length. The first couple of write-off minific events (unofficial, so you won't find them on the site, but they are on FiMFic, and I can go dig up the link if anyone wants to see them) had a 400-word limit, so you've only ratcheted up the difficulty level. I prefer the challenge here, and I prefer that there's no scoreboard. Maybe entrants should post a header on their story saying whether they want feedback or not. Personally, I think inexperienced writers would benefit from feedback, but it can be intimidating if they expect they'e going to get raked over the coals, so my goal in any unsolicited review is to 1) never mock the story or author, 2) never say the story is bad, 3) always find something positive to say so the review doesn't come across as overwhelmingly negative, whether or not that's my true opinion (and the balance isn't indicative—it's not unusual for me to lean toward being critical of stories I thought were very good, since I want to push the author to make it the best it can be), and 4) I don't give any sort of overall rating (well, I used to, long ago, but I stopped), since I don't want the author getting hung up on how good or bad I thought it was; learning something from it is the more important part.

And taking that last point, I didn't stack these in any fashion. I don't know who I would have picked as the winner, and these aren't necessarily my top favorites, nor are they in any sort of order, but a couple I'd highlight as my own honorable mentions because there was something specific they did very well:

MLPmatthew|419's unnamed Octavia story, as I noted, really exemplifies the "write what you know" adage, which is of course not a rule, but the emotional content that comes from experience is easier to convey to the reader and is often more authentic. This one had that feel to it.

Lil_Penpusher's unnamed presumably Applejack story does a good job of using sentence construction and word choice to complement the atmosphere it's trying to create. It has an austere, bleak, unadorned feel to it, and only that last sentence, as a fragment, breaks the pattern,right where it needs to be broken.

Prane's "Warm, Warmer, Warmest" pushes the climax right to the last line and essentially has no denouement, and that very well mirrors Fleur's own emotional line, where she so desperately wants to be angry, only giving that up at the last moment.

SweetAIBelle's unnamed Sweetie Belle story and KwirkyJ's unnamed Sunset Shimmer story I'll lump together because they both do very good character voicing and slide a joke in at the end that's not a throwaway line, but a reinforcement of that characterization.

CoffeeMinion's "Hell Awaits" is similar to Lil_Penpusher's in that it has strong atmosphere, but it's a different one in this case, with a sense of foreboding.

As to next month's prompt... I'll stew on it a bit. I have... 6 days? Damn. I was thinking something like "bad things always come in threes," but I think the word count would force people into the comedy route, since tragedy without the space for setup just feels like a huge road map to melodrama, and when you have to set up three things...

I'll come up with something that's ultimately stupid.

5883631 Aww, discovered this just a few days too late to try it out! Oh well.

5921969
Think of it more as a few days early, since the next contest is at the beginning of May!

--Sweetie Belle

5922005 That's true! I'll be sure to join in that one.

5921809

you did invite feedback

Indeed, and nothing that was posted went against what I said at the start. It's entirely my responsibility that I didn't foresee what happened.

Maybe entrants should post a header on their story saying whether they want feedback or not.

This is probably the way I'll go for the May edition. I'll probably also adopt Prane's suggestion of asking for feedback comments to be descriptive rather than score-based -- that fits in nicely with this event's lack of leaderboards etc.

As to next month's prompt... I'll stew on it a bit. I have... 6 days?

Only 30 days in April, so nope! As long as you choose something by Sunday (30 April), that will be fine. You've already thought about it more deeply than I did with this month's prompt!

5922011
Welcome! Here's the Rules, Q&A and Suggestions thread. If you have any questions or comments that you'd rather not post publicly there, my PMs are open.

5922438 Already read through them all! No questions yet, thank you for the welcome!

5922438 Well, I posted that yesterday. I now have 5 days until Monday.

5923391 Ah, but I need to get the thread started on the 1st, and it's already the 1st here while it's still the 30th for you... (I'm being silly, of course. I don't care about a few hours with a three-week timescale, and I'll probably start the thread slightly early anyway to make sure I don't forget to do it!)

I apologize for the delayed responses here, but I do appreciate the feedback.

5918077

it's even a tad misleading. Since you chose to focus on this as a pet play date, it set that up as a basis for what would follow, but it didn't end up mattering. She could have been baking for anything, and it would have turned out the same.

To be perfectly honest, I didn't really mean for the pet play date to be the focus, I kind of just threw that in there while touching it up. (My train of thought went something like this: "Hmm, how can I make this warmer and fluffier than just Pinkie baking cookies? Oh! People like pets, they make things warm and fluffy. Maybe I should add that somewhere.")

So it's a nice little fluff scene of Pinkie using her special senses to do some baking, but it's nothing of consequence, which is the kind of thing I'm looking for. But if that's all you wanted it to be, then no harm done.

Glad to be of some slight service.

p.s
Belated congratulations on winning this prompt!

5918410

Technical (Correctness) : 6

Faultless.

I'm glad you appreciate my little picture, even though it's not very memorable.

5921397

if you expect my judging to be entirely logical, you really are in for a shock.

Considering the informality of these flashfic prompts, I like your style.

One other rule you may consider to make sure as many people as possible get to choose prompts: restrict how often someone can. Say the same person wins two months in a row. After the first one, it might be better to say you liked his entry the most (he'll appreciate the recognition), but move on to your next favorite story for choosing the following month's prompt. Or if the same two or three people keep cycling through winning, make it so the same person can't choose the prompt twice within three months or six months or whatever. This is one thing that's hurt the write-offs, because you can usually pre-emptively assign one or two of the medals to the same people, limiting what's available to everyone else, and it's discouraged new participants in the past. Though I'm led to understand there's less emphasis on who wins these days, but I'm not sure I believe that, as it was pretty pervasive to the atmosphere for a long time.

I decree that the prompt for May shall be:

Laugh so you don't cry

There are obvious sad/tragic uses, but I'm interested to see what other ones people come up with.

5928020
That's an interesting point -- though of course it would mean you couldn't win next time round! Still, I do like the idea of giving as many people as possible a shot.
5928022
Seems fine to me. So let it be written, so let it be done. I'll get the post up very shortly!

5928696 Absolutely, it would mean I can't win next time. But I'd fully support that. It might mean people who were automatically excluded from winning wouldn't bother entering (which I why I'd still recommend saying they were your favorite or runner up or whatever, if that's the case, so they can still "win"). I'd rather see a larger cross-section of participants getting that honor, and it'll lead to more diverse prompts as well.

5928882 I've adopted your suggestion as of May's contest, so we'll see how it goes.

5928945 I think it'll be fine. No telling how often it'll actually come into play, but it's a good safeguard. And I do intend to enter one this month.