Art by rice-flowers

Welcome, one and all, to the AppleDash Warm and Fuzzy Feelings Event!

A lot of us have been stuck inside for the better part of the year, and might need a little bit of a pick-me-up. That's why this event has one, simple mission:

Bring a little warmth and happiness to someone's day!

During the month of August, each person who writes an AppleDash (romance or friendshipping) story full of the warm-and-fuzzies and publishes it to FIMFiction will receive $15! It's that simple! This is not a contest and there’s no judging involved!

Beyond that, there's no prompt, so feel free to write a grand adventure, cute romance, captivating mystery, or whatever else your heart desires!

In a nutshell: someone should be able to read your story and walk away feeling better about their day.

• Each qualifying entry (one per person) will receive $15.
• There's a hard limit of 100 entries that may qualify for prizes. (The amount remaining is at the bottom of this post!)
• I (KrazyTheFox) reserve the right to decline to award prizes to insincere entries (trollfics, entries that are not stories, low/zero-effort entries, etc) if necessary.
• Multiple entries are allowed, but only one prize may be claimed per person.
• Stories must be published to FIMFiction and marked "complete" during the month of August.
• Stories must have a minimum length of 1500 words. There is no word limit.
• The following tags are forbidden: Dark, Death, Gore, Violence.
• Stories may contain sad elements, but the story should end on an uplifting note, keeping with the theme of the event.
• No humans in Equestria, ponies on Earth, or Anthro. Humanized and EqG are allowed.
• Mature entries are allowed.
• Romance is not required and other Applejack or Rainbow Dash ships are allowed.
• While other Applejack or Rainbow Dash ships are not forbidden, do bear in mind that this is still an AppleDash event and the primary focus should be interactions between the two.
• The spirit of the rules should be followed. I can't account for every edge case or tip-toeing around the rules here. If still in doubt, ask—I’m happy to clarify things.
• The deadline is 11:59PM at the International Date Line (UTC-12) on August 31st, 2020. (Deadline Countdown)

Please ask for clarification on any of these rules if you have any questions about them.

Add your entry to the group's submissions folder, then message me with a link to your story. From there, I'll work with you to figure out the best way to get your prize to you via PM!

I hope you're as excited about this event as I am! If you have any questions or need any clarifications, feel free to contact me—either in this topic, through PM, or on the AppleDash Discord server. Good luck!

I'd like to see everyone who'll participate in this event and read their fanfics. Me needs a fluff ApleDish fic to read. I'm not participating though, since I can't write.

7292310
You should give it a shot if you're up for it! I especially want to encourage people who haven't written before to give it a try.

Unfortunately, my writing is way too rusty. And my experience writing romance is practically nonexistent.

So, no entries from me I’m afraid. BUT, I’ll gladly read whatever fluffy Appledash fics come out of this!

7292339 So was mine when I started writing! You could view this as practice! : ) There aren't many practice opportunities that come with a $15 reward...

7292273 Will there be a folder or something documenting entries so they're easier to find for folks? For example if I wanted to go and potentially review other entries on my blog.

7292537
Yep! I'll make one with the first entry.

Best ship strikes again. Can't wait to participate and read all the entries!

I can't wait to sink my teeth into another writing project. Been a good while since my failed AppleDash fic on DeviantArt.

I've added a counter to track the remaining number of prizes at the bottom of the first post. I don't expect to run out, but you never know!

I've gotten started on an entry! Hopefully it'll come out well!

7298121
Looking forward to reading it!

7298695
Now you can!

This event has inspired me to try writing something for the very first time. I may not have much writing or reading experience, but I'm currently trying my best to create something that at the very least isn't bad. My method of writing is probably incredibly inefficient for how relatively short the story is going to be, but I'm honestly having lots of fun trying to make the setting and characters act just as I would expect them to.

I've been working on it for a few days now and I have most of the story planned out, but I still need to write the conclusion and then add all the inter-dialogue stuff to my mostly dialogue-based outline. I'll probably also come up with new details along the way and try to blend them into the story if I think they'll improve it.

Hopefully after I've finished this I can figure out more efficient ways to write a story.

Also, holy moly! That's a massive prize pool, and from what I can tell you've done contests with large prize pools before! I admire your dedication to supporting what you love.

7299513
I'm glad I could inspire you! Half the goal of this event was to get people who haven't tried writing/publishing before to give it a shot.
And there's no "right" speed for writing stories. Everyone has their own pace, and as long as you're having fun, I think that's all that matters! (Although, as a slow writer myself, I do understand the desire to be able to write faster. )

P.S. I love your username.

7299703
Ha, that's the third time someone's complimented my name. You can probably expect the title of my story to be of a similar nature.

7299513 Good luck man! Writing can be an incredibly rewarding experience. Can't wait to read what you make.

I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask, but I'm working on a story for the event, and I'd appreciate if somebody took a look at it and told me what I could improve.

Here's the link: https://www.fimfiction.net/story/476323/rainbows-apple-placeholder-name
The viewing password is 'crystalskittles'.

If someone could help provide a good name or description, that would be great as well.

7309456 Well, I've not read it, but as a start it'll need to be longer; stories need to be at least 1K words long to publish. 750 won't work, no?

I'll try and take a more thorough look later when I'm not in a zoom meeting!

7309457

The story isn't done yet, though I appreciate that you're willing to take a look at it.

7309458 Hey hey; looks okay. It's hard to comment too much on it since it's incomplete, but I'll do my best.

Since it looks like you've got a bit of a semi-adventure vibe, I'd probably instinctively recommend trying to consolidate a lot of your somewhat disparate sections together into maybe one or two larger, more condensed sections to avoid jumping from one conversation to another. It might help you with flow a bit. A few short sections to break up larger ones will probably be fine (might even improve pacing) but it seems to me to be quite broken up atm.

I'd personally recommend having Applejack just say 'I' instead of 'ah', but I appreciate that this is something of a stylistic thing. I kept getting flak for it when I was a younger wee author though.

You seem to rely on dialogue for exposition a bit. Whilst that's fine, you might want to consider looking at non-dialogue options to provide context as well, though description and implication.

Hope that helps you a bit.

7292273 Here be thy entry.

TComing Home & Leaving With More

• MLP: FiM
• Romance
• Drama
• Slice of Life

After six months living in faraway Griffonstone, Rainbow Dash returns to Sweet Apple Acres to reunite with a friend she still harbours intense feelings for.

• Sex
• Rainbow Dash
• Applejack
• Rarity

HapHazred · 6k words  ·  98  9 · 1.7k views

Like I mentioned a while back; I don't actually want the prize money for this one. If you could do either one of two things for me with it, it'd be great; either donate it to the Sir Bobby Charlton foundation or recycle it and inject it into prizes for either this or a future contest. I don't particularly mind which since both are good causes as far as I'm concerned.

Consider this the like, one time I'm nice per year.

EDIT: Oh, and if you do recycle the money into the contest, be sure to send an ominous message with it along the lines of 'the grey avocado send their regards' or something. It'll be great, trust me.

Just a couple days left in the event!

Just to make sure I'm not missing anyone, please double check the event folder and let me know right away if your story isn't in it.

For those of you waiting for a reply from me, I've been very busy lately, but I will do my best to read/comment/contact you this weekend. As long as you've let me know you have a story or it's in the folder, I've already got a prize reserved for you. Sorry this is taking a while for some of you, but thank you for the patience!

Also, if your story requires manual approval and is stuck in that queue, send me a message and I'll make sure it counts for the event!

Well, this definitely gave me no shortage of stories to enjoy.

Added several to my library.

Writing for this event was quite a journey, but I did the best I could with the time I had. Hope it brings a smile to those reading :)

I'm so glad my story got approved, and I can't wait to write more in the future! Thank you so much for this event!

It took me forever, but I've successfully written my first story! It was a nice experience, but I'm quite relieved that it's finished. Now I get to relax, read the other entries, and anxiously await reception to my own. It has been stuck in the approval queue since yesterday, but hopefully it won't stay there too much longer. For anyone who is interested in learning about how a total noob writes, I'll be making a blog post with some details about my writing process and thoughts on the story.

Thank you for the writing opportunity!

And that's a wrap, folks (for writing, anyway)! First off, I want to thank each and every one of you for participating in this event—I am beyond thrilled with the turnout. Altogether, you wrote an incredible 41 stories. And there's even a couple more still on the way due to granted extensions! That's more than double the previous record for any AppleDash event we've held. I'm absolutely blown away.

I've received so many wonderful and positive comments from entrants (and sometimes non-entrants!) throughout this whole thing that have really made my month. On top of that, I am truly privileged to get to read so many heartwarming stories (and I have quite the mountain to get through now ). What's more, nine people took the opportunity to submit their first stories to this site, so please give them an extra round of applause (and a warm welcome)!

I will be reading and leaving a meaningful comment on every entered story by this weekend, so if I haven't managed to get to yours yet, just hang on a little longer—there's a lot of stories for me to get through!

Once again, thank you all so much for contributing to this event. I cannot overstate how much that means to me.

Welp, my entry died in a hole.

7317933 Cheers man. No joke, this was like the most wholesome event I think I've ever seen in my whole time on FimFiction.

My entry is still in the submission queue. Soon. Hopefully!

I'm sorry this is taking so long to get through. I will get through all the entries, but life keeps getting in the way with stuff that I really can't put off (like the very sudden need to find a new job and move at the same time). Thank you all for your continued patience—I have not forgotten about the rest of the entries.

7329369
I didn’t realize there was still more to come...

7329391
All the stories from the event (minus a couple that got extensions) are in the folder. I simply haven't had time to read them all so I can hand out rewards.

7329401
Ah.

like the very sudden need to find a new job and move at the same time

you doing ok?

7329493
Yeah, just a lot of poorly timed things happening all at once. Work called everyone back into the office on very short notice due to some politics, just when it was looking like they'd be fine with us working from home long-term. Then my sister called up with a need for a new place to stay. My place is too small, so I need to move to a bigger apartment, even if it's only for a short term stay for her. There's a few other things that also happened, but I don't need to go into all my problems here. It's just all at a time when I figured I was safe to run this event because everything looked stable and I'd have plenty of time to do it (I was originally planning to do this around April-ish, but too much was uncertain then).

7329515
Sounds about right for 2020, honestly. Just can't seem to give anyone a break.
Just don't let this put too much pressure on you, that'd go against your own event of being warm and fuzzy!

Take care, pony friend. I'm sure nobody minds a delay for very valid 2020 reasons

7329515
It's been some time, hope life is getting into place

7375546
Getting there! Just about done with my move, so I should have a lot more time soon. Still need to find a job, but at least I won't be juggling two major life events at once. I'm so sorry this is taking so long to get to, everyone, and I sincerely thank you for your endless patience.

Hi guys, there will be another contest anytime soon?

7419095
Probably not sooner than a few months out at the very least (for me, anyway). I'm finally about to start my new job, so I can start saving up for one (lost a fair bit of would-be contest money due to significantly reduced work hours).

Also, I still need to wrap up this event, which I really hope I'll have the time and mindset to do soon. (I'm so sorry, everyone. )