#asks:contest

Hi! I know this may sound stupid 🙈 but could you elaborate a little more on the theme. It can’t just be Halloween related right?

Folklore is just popular myths and stories that every society, culture, country passes down throughout generations. Urban legends are modern folklore.

Here are examples of popular urban legends

Here are examples of popular spooky folktales

So for your story, you’ll want to draw inspiration from an urban legend or folktale. There’s probably a billion out there spread among thousands of cultures, so the possibilities are really endless.

Ahhh, don’t worry. Notes are not a factor when judging stories. There are plenty of amazing stories that have very few notes, and plenty of not so well written stories that have thousands of notes. A blogger’s popularity isn’t always a reliable gauge for the quality of their story telling, so it is not considered.

As for the criteria, I’ll tell you about how stories are judged. Once the deadline has passed, me and whoever is helping me as my judges will read the submissions and give each entry a score, usually a number out of 10.

Scores are based on the quality of writing, the engagement of the story, the enjoyment of the story, how well the story fits the contest theme, and general feel. None of the judges are ever harsh on a reasonable amount of misspellings or grammar issues. The focus is on the storytelling.

Once all the stories have been scored by all judges, we discuss those with the highest scores and make our final decisions from there.

I’ve talked about this a little bit before here, but I only increased the word limit to 20k because I got feedback from writers who write longfics or series wanting to participate. But that shouldn’t discourage any writers who are more comfortable writing shorter works.

Of the four contests I’ve held, one was during Christmas and another was during summer. Also, all my writing contests have had 8 weeks between announcement and due date, save for one which I think I had 6 weeks. So I’ll have to disagree about the timing of school being the main issue. It really does seem that no time is a good time.

I’ve enjoyed doing the writing contests until now, but this Halloween contest has just taken something out of me. I for sure will no longer be having a Christmas writing contest. I’ll just wait and see what next year feels like to see if I’m inspired to hold them again.