Halloween Short Story Contest 2 (HSSC2)

Alright, the people have spoken. We are running another Halloween short story contest, with the theme of Personal Horror. Personal horror is a combination of Psychological Horror and Horror-of-personality . The mixture of the normal and the horrific, in other words. Splatter is not the objective. Normal people in horrific situations is.

Rules are as follows:

1. NO FANFICTION: I'm putting my foot down on this one. You cannot use settings, people, or concepts from other works of fiction. I will, however, allow exactly four lines of one song to be used as set-piece. Use of fanfiction disqualifies you immediately and makes the judges sad pandas. Use of videos is likewise prohibitas, and only one picture, taken by yourself, may be used. Writing stories is about words.

2. While we have a certain amount of free run here with the T&C, excessive splatter earns you a DQ. Gore has its place, but torture and and SAW-like 'splatterporn' do not.

3. Entries will be no longer than 7000 words. If your story is utterly incredible, you may petition the judges to allow a continuation. This is a SHORT story competition.

4. The contest will be scrapped unless three judges step forward and U2U myself. You will keep yourselves anonymous.

5. Persons lacking writer status shall U2U Intrepid, so that writer status may be awarded.

Entries may be submitted from the time of this posting up to 2359 of the 29th of October, 2008. Please U2U myself or Intrepid for clarification. There will be prizes (yay).

DE

I´m game. and look forward to reading, writing for and promoting the contest

You know, I've had a horror story on the back burner for awhile now. It's like my muses won't even speak to me till I finish it. This will give me a good reason to get serious with it. I'll try to knock it out this weekend

Advice, reposted from the last contest:

1. Please put all your work in one place. Part one and part two should be in the same thread, if not the same post. Saves them the trouble of hunting around for it, and makes the work they have to do look less intimidating.

2. Get someone to proofread your work. You can't see the mistakes, and they do. For instance, I sometimes skip entire sentence ends to get started on the next one.

3. There are a lot of very fine, very free word processors out there that you can use, and that come with spell and grammar checks. It's kinda dumb to lose points on stuff like that. And yes, people have lost points for it.

DE

PS: And lulz

I will report now 08's greatest horror story. The state of the union and current geopolitical crises.

Way worse than any witch story you can think of.

[edit on 17-9-2008 by AccessDenied]

I'll try one out. First time for horror so don't hurt me to bad if I don't do a very good job. I look forward to reading all the other stories from all the great writers here.

Is there a limit to how many stories you can enter?

[edit on 9/17/2008 by Solarskye]

The (LSWC) stories probably need to be un-pinned now so the new contest entries are at the top.

I was just thinking about this the other day and wondering if we were doing it again this year.

I'll get started today!

Cool, i'm in! Thanks for the contest

Looks to be a good contest.

The length is reasonable, especially to writers like myself who tend to tell long stories - just short of a novela as it may.

I think I can keep it under the 7000 word max.

Thanks too for having a reasonable set of parameters.

Some writing boards have short story contests and there are so many parameters involved it's like being in a writing class . . . run by no-nonsense Marines....

reply to post by DeusEx


I am in... I really wanted to step up as a judge, but Halloween!

Thankyou thankyou thankyou.

How many submissions allowed this time?

The story limit shall be three per person. Sorry, no flex on this one.

DE

Good luck to everyone writting this year! I remember last years HSSC! And it was a great turn out! Many great stories, and so much talented shined that It has inspired me to throw my hat into the ring again and come up with the Tale of the fall leaves part 2!!

Again best of luck to everyone here, and love reading what you guys write!
So much talent across the board here on ATS/BTS! Cant wait!

I'm in, I haven't written in a very long time so this should be a nice chance to flex my Lovecraftian muscle

Definitely count me in....not done this before, but why not eh? It will be fun, and I can't wait to see what you all write....

Cait

how exciting, i really would love to take part in it - yeah
a lovely challenge

please let me write ……

reply to post by Skyfloating


Because of all the slime that drools out of our TV sets - I put this vid together which I really think you'll like. fer shure...

ca.youtube.com...

What? A psychological thriller? No Splatterporn?!? Aww man.

Ok Ill see what I can come up with, can a retelling of my marriage count as a horror story?