SCHEDULEThe PseudoPod Flash Fiction Contest VII will begin on October 4, 2021!
We received
260 stories in total (huge shoutout to our authors, you guys rock), which means Round 1 is going to be brutal. As such, I have decided to split stories into 20 groups (10 groups of 14, 10 groups of 12). These groups will be initially released in batches of 4 each week. That means, on October 4, 70 stories will be released for your voting consideration. The initial round will be open for votes for 3 weeks to give everyone time to read each story.
This is an attempt at a balance between getting the stories out there and giving everyone enough time to make it through all 260 stories.
Please pace yourselves! Voting fatigue is
realRound 2 will consist of 5 rounds of 12 stories each and polls will be open for one week.
The Semifinal round will consist of one group of 9 stories and one group of 6 stories. Polls will remain open for one week.
Our Final round will consist of 6 stories and the poll will remain open for one week.
All in all, the contest will run from October 4 to approximately December 16. The full schedule is posted below, click on it for the full-size image.
Some rounds may be delayed in the event of tiebreaker runoff polls, which will be posted as soon as the poll ends and remain open for 3 days.
UPDATED SCHEDULE:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kTdCoOjVF_eXxPLUqh_N7Ds6wLSBfhtND4z1ZWxA5qU/edit?usp=sharingThere will be no more semifinal round. Instead, the 15 stories that would have participated in two semifinals will now go straight to a final round, where three stories will be picked over the course of one week. This poll will be open from December 1 to December 8.
Dates, as always, are subject to change in lieu of tiebreaker runoff polls.
May the best stories win, and I hope everyone has as much fun reading as I do running this lovely contest!
RULESA special Flash Fiction contest portal will be open on
Moksha and will close at midnight as August 31 changes over to 9/1. If the portal disappears, submissions are formally closed and will not reopen.
1. The story must be no more than 500 words long, not including its title. Do not use the title to skirt around the word count. Word count will be determined using Google Docs*.
2. The story must adhere to the general Pseudopod submission guidelines. Most importantly, it needs to be a horror story; other genres, including science fiction and fantasy, are discouraged. As a general rule, we will take a very liberal view of what constitutes horror, but authors should note that past experience shows that stories which attempt to skirt the genre restriction tend to fare badly in the voting.
3. The story must be original and previously unpublished. Stories will be posted on a members-only portion of the forum, so first publication rights will not be spent if your story does not win.
The person submitting the story must be the story's author (or acting for the author with express permission) and hold full publishing rights to the story. A story that is derived from a previous published work in another format (i.e. not a short story) is fine (assuming doing so isn't in violation of copyright, obviously).
If you are not sure whether your story counts as published or not (for example, if an earlier version has appeared on your blog but nowhere else), please write (PM or send a query to brian@escapeartists.net with the subject line "QUERY") and ask before submitting. Please do not submit stories that have been entries in a previous Escape Artists contest.
4. The story should be submitted in its final form, as the author intends it to be read by the voting public. We may or may not allow minor typo corrections if those slip in, but as a general rule, we will not allow authors to submit changes to stories, especially not after submissions are closed.
5. Each author may submit only one story.
6. This is an anonymous contest. You are not allowed to claim ownership of a story while it is still in the running, and you may not send your friends in to vote for your story.
Included the body of the submission should be the title and the text of your story. Any byline will be stripped when the stories are posted in the contest, and will be revealed when either the story fails to advance, or ultimately wins. Feel free to request a pseudonym for the byline, but we will need a legal name if you win for prize purposes.
Winners will be paid $0.08 per word, making this a pro sale.
Please blog, tweet, email, send postcards, telephone, summon demons, and otherwise get the word out.
* Note: In close cases with word count and Google Docs (ex. 501 words), alternate wordcount services may be employed such as
https://wordcounter.net. Discrepancies usually happen due to novel uses of punctuation that Docs counts as a word, etc. You won't be disqualified just because of a header that 'confuses' Google Docs slightly over the wordcount. It's the spirit of the law, not the letter!