Flash Fiction Contest

Another 100 minutes before Sideshow closes the contest for submissions...

So, I'll throw out a few thoughts/questions:

1) I wonder how many submissions SS will receive? And they are going to read all of it?! Last year with the short film contest, people worldwide could vote for their favorite but the staff of SS vs. online community? What I mean is, don't you think that there may be sheer overwhelming volume? They kept on advertising for it, so I guess they didn't feel overwhelmed... plus they have a month to sift through it all...
2) who here has submitted short stories?
3) how many short stories did you submit?

Beren

I submitted one short story. I am very curious as to how many total entries Sideshow received! I have zero hopes for success, but I had to at least enter with such great prizes up for grabs.

I submitted just one story, but not until the 14th. Got a thank you, but no email yet so not even sure if it made it to the contest. Not expecting to win, but I really had fun writing it and fitting it into 500 words or less. I think I ended up with 493 and 3 of them were "Sideshow".

DonnamiraTook said:

I submitted just one story, but not until the 14th. Got a thank you, but no email yet so not even sure if it made it to the contest. Not expecting to win, but I really had fun writing it and fitting it into 500 words or less. I think I ended up with 493 and 3 of them were "Sideshow".

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Strange, the email should have arrived immediately as an auto-reply when you got to the 'thank you'-screen. I would check your spam and otherwise contact SS if you didn't get the confirmation email.

Battletroll said:

Strange, the email should have arrived immediately as an auto-reply when you got to the 'thank you'-screen. I would check your spam and otherwise contact SS if you didn't get the confirmation email.

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yeah, I got confirmation within SECONDS, all nine times.

I entered a couple of stories, although I admit I was mostly just amusing myself. Definitely don't expect to win anything, but hopefully I can give the Sideshow guys a moment of entertainment.

The only problem I ran into when entering was that my version of word apparently takes a slightly different word count to the contest entry counter. Had to trim a few words out at the last minute, but got both stories down to 499.

damn, I didn't get the conformation yet.

I suffered the same discrepancy when using the Word counter, as opposed to Sideshow's. Don't know how that works, but I changed mine to comply with Sideshow's just to be on the safe side.

Same here. The SS counter was telling me 499, and Word said 500 words, so I hope SS counter was correct.

Battletroll said:

Same here. The SS counter was telling me 499, and Word said 500 words, so I hope SS counter was correct.

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Weird, I used MS Word and in all my submissions the word count at SS was exactly the same every time. I really wanted to make sure that I was under 500, so before submitting I kept it to under 500 so I wouldn't run into problems when trying to submit in case the word counter with Sideshow worked somehow differently.

The Sideshow word counter gave me a count that was one below what I got from Word.

For me, Sideshow's counter gave me a higher count than Word did, on both my entries. I figured there must be some minor difference in how it takes the count. I trimmed my stories to fit in with the Sideshow counter, just to be safe.

I wrote to the FlashFiction email address and got a confirmation that my entry had been received.

I have a feeling those judges are going to be very busy for the next month reading entries.

I'm looking forward to reading the winners.

Almost 500 entries. That's a lot of reading. Good thing they are all 500 words or less.

I expect there will be many really good ones, though. I'd love to read the LotR entries even if none are the winners. Maybe if Sideshow only posts a few, we could sneak some in here.

I know that part of the rules of submission included the fact by sending in your story, you are giving Sideshow permission to reprint it or post it. I am hoping that they might produce a little anthology book that included one or two hundred of their favorites. Just seeing the top four will not be enough--I would like to read more of the entries than that.

That would be great tomandshell, but I don't think that will happen. I think the costs for such a booklet are too much. Those reproduction rights are standard policie for such contests. We may be lucky if we get to see the top-10 entries, or the winners and some of the funniest, but I fear they will stick to the winners only.

They could do a printer friendly PDF. You just print em on 3 holed paper and bind em in a folder or what have you.

That's a really good idea LE. Maybe they will read this and decide to do it. That would be so great!

Sideshow will be posting 10 honorable mentions entries that we can all read and vote on. The winner will receive a $75 gift certificate.

That's cool.... I'm really looking forward to seeing what the others wrote. Mine was really just a fiction version of my own situation so it was not much of a stretch. I'm wondering what kind of direction other people went in...

Should be interesting to see the winning entry...