Welcome to the Q3 2020 Dresden Files Competition!

“You can't plan for everything or you never get started in the first place.”
― Changes by Jim Butcher​

With the release of Peace Talks and only a single (and very lenient) Harry Potter competition going on this quarter, it's about time we dipped our toes into another fandom. A poll done a bit ago indicates there's some interest, so here goes nothing... set the building on fire folks, and make damn sure it isn't your fault.

Butcher averages about 8.5k for his short stories if we estimate 250 words per page of a standard paperback. He tends to write Dresden Files stories in first person and his short stories tend to vary with the POV character. Keeping all of this in mind, the competition guidelines are as follows.

Requirements

1. Word count: 1,000 - 10,000 words
2. 1st Person POV
3. Any existing character in the Dresdenverse (no OCs)
4. Crossovers are allowed (POV character must be from DF)

Deadline - September 15th October 15th November 15th!

Voting

Review each story then come vote in this thread. You do not have to read an entire story to review it, but you must still write a decent review on what you do read (and it's preferred that you at least skim the full story to offer the best feedback).

Voting will be done via distribution of 5 points (subject to change if we get 4+ entries) between the entries.

Authors can vote, though not for themselves. However please consider reviewing even if you choose not to distribute points and vote - your fellow competitors are doing this in large part for the feedback they'll be getting. If you review and don't vote then yeah, it might give away the fact that you entered... but it won't tell anyone which story is yours.​

 

On another note - while my page count estimates for Butcher's works were correct, I've just checked the word count for several of them and the 'standard' of 250/page doesn't really hold up. With that in mind I suspect his stories average more than the estimated 8.5k I had previously guessed at.

Doesn't change our word count target, however.

 

After some discussion I've decided to extend this competition! Please inform everyone who might be competing.

The next book is out on Sept 29. Let's extend this to October 15th - a full month extra. Give us something good people.

 

BUMP!!

 

Well I have an idea. No plot yet, but an idea. General idea of what's happening, what the feel of the story will be, etc. If I can just come up with a basic plot...

I think I'm going in a strange order here. But then that happens sometimes with these comp short stories.

 

Less than a day left before you need to submit to @Xiph0 !

I had a great idea for this - was going to star [redacted] - but alas. COVID has kicked mah butt with work. Maybe I'll try to bash something out in the next 8 hours before midnight.

 

EXTENSION!

Sadly we only had one entry, so we're extending.

I'll go ahead and get another HP one going soon, but come on folks! Where's the excitement/interest? We definitely had it at one point, let's recapture shall we?

New date: November 15th

 

I'm gonna work on mine too !

 

Oh shit, my bad - we did extend it again (twice instead of once).

I'll uh, un-cancel it. I had in my mind that we went to Nov 1st, but that was the other comp. FFS I'm out of it.

 

No new Entries - so yeah, this is cancelled. We tried folks, and we appeared to have interest, but no challengers appeared.

Go enter the HP comp !

We did have one entrant - and they got a quasi award (picked one of the current HP prompts) for their participation.