Mine wouldn't have been submitted without the extension.

 

We gained Pers from the extension, and I believe melior did a redraft during it as well.

 

We're needing more judges for this round (we're currently sitting at one) and neither Mordecai nor I have the time needed to do a full bout of judging ourselves.

Just email us if you're wanting to help out. Cheers.

DLPWritingContest@gmail.com

 

So for the March cycle we unfortunately only received 1 entry. Thanks to Sardonic Irony for sending that in. However, we've decided not to proceed with judging with only a single entry.

We've been discussing why we might be having such low turn out, any feedback on that would be appreciated. Is there something that would encourage you to enter if you haven't been doing so?

We have thought that perhaps the topics have been a bit too out there for most folk to feel able to write an entry. And we've taken into account the feedback we've had regarding the length limits.

So for the next competition cycle we're setting the time limit as 1 month again. You'll have till midnight on the 2nd of June to get your entry written.

The topic will be a good old DLP classic: Dark!Harry.

Length: No required length, we would however advise entrants to aim for between 5 and 10 thousand. No entry will be excluded on the basis of length.

Judging will remain the same as previously.

Any questions, comments, feedback, concerns or advice can be sent to us at DLPWritingContest@gmail.com, by PM here on the forum or by posting in this thread.

 

I think the theme this past month (Hunger Games) required more setup than others, which made the problem of writing that much more daunting, particularly for those of us who competed in the last contest, having only about a month or so for this one. In my case, I completed about 10k words, making it about 1/2 of the way through, and still felt like it was running lean.

I'll still complete it at some point, but it wasn't possible to make the deadline and not feel like it was NaNoWriMo level of quality.

 

You also have to realize that the anthology #2 is going on. I feel that most people are working on that instead of this.

 

For this reason, it may be prudent to make the deadline 1 June, not 2 May.

 

I think it failed so hard because it was rushed, and the topics sucked. You should have started with something like 'dark!Harry' and you would have gotten 10+ entrants, myself included. But I've sort of lost interest in this whole thing now.

Hell, I was the original topic starter for getting this thing revived, but once I saw how the whole thing was being handled, I knew it would fail.

 

As the only entrant for this cycle I feel that I can comment that the reason for such a low number of entires is indeed the topics. But I would say that it's not because the topics weren't interesting (they won a poll they must have appealed to the most people). Far from it, I find the prompts given more interesting than just dark!Harry, I think the issue was that the prompts were almost too interesting or too ambitious. Speaking from doing the Hunger Games prompt, it kinda required me to map out a rather large-scale fic, its not something I thought I could particularly cover well within 20k words in a oneshot, not if you want to cover the ramifications completely. So, I think that the issue is that the prompts were so large that they require a lot of work to turn into something that is actually worth writing.

Personally I like the idea of competitions I just think we have to find an equilibirum between achievable in the given time and interesting. Easier said than done I know, but that is what has to happen in my view.

 

Echoing what everyone is saying, yes the problem, at least for me was the topic choice. Hungergames!HPverse would require far too much time to attempt to set up properly, especially in such a limited time frame. Yes I had a plot and everything, but it needed too much to make it work, and i couldn't be arsed into starting something that would take long to finish.

However I think Dark!Harry can work quite nicely.

PS: Sardonic, since judging is not going to happen for this round, do you mind putting up your entry in WbA? If that's ok with the competition organisers?

 

No excuse from me, I've just been on a reading binge and only wrote maybe 10k words total for the month...including just over 1500 words of crack for this one. It sorta fizzled out when I realized it wasn't very funny, though.

Personally I prefer the more specific prompts, but it's worth trying something more general like this to encourage turnout. Also, there isn't much visibility offered on the forum. If you could score an announcement (at least, if not something more impressive), that extra recognition might offer more encouragement for writers.

 

Four words:
Steal My Thunder God

And then some:
That, and the latest topic was kinda too narrow in terms of ideas what could be done. Yes, lots could be played withing a short idea, but without anything inspiring to include there, it would just be a variant of the same - at least that was why I didn't even try to write out the very first idea.

5-10k words seems to be a good idea, too, but the deadline should be moved a month, since you know, Anthology.

 

You guys make a good point about the anthology deadline clashing with this. I've edited my original post to reflect a revised deadline of June 2nd.

 

Mordecai already told me that he liked the entry, so yeah I'll certainly get around to posting it soon. It runs to about 11k in length and is really the first chapter of what may well be a WIP. I have parts of what looks like a rather large plot outlined so it can definately be worked with. That does of course partially depend on whether I get torn apart by all the wonderfully viscious bastards that populate this site!

Bottom-line, I got it done in two weeks so I haven't given it a title or summary yet but once I have, I'll get it up.

Personally, don't think I'll be in for dark!Harry, if the WIP goes down way gonna focus on that and RL commitments, props to all those who are going to enter though.

 

I will definitely participate in this contest!

 

So, any chance we'll see another one of these soon?

 

Well, no one submitted an entry for the latest competition at all. Combined with the lack of participation in the previous round, there doesn't seem to be much interest in participating in competitions.

From what I can see, the anthology takes up most of the time of those who are likely to actually put forward an entry for a competition.

Maybe someone else will be able to come up with a format that gets more interest for participation.

 

I agree with Oz. Anthology stuff appears to have taken most people's time. Now that the current Anthology is almost over, perhaps participation will build up again but in the interest of making this a long-term thing, we could adopt the 500 for 500 thing Oz is talking about or we can do a themed/genre'd monthly Oneshot contest instead, where with a few hours at hand anyone can churn out something decent.

 

How about expanding the fandoms? Or allowing crossovers? Personally, most of the good stuff I've read recently has not been in the HP fandom. So, instead, we could have a month of Dresden, and then cycle though a couple of other universes (decided by vote) or combination of universes.