Naturally, the reward for winning the contest is fortune, glory, and prestige.
However, to spice things up this time around, I've cooked up some bonus incentives in order to increase our numbers.
BONUS INCENTIVES! (No, they don't stack)
1. If there are at least 10 successful contest entries, the top five will receive 50 points, while all other valid participants receive 25 points.
2. If there are at least 15 successful contest entries, the top five will receive 75 points, while all other valid participants receive 50 points.
3. If there are at least 20 successful contest entries, the top five will receive 100 points and guaranteed story commendations, while all other valid participants receive 75 points.
Prompt: A recent event has caused the protagonist to go through a difficult change.
It's a pretty open-ended prompt, there are a lot of directions you could go with it. Just as long as you don't tuck any relevance of the prompt away hidden in one specific page in a sub-branch, you're going to be okay, I promise, just stop freaking out, just calm down.
I should also note that while anything above minimum site standards technically qualifies as a valid entry, any 3.01/8, 2000-word slop will be thoroughly looked down upon by my higher council, and I might just feed your points to @ISentinelPenguinI out of spite. Do yourself a favor, start early!
The deadline will be October 31st at 11:59 PM (PST), just in case the default spookiness of other deadlines isn't enough for you people.
Best of luck!
I'm in. 200.
I'm in
I'm in.
Good luck to everyone!
I suppose ill join too.
I dont know what i was thinking, im actually a fool, smh.
lol, perhaps time will be the healer to my foolish nature. Im currently reading in moonlit waters, but once im done with that and finished reviewing it (halfway through). I think ill finally head on to reading some of your stories.
A ford story sounds fun.
are you joining then mizal?
hmmmm, lol. I expect you to deliver something, please?
Sign me up
After some internal debate, I'm in. How could I not contribute my efforts to such a worthy cause?
I think it's because the prompt is so broad. You can almost write about anything, which is both an advantage and disadvantage lol.
The Participants (So Far)
Suranna
Ford
Yummyfood
Clayfinger
WizzyCat
RKrallonor
granolagoth
mrcrimsonclean
Mizal
Orange
Marte
ItzSugar
MiltonManThing
Fabrikant
bezro
Abgeofriends
Cat2002116
Already deep in the shit, might as well go big or go home right?
Locked in, good luck!
damn that has to be the fastest entree submission ever on cys
Hah, you just called yourself out
Honestly? I'm inspired to try two entries as well. Since Clayfinger had most of his first story done before the contest was announced, can I do the same thing with one of my stories I've had sitting around for a couple years? I'm also working on a new one that was started after the contest if that helps.
What I mean is, after I finish the newer story I'm working on, may I use one of my older, pre-contest stories as a second entry as long as they both fit the prompt?
Not me, sadly I've been super busy, working, and then after working I'm studying. That grocery store job is so shit, I'm sorry I bothered, you were right. I've had many jobs before, but this job is an actual sweatshop job. It's such a time crunch, it's 1 person doing a 3 person job. Undoubtedly my least favourite job so far, the customers need to stop talking to me, they're assholes and im too busy to help, all they do is make me either go home late or feel like shit when I couldn't finish my work and force it on another staff member. Shite job, I'm just gonna give it a few more weeks and then quit I think. Not for me. Impossible workload. Realistically I'd have to not have my 30 minute lunch break to finish or even get close to finishing what they need me to do. Which is what the girl before me was doing lol
Today some old ass man with a cane was walking super slow, and blocking up the staff door, so I subtly squeezed passed him and I shit you not he said "what an ignorant piece of shit" Like wtfff, I'm just shocked at the nerve of some people.
Lol
locked?
He already joined, he was just going on about how he's going to get SHAMED due to his shitty job where he hilariously gets called named by old people.
No more three day work weeks! Lol
I think he just felt like I invaded his space, I didn't even touch him.
I just like to imagine this is all going on with everyone sounding like a bunch of cockney gangsters and chavs.
I'm surprised you even know about chavs and cockney accents. I do live more up North, so I do meet some people with more 'harsh' accents, like the scousers, one of my dad's ex wives was a scouser, VERY distinctive accent (think paddy the baddy pimblett). Chavs are something else, we call them road men here now and you can almost always spot them by the way they dress and talk, which once again, Is like another language. They're usually hyper aggressive - also known as lovers of petty crime.
My grandmother was from a small town in England. (Probably not as small anymore)
Also Briar's a chavette so we're quite familiar with them.
Plus she'd say all of you that live up north are a bunch of poofters and wankers.
Count me in! I already have a started story game that fits this prompt well. So I suppose you can count me in!
Wavering a bit, but I'm in. Hopefully, I will actually be able to finish something this time!
Clayfinger (DONE)
sitelung
benholman44
Payaso
fresh_out_the_oven
RKRALLONOR
you are being called out because we know you ain't done shit yet.
Still tons of time really.
Fuck it. I'm in. Also, I'll bet 225 points I can submit a valid contest entry. I figure that should be enough to motivate me to not slack off like I have in past contests.
Locked
Ok. 1,500 words in three days. Meeting my goals so far. Now all I have to do is resist the urge to procrastinate for long periods of time after I start off strong like I've done in the last two contests.
1,500 in three days?? That's like one page a day
500 a day, yeah. I know it's small, but I have this issue where I write a bunch in the beginning and then get burnt out and ignore it till the very end of the contest. I think by pacing myself I'll be fine. Besides, 500 words a day is the minimum amount. I'm planning to write more than that.
1) isn't that just Breaking Bad
Just write a breaking bad fanfic
Wait
No
Shoot
Daily word count!!!
Oct 3: 1331 Oct 4: 954 so far (2285 total)
... and now I can't edit my post.
Anyway, every page tells you the word count, so just add those together. Don't respond to this post (:
Oct 3: 1331 Oct 4: 1799 (3130 total) Yay, I reached and surpassed my total word count goal for today. Oct 5: Today was the final tennis meet of my high school career. I've been busy, I'm tired. But hey, I won! Also, 567 (3697 total) Also also, I'm past the "oh my gosh I'm so good at this look at me go" stage and to the part where I'm more like "oh my gosh I suck at writing and this is trash". Most of all, I SUCK AT DESCRIBING THE SETTING. In my brain it's just not important. I don't picture it, I don't care. I skip over that kinda stuff when reading half the time (makes reading Tolkien a lot faster for sure). But that's the #1 comment I get on all my writing– all they get is talking heads. I don't know what the classroom looks like. It could be any classroom, it doesn't matter! Why is it so vital?? (Wasted all these words and all this time ranting when I coulda been working on my story)
Not sure if you've read the article yet, but Mystic wrote a very good one that explains the exact situation you just described and how to overcome it. I'll leave the link in case you haven't seen it yet, and I hope it helps some.
As for lack of description in setting, I admit I myself have had that problem, and I prefer stories that have little to no description of a setting to give my imagination more license to visualize the story. I guess you could picture a scene in your head and write a few sentences giving a basic summary? Idk
https://chooseyourstory.com/help/articles/article.aspx?ArticleId=4345
Haven't read that, thank you!
Word Count Oct 3: 1331 Oct 4: 1799 (3130 total) Oct 5: 567 (3697 total) Oct 6: :P (3697 total) Oct 7: 1069 (4766 total) Oct 8: 19 (: (4785 total) Oct 9: 0 (4785 total) Oct 10: T-T maybe just 500 a day wouldn't be so bad Oct 11: 821 (5603 total) Oct 12: 243 (5846 total) Oct 13: 154 (6000 total)
A small sketch of my main character I did instead of writing greater than 20 words yesterday!
What I didn't know that
Word count so far,
51,345 words
can I make it to 100,000k?
Probably not
But I wrote that over the last year or so
50k?!? Holy
Granted, the fact that Clayfinger was about 2/3rds done with his story beforehand slipped by my radar at the time (I think I interpreted it as a much lower fraction in a state of exhaustion), but his wasn't especially long, a good portion of the writing happened during the contest, and he's apparently working on submitting a second story in addition to it.
I'd really like not to encourage people to prewrite and sit on storygames waiting for contests to roll around, so yeah- just make sure most of the writing happens between the announcement and the deadline, and all will be well. Cheers.