Topics

[Reader's Choice]

Hello, and welcome to the Fortnightly Writing Competition.  Here we compete with words and wits to write the best composition on a given theme.  Submissions can be long or short, poetic or prosaic, published here or hoarded to yourself.... wait, not that last one.  Basically you need to write something on theme in the next two weeks and share it here in the comp thread.  Our theme this fortnight is...

Reader's Choice



This is how it will work.

1) Announce your intent to write something (this does not legally commit you to finish something, but allows you to maybe get started)

2) Wait 72 hours for someone* to post a simple scenario.  This might be something like troll goes to manner camp or witch gets part-time work as a line-chef.

3) Write!  Or don't write, I guess.  But it might disappoint your expectant fans....

4) We all meet up again in two weeks to vote on who we thought did the best with what they were given to work with.

5) Everybody wins!**

*Any AGS member is entitled to give one (1) other person a theme.  Any number of people can give the same person a theme within 72 hours of their announcement of intent, so that the writer might have several themes to choose from (or choose to combine them all?!?).  So that there is no confusion, with overlapping announcements, you must direct your theme at the intended recipient in the following format:

@Somebody: insurance salesman goes to war

In the highly unlikely event that nobody gives you a theme within the allotted time then the contest administrator will provide you with one.  If you don't like it, you can cherry-pick someone else's theme.  But if a reader has directed a scenario specifically at you, you must adapt it into your piece somehow (unless you have multiple scenario proposals to choose from).

**We all win by having great stories written just for us!***

***Actual winners may vary.  See contest rules for full details.

Potential voting categories:

Best Character: the most believable/captivating/magnetic/unique character
Best Plot: the best journey from A to B, told in a gripping way.
Best Writing: the technical category for polish, word-choice, conciseness, etc.
Best Use of Theme: who was best able to take a difficult theme and make magic of it. 

All submissions are required to be posted in this thread by Tuesday April 30.  Good luck to all participants!

[Faker's Gonna Fake]

What do Bridget Jones, Krusty the Clown, and Neville Chamberlain all have in common?  A façade of competence and the sword of Damocles dangling just above their heads.  A player's gonna play, and a hater's gonna hate.  So what's a poor faker to do?

Faker's Gonna Fake


Nobody likes a phoney in real life, but god they get into such great predicaments for story telling!  Teenagers trying on new personas like they're clothes-shopping at the mall, corporate yuckity-yucks throwing around buzzwords like they somehow make sense, politicians lying through their teeth just to disprove the rumours that someone just shaved a monkey and put a tie on him: it's a faker's paradise out there!  Your mission in this competition is to create a character self-delusional enough to believe that, despite a lack of genuine skill and experience, they can do it just like the pros!  It'd be great if there was some sort of reckoning at the end, actual or implied, but that's just for bonus points.

Deadline: All entries are to be submitted by Friday December 7.

Word Limit:  It's gotta fit all in one post.  Faker's not gonna put in extra work, why should you?

Possible Voting Categories: I might change my mind over the next two weeks, but right now I'm thinking:

Best Character: A really genuine faker of the fakiest kind.
Best Fake: Which character was able to pull off the most audacious fraud?
Best Plot: The most suspense created as the fake is about to be uncovered.
Best Writing: Which writer can best fake grammar competence, spelling proficiency, and word-choice prowess?
The Fake Vote: This one is a bluffer's dream come true.  Is if for best overall, or fakest entry?  Hmmmmm....  A wild card indeed!

Good luck to all entrants!

[The Dwindling Party]

You announce an exciting writing competition theme.  Several friends volunteer to participate.  But then mysteriously they begin to drop out, one by one.  It looks like you have yourself a serious case of...

The Dwindling Party




But that would never happen here.

In all seriousness, the Dwindling Party is a long established trope in fiction.  Done properly, it can be full of mystery and suspense.  But beware of the pitfalls!  Don't kill off your poor Red Shirts before the reader has a chance to empathize with them.  The misfortunes themselves need to blend into the plot, and not be glaringly obvious from the offset.  Three misfortunes, that's possible.  Seven misfortunes, there's an outside chance.  But nine misfortunes-- I'd like to see that!

Entries will probably be judged on the following criteria:

Best Character: the most believable/captivating/magnetic/unique character
Best Misfortune: best death or misfortune that removes a character from the group
Best Atmosphere: the eerie, suspenseful, or possibly comical sense that anyone could be next!
Best Writing: the technical category for polish, word-choice, conciseness, etc.
Best Unpredictability: don't make it obvious who's next, but don't make it so not obvious that it's obvious either.

You have until Monday October 15 to submit a story, poem, or the best dang op-ed piece that anyone will ever read!

Good luck!

[Beautiful Brevity]

Beautiful Brevity



Brevity is beautiful in writing.  Every word is carefully chosen and curated to have the maximum impact.  There's no beating around the bush, no redundancy, and certainly no eight-paragraph descriptions of the furnishings (back in the grave with you, zombie Charlotte Bronte!).

This fortnight we are writing shorter than usual stories.  Well, in most cases anyway.....  You are free to write about any topic or genre that you want, but your submission must meet the following criteria:

Be exactly 144 words. This includes titles. Hyphenated or contracted words only count as one.  Be creative to meet the limit!
Be submitted by Sunday August 5, 2018.  No exceptions: it's only 144 words!

We will be voting in the following categories:

Best character: Quite a challenge, given there's not much room for actions or descriptions.  See what you can do!
Best word choice: getting the most mileage out of each individual word is the hallmark of a successful short story.
Best overall: Which story combined the above categories but also had great atmosphere, entertainment value, heart-string tuggery, etc?

Remember that deadline is August 5.  Don't forget.  August 5.  

August 5th.

August 5th....

August 5th...........

[Failure]

Welcome to the Fortnightly Writing Competition, where writers compose an entry loosely related to a given topic over roughly a two-week period.  This is a friendly competition where the goal is to have fun and improve as writers.  Entries can be short or long, serious or silly, timely or deadline-challenged....  We're not fussy, we just want to read what you can write! This fortnight's theme is:

Failure



To quote a frequently misunderstood poet (because he used crazy Scottish words that make no sense): "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley."  What?!?  Think of it like that cat with the speech impediment who could never catch Tweety Bird.  I mean, even if he did eat the little featherball, he'd still get fewer calories out of the deal than he would get on a regular basis from licking the dust mites off of his fur.  It's not just that he can't accomplish what he set out to do, but that the whole goal was ill-conceived from the offing.  My point is that your entry should relate somehow, at least obliquely, to a degree of unsuccessfulness at some endeavour, such as making a peanut butter sandwich with the bread on the inside, or trying to explain a writing competition without entirely thinking through the essence of what you want people to do.  Maybe your characters are coming to terms with failing to meet great expectations?  Maybe someone takes inspiration from the struggle instead of the final flop?  Maybe your entry just ends with a final flush of epic fail?  Either way you cut it, the worse you do at this competition, the better you actually do.  You can't lose!

Deadline:  All entries shall be posted by the close of business on May 10, 2018, unless stipulated otherwise in some random post herein.

By convention we vote by categories, and it is considered sporting to set these out in advance.  Your entries will (probably) be voted on in the following way; at least, as long as I don't have any better ideas in the next two weeks.

Best Character: Or maybe worst character....  An extremeness of character, anyway.
Best Fail: Or worst fail....?  You be the judge.
Best Writing: The way you put the words together to make it sound like a real writer wrote it, y'know?
Best Story: Kinda this mix of tangible and intangible factors, bundled together in a vague concept known as "having it".

Good luck to all entrants!

[Great Whatever]

Greatness is what people make of it.  If enough people think something is great, then it becomes great.  But in this era of counter culture and alternative narratives why should we accept what the majority thinks?  Ten men's idea of the greatest thing of all time may solicit only a colossal "meh" from the eleventh.  Circumstances have thus aligned to create a...

Great Whatever



Your story should feature something amazing that most people think is awesome, but someone prominent in your story finds boring, mundane, inane, contemptible, or outright vacuous.  Your special something can be an event (New Years, Valentine's, Birthday, etc.), a piece of art (music, movie, book, etc.), a person (celebrity, sports star, etc.), fad (type of dance, fashion style, way of talking, etc.), or object (whizzbang, doodad, widget, etc.).  Obviously something boring might make for a bad read, so don't be afraid to ham up either the event or the reaction to make it more entertaining.

Possible voting categories include: Best Rant (aloud or thought), Most Unique Thingy that is Popular, Most Insight Into the Psyche (attempts to explain the rationality of following the crowd or bucking the trend), Most Entertaining Whateverness (best story).

Deadline is Friday January 19, 2018.

Good luck to the vast and teeming hordes of potential entrants.  Please be advised that we will only be able to accept the first ten valid submissions, so don't delay and start today!

[Weird Alternate Reality Historical Plausibility Quiz Game!]

That's right!  Welcome to the
Weird Alternate Reality Historical Plausibility Quiz Game!

The rules are simple and basically nonsensical.   One person comes up with a highly implausible theory for how an actual historical event was initiated, and then the next person guesses the name of the historical character or event.  As long as the guesser can rationalize how it actually makes sense, then they get to name the next implausible theory.  Simple, right?! 

I'll go first:

This German official slipped on worm guts on a wet sidewalk, fell into the open window to the basement of a durndl factory, the trauma of which led to a hidden mental imbalance that eventually led to one of the most questionable lapses of judgement in the history of government. 

Who was the official and what was his decision?

[Possible Voting Categories:]

Juvenile Delinquency



The world is your oyster when you're a kid.  Except if you don't like oysters and are determined not to put up with them anymore.  Then the world's a devil's kitchen of fun and mayhem!  From damaged children to pre-teen gangstas; from wayward youth to bad-ass babies: this is the topic where the young follow their own rules and shock their staid and settled elders into bouts of apocalyptic hysteria!

The rules are thus: your story must prominently feature some kind of antisocial minor who marches to the beat of his or her own drum.  The rest is up to you.

Possible Voting Categories:

-Best Delinquent Character
-Best Insubordination
-Best Writing Style
-Best Overall (Bonus Vote)

The contest will extend from now until Thursday December 7.  Then it will likely be extended at least once, but don't count on it 'cause you never know!  Then eventually I'll close the contest and we will vote.

Good luck to all entrants!  I look forward to reading your autobiographical accounts fictional creations!

[Spectacle!]

Spectacle!



How do you write in words about a spectacle, a quintessentially visual thing?  A spectacle can be something good or bad.  It can be impressive or cringe-worthy.  It can be a thing or an action or a person.  It can be a performance or something impromptu.  It can be used for community building or propaganda, adoration or shaming.  Basically something or someone has to be on display, or at least feel as if they are on display.  Where you take it from there is up to you.

Deadline:  All submissions should be posted by the end of Thursday August 31, 2017, with voting to start the following day.

Possible Voting Categories:  Best Character, Best Spectacle, Best Writing, Most Thought Provoking.

Best of luck to all entrants!

[Saturday June 17, 2017]

This isn't a writing competition, it's a word fight!  Or maybe it is a competition.... it depends on your point of view, I guess.  Some people see things one way, one might say the "correct" way, while others see things differently, one might say the "bafflingly, inexplicably wrongheaded and moronic" way.  But both perspectives have merit in the era of...

Alternative Truth


Your writing challenge for the next two weeks is to create a story featuring a distinctly unconventional, far-fetched, or laughably idiotic perspective.  To make it work I would think you'd have to write about something with facts that everyone can agree on and then warp the meaning of those facts, but then that's just my own weirdo opinion.  One bonus vote will be awarded for every entry that does not mention The Donald by name.    Deadline will be when it's no longer Saturday June 17, 2017 anywhere on Earth.  Possible voting categories might include:

Best Alternative Truth
Best Alternative Truth Spouter
Best Alternative to a Plot
Best Alternative Writing
Best Alternative Thought Provokingness

Good luck to all participants!

[Revolution]

This past year we've written a lot about politics (Revolution, Time to Vote), sociology (Scarcity, Last Will & Testament), the wilderness (Camping, Abandoned Place, and most recently Myst), and the occult (Mass Disappearance, Biblical Book, and for all intents and purposes Serial).  Now the pendulum swings and it's time for Sci-Fi once more.  Our topic this time is:

STEAMPUNK!



Any kind of story is permissible so long as it is your own original unpublished work, and contains futuristic technology as if it were devised in past times.  So to clarify, the technology in question need not necessarily be typical Victorian steam-powered machines, but could be elaborate medieval water-, wind-, or pendulum-powered; ancient steam-, animal-, or human-powered (à  la Roman galley?); or indeed prehistoric inventions that mimic futuristic or contemporary technology (mammoth dung-powered?).  Heck, you could even come up with a fanciful power source that some crazy inventor stumbled upon that even we don't know about.  The important thing is that cool shit goes down in historical (or fantasy) times due to wicked creative inventions.

Deadline for the contest is Saturday November 19, 2016, with voting to start the following day.

Voting will be based on the following categories:

Best Character: the most believable/captivating/magnetic/unique character
Best Setting: the most vividly evoked background world, or most gripping atmosphere
Best Plot: the best organized, coherent and well-executed story with appropriate pacing, climax, etc.
Best Word Choice: the technical art of combining words in a memorable way
Best Technical Innovation: Which invention/technology is most impressive from a creative perspective?
Most Substantive: Which story best reveals a lesson about the relationship between humanity and technology?

Good luck to all contestants.  Let the writing commence!

     ¹ In the beginning there was light.  And then there followed a series of events of no remarkable importance.  And then the Fortnightly Writing Competition came into being, and it was good. Welcome therefore to the competition named:

Biblical Book


     ²The commandment was written on the tablet in letters that flamed.  Thou shalt write a story in Biblical format.  Thou shalt name thy piece the Book of Something, and therein thou shalt tell a tale of moral ambiguity, perhaps with occasional lapses in continuity with lessons so arcane as to be of dubious value!

     ³Ye olde archaic language is optional, quoth the tablet.  Furthermore, thou needst not necessarily have a biblically themed story: only the format need be in bible-esque verses.  So thou canst write about modern times, or some hedonistic atheist creation myth, or write a bubblegum commercial without judgement.

     ⁴ But thou shalt not incur the wrath of the higher power in this competition by forsaking the deadline!  All entries must be submitted two days after the first Sabbath of autumn.  Hence thou shalt travel to the village of thy forefathers to vote and be counted in categories various and sundry.  These categories might include something related to character, setting, plot, style, and best-use-of-theme.  So it is written.

     ⁵ Directeth thy questions to the nearest oracle, and thou willt learn that all is permissible if ye but submit to the awkward format prescribed!  Seek ye the guidance of the voices in thy head, and thou shalt revel in the wisdom of the prophets.  Ask, and thou shalt receive.  But render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, lest He vomit thou from His mouth.  Go in grace.     

Fact: People have dirty mouths.  Not just talking smack, but bacteria wise.

Fact: Dogs have cleaner mouths than people, somewhat counter intuitively since they eat poop and garbage they find lying around.

Common Sense: People who kiss their dogs on the mouth have cleaner mouths than average.



Who else has had an aha moment like this?

[Deadline for submissions is Monday August 8]

It is now the middle of summer, the most clement of seasons.  Now is the time when the common folk marvel at the temporary hospitable-ness of the wilderness and think, hey, even I could hack it out there!  Campgrounds swell with the teeming hordes, parks are overrun, and even the deepest bush is penetrated by the irrepressible enthusiasm of man.  So this is my challenge to you, Fortnwriters:

Let's Go CAMPING!





Your story can be about anything, as long as the main characters are camping in some form (i.e. not residing in a permanent dwelling structure).  So you could write about gypsies on the road, or carnies floating from town to town.  You could vote about the Roman legions on the march, or medieval merchant adventurers, or prospectors in the bush, or hunters on the hunt, or primitive humanoids dragging their motley possessions across the steppe, or American Girl Scouts playing truth-or-dare, or a refugee camp, or surveyors exploring a new land, or suburbanites running amok in nature, or pioneers, or space aliens on vacation, or ghost stories around the camp fire, or ...well, you get the idea.

Deadline for submissions is Monday August 8.  I will start voting sometime later on the 9th EDT.

I only wish I had more categories so everyone could get their share of my votes

The dancing cow speaks reason.  We need lots of categories to make voting more fun!

Submissions will be judged on the following criteria:

Best Character: the most believable/captivating/magnetic/unique character
Best Setting: the most vivid background world, or most gripping atmosphere (i.e. nature in all it's harsh reality or haunting unknowability)
Best Plot: the best organized, coherent and well-executed story with appropriate pacing, climax, etc.
Best Word Choice: the technical art of combining words in a memorable way
Best Natural Obstacle: What was the best curve-ball that nature threw at our heroes?
Most Substantive: Which story best reveals a lesson about humanity or the world around us?

Good luck to all participants!   

To start, I've got no horse in this race.  But I find it interesting that my normal source of the pulse of global political sentiment (i.e. the AGS forums) has nothing to say on the matter.  Is this a sign of a collective shrug?  What about the inherent democratic deficit of the European Union?  What about the racist tinge of the Leave campaign?  What does it mean to be European?  What do the Scots have to say on the matter?

For me, I honestly didn't see the point in all the paranoia about well-qualified or highly industrious immigrants coming to the country to subsidise the local slackers, but then my country is just a hodge-podge of anyone who bothered to show up, so I have a hard time appreciating nativist sentiment.  On the other hand, as a person I do my best to have as little as possible to do with governments and regulations (don't tell the building inspector), so I appreciate the sentiment of wanting to cast off the burden of an extra level of bureaucracy.  But I want to hear honestly from the Brits and the Euros: what's the real motivation for this Brexit thing, and how's it all gonna shake down?

[Deadline for your second entry is Thursday May 26]

A slight change in format this fortnight.  Welcome to the competition known as
SERIAL


Novels of yore were published as they were written, often a chapter at a time, sometimes in a journal or newspaper.  Audiences would wait with baited breath for the next instalment, like tv shows before Netflix.  Our mission this fortnight is to rekindle the magic of the serial format by writing an episodic entry according to the following criteria:

1)Valid entrants will write a minimum of two distinct entries at distinct times (ie not published within an hour of each other)

2)Entries must have a common title/branding with episode sequence indicated (e.g. TIME RIPPERS, episode 3: The Buxom Beta-Centaurians)

3)Any given entry is capped at 1000 words, but of course could be much shorter (paragraph?  log entry?  extremely well-crafted sentence?)
    There is no limit to how many entries you enter, as long as you don't violate rule #1.

4)Entries must develop the same story line (I don't mind throw away episodes or tangents, but no completely different stories)

5)Completion of the story arc is not required: it's the journey that counts.

Bells and whistles would include suspenseful cliff-hangars at the end of each entry, but are not necessary. The main idea is to bring the readers along on a thrilling ride with you the writer.  So have fun, engage your audience, and write up a dark and stormy....er, episodic story!

Deadline for your second entry is Thursday May 26.  You can write more than two instalments but we won't be counting stand-alone entries, so don't get caught at the last moment.  Or if you do, make sure you ask for an extension so that your hard work doesn't go to waste.

Submissions will be judged on the usual criteria of character, setting, plot, word-choice, and an overall "couldn't-wait-for-the-next-episode" score.  Good luck to all participants, and I look forward to reading you frequently!

[Sunday April 10]

Have you ever seen those YouTube videos by Grant Thompson, a.k.a.

The King of Random?



Well, this topic has nothing to do with him, but enjoy learning how to smelt metal by taking apart a microwave.   But seriously folks, this competition is about a single, random event that suddenly turns a character's world on its head.  Maybe it's a regular day and then suddenly aliens invade, or a car drives through the living room wall, or a taco in a restaurant becomes sentient, or a character suddenly develops the telekinetic ability to trigger aneurysms in anyone he meets, or an AGS game your character is coding starts taking over entire swathes of the digital global financial system, or the bottom rusts out of an airplane, or a protagonist wins the lottery, or frogs that were sucked up by a tornado suddenly start raining down à  la Magnolia, or a pothole suddenly opens under a character's car and swallows the car and then the car and the character are transported to an ancient version of the same city but has been buried for millennia under debris and is now populated by blind albino ancients with grotesquely long ear hair and uncanny echo-location abilities.  So yeah, the topic is random.  Enjoy!

Deadline is Sunday April 10 at the close of business, which means I'll actually close the comp when I get back to my computer on the evening of the eleventh.

Successful entrants will be judged on the quality of their character, setting, plot, word-choice, and of course the creative aspect of their random event.  Happy writing!


 

[Abandoned Place]

Welcome scribes and scribblers, tale-tellers and textual-titillators, to the epic writing challenge of the age.  I want you to throw a motley crew of unsuspecting characters into a strangely, hauntingly, mysteriously

Abandoned Place



The abandoned place can be a physical space (ruined city, dilapidated building, an inentionally sealed tomb, or just a pristine but mysteriously empty edifice), or a mobile setting large enough to host a drama (ghost ship, space wreck).  The important thing is that it was once occupied by intelligent beings, and subsequently abandoned (or at least apparently abandoned ).  The drama that takes place inside the abandoned place is up to you.  It can be comedy, suspense, survivor horror, etc.  I look forward to being immersed in your creativity!

DEADLINE: Sunday January 24, 2016

Good luck to all participants!

[Best Character]

Petty Deity



It's almost hard to conceive these days, with several of the largest global religions now obsessed with a single deity with vast, immeasurable, almost laughably paradoxical powers, that way way waaaaaay back in time there was more of a continuum of the divine.  At the top there were indeed fairly powerful gods, but even they had to fear their sons or enemies, lest they be overthrown.  But beneath them there were a range of lesser gods, and even quasi- or semi-divine beings, blending at the bottom into the upper echelons of mortal society.  It is somewhere down towards the bottom of this continuum that I want our authors to focus this time.  Taking the Romans as an example: they had thousands of these petty gods, each looking after very tiny and specific elements of life.  Fontis (or The Fons, as he was sometimes known) was in charge of only wells and springs.  That's it: no other duties listed.  Lateranus (not a way of saying goodbye to someone you don't like) confined his powers to ovens.  Lacturnus put the sap in plants.  Serritor was in charge of holes and ditches.  And Cloacina has the honour of presiding over the main sewer pipes (but presumably even lesser deities were responsible for the feeder lines).  This got me to thinking: what if there were petty deities for all the minor contrivances of modern civilization?  Gods of light bulbs, or toothbrushes, or dryer lint, or nose piercings, or insoles, or oversized belt-buckles, or nail clippers, or the microscopic little ball at the end of pens, or the little nests of hair that accumulate in shower drains, or... well, you get the idea.  What would their eternal lives be like?  What would be their struggles, their envies, their rivalries or their distractions?  What would it be like emotionally to be divine and immortal, but at the same time pretty insignificant in the big scheme of things? 

You have two weeks to explore these themes or parallel ones of your own devising.  Voting may or may not be along the lines of the following:

Best Character: Probably your divine creation, but maybe some mortal he/she is tormenting perhaps?
Best Plot: Someone tries to resolve some sort of conflict in a gripping or entertaining way.
Best Tone: Can you bring the reader to some understanding of what it feels like to be omnipotently minor?
Best Background World: Is the setting more than just a blackened stage with a sole spot-light?
Best Style: Encouraging the composition of memorable turns of phrase, or bold new ways of combining words.
Most Substantive: The reader actually takes away something meaningful from their short time with your words.

Deadline will be Monday November 23rd at 11:59 pm Hawaiian time.  I look forward to lots of marvellously petty entries.  Have fun and get writing!

[Fortnightly Writing Competition!]

Welcome super scribes and hilarious hacks of all hues and hemispheres, to the most famous and prestigious writing contest in the history of mankind!  The one, the only, Fortnightly Writing Competition!   Your topic, should you choose to accept it, is:

Lifeboat



When there is nothing but a postage-stamp sized bubble of safety between you and oblivion, people tend to get territorial.  They tend to give in to their basic, basest survival instincts.  They tend to get suspicious, nasty, devious and sneaky.  Or maybe the ordeal brings out the best in them: heroism, altruism, extreme creativity?  Whatever the case, being crammed into a very confined place with fellow survivors is a certain formula for high-drama with even higher stakes.  Do not confine yourselves to a literal (littoral?) lifeboat: any confined space of refuge will do.  It could be an escape pod in space, or a bomb-shelter on earth, or something so daring and bold that I wouldn't be able to think of it if I scrunched up my eyes for ten minutes and grunted at the effort.   The only solid requirements of your story are:

1) A place or vehicle of refuge from certain or probable death
2) More than one initial occupant
3) Drama!

Deadlines have been extended due to OROW falling on our natural deadline, plus lots of people make big non-internet plans at the end of summer.  Official deadline is Sunday September 6, 2015, which should give you lots of time to write, or at least lots of time to procrastinate.

Your work will be judged on the following criteria

Best Character: Most believable or captivating or magnetic or unique: could be main character or supporting role
Best Scenario: Replacing our usual Background World/Setting category: who had the most creative scenario, or the most vividly described predicament?
Most Suspenseful: Replacing our Atmosphere category, which story left you at the edge of your seat, yearning and dreading to find out what happens next?
Best Writing Style: The technical art of combining words in clever or gripping ways.
Cleverest Ending: Sometimes the best suspense leads to a disappointing conclusion.  Which story had the most satisfying ending?

Good luck to all entrants.  Please do intend to vote if you submit: it makes the competition more interesting for the rest of us.  Write!