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Dear lord you impatient rubes! Lets be honest here, no one even thinks about these contests until at least two months before the deadline and I'm being generous with that guesstimate. I've been busy at work and haven't gotten around to posting the thread. I've been just fine tuning exactly what I want to do and I have it to the point where it's ready. Hold your quivering cocks in anticipation for you will have your precious guidelines and theme either tonight or tomorrow.
I will be making the IWT 11 official thread on April 1st, so get all your ideas into this thread before I make the new thread!!
Worst April Fool's Day joke ever, you lazy hack. Par for the course, admittedly, but still. We demand better from you now that you're in charge* of the contest.
I'm still waiting for BatC to pull some sort of "Surprise! I'm in charge and the contest has absolutely nothing to do with any of your ideas!" stunt, but then I remember he mentioned a desire for a horror theme in his first post. I would bitch about how we've already had horror as a theme, but... 1) the theme was actually "from hell" and 2) that was six years ago. Now I feel old. (But not as old as End, DEP, or Drag, so let's all point and laugh and them, eh?)
It's true that when we did the SciFi grab bag, we ended up with everything from gritty post-apocalyptic horrors to silly reverse-Tron ramblings to campy 50s action hero works. I never had a problem with that, though. I liked having the wide variety of things to read. Plus, it lets people tailor an entry based on their strengths. Can you imagine a story by Ves where she's not allowed to use big words or depressing themes? Or a story by BatC where he's not allowed to have non-sequitur rooms? That would be awful.
Well...I could still change my mind about horror theme and switch to your idea mizal. Damn if that picture isn't all sorts of inspiring, humbling and epic. I mean really just what in the HELL is going on here? A seemingly infinite number of stories could spawn from this one image alone...
Although I do fear that someone could just say "And dinosaurs piloted by aliens and humans, battled each other on the TV. Some lame kids show. Billy turned it off." And that would be it. No, the focus MUST be the picture. No quick throw away. We need to get to the heart of the fierce battle that is being waged!
If only you had come shown this to me earlier Mizal! I feel the cogs of horror are spinning too fast to stop now, yet there is still one full day for the people to make their voice heard before the dictator (me) has them all shot in the streets like dogs!
You know, if I had been the winner, instead of waffling around with these silly horror ideas, I would have just posted this picture and told everyone they had to write their story about it:
There's a lot that sparked my imagination from Locke's list, too. He's got mostly specific concepts with a few themes, while mine's the opposite. Perhaps some medley of both? Say 1-2 themes and 1-3 concepts or something (which isn't very different from the Science Fiction contest, anyway). For example;
Theme: Betrayal (one of Locke's), Revenge (one of mine)
Concepts: Thug life, shop of horrors (both Locke's), ritual sacrifice (mine)
So there's the makings of some kind of bloody ghetto take on Needful Things, just to illustrate. If this formula's too convoluted, by all means, pillage through our lists (or at least mine) and then do what you will.
dreamshell had some good suggestions, but I don't see any problems with 'grab bag' contests either...the list Locke posted immediately got the wheels in my head turning, and at the same time feels a lot more flexible than having to adhere to a list of themes.
Wow, Dream, those are some really great ideas indeed! I think you pulled some real inspiration out of ye olde hat, providing our brave new leader with the most fecund supply of thematic think-eggs imaginable!
Something which is called a "theme" should have a strong influence on the plot and scope of a story. The problem with grab bag contests, as I see it, is that the elements being chosen often don't have any real effect on the heart of the story; they're just ornamentation. I'm sure the contest can still be accessible while also offering a strong thematic guideline to unite all the entries, thereby helping to form a basis for comparison. If you are going to go with some element of choice, I'd suggest keeping these choices very limited, just one or two varying options instead of a whole list.
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. See you all in January!
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