Note: remove identifying information from manuscript for anonymous judging.

Contest Rules

1. Your story MUST be based on the current contest premise. Please make the connection between your story and the contest premise obvious! The more obvious, the better. Your entry will lose points (seriously!) if we have to work hard to figure out how it uses the premise.

2. Your story MUST NOT have been published elsewhere in any format, not even on a blog. However, it is okay to send us a story that has been posted to an on-line criticism board that requires a password or similar membership mechanism. In fact, we encourage using such boards, as long as they are available only to official members. Getting critiqued is good!

3. Your story’s length MUST be between 1,000 words and 5,000 words. Titles don’t count towards the word limits unless they’re so long we think you’re trying to get away with something. End-of-story markers like [end] also don’t count.

4. Your story MUST be submitted to us via the link provided below (also on the main contest page) within the time period specified for the contest you’re entering.

5. One submission per author per contest. If you submit two entries before a contest deadline, the second one replaces the first.

6. Stories MUST be in English. It’s okay to use non-American spelling (though if your story is published, we’ll Americanize all spellings prior to publishing). Also, it’s okay to have a little bit of non-English, if necessary, but no more than a little.

7. No fan fiction and no pastiches, not even ones using public-domain characters like Dracula, Little Red Riding Hood, Sherlock Holmes, or Tom Sawyer. And certainly, no copyrighted characters like Harry Potter, Goku from Dragonball Z, etc. If you wonder where the line is drawn, read this story and note how Elmer Fudd and other Warner Bros. characters are not really those characters, but impersonators.