r/WritingPrompts • u/Cody_Fox23 Skulking Mod | r/FoxFictions • Jan 11 '21

Moderator Post [MODPOST] Simply 15M Contest Round 1 Write

Good Morning Promptians!

 

SUBMISSIONS ARE CLOSED!

 

So what happens now?

  1. Read all of these numbered points before continuing!

  2. Write a story using the prompt below as inspiration. It can be a fleeting moment of your story or a central pillar. There are plenty of ways to go with it. Keep in mind, the story will be judged by your peers, and they may want to clearly see it.

  3. The story will be between 500 and 2100 words as counted by https://wordcounter.net. This is a hard boundary. With how many entrants there are, we can’t try and make a blurry zone on this. If it passes word count it moves on, if it doesn’t it DQs right then and there.

  4. The story will be within the subreddit’s rules. I am trusting that our writers aren’t going to create stories about abuse, hurting children, poop, or low effort copypastas among other things.

    ANY submissions that violate the rules will be an instant DQ and blacklisted from future contests.

    This will not be appealable either. If you think you might be toeing the line, it might be best to back away from it a bit. We had three such incidents last contest, and I'd like to avoid a repeat in this one.

  5. In the interest of keeping everything hush hush, please only use self-edit. If other people know your story they may vote on it just because they recognize it. If proof arises that you shared the story before the approved posting date, you will be disqualified.

  6. Once your story is as polished as possible, submit it! We’ll check it over and compile it into the appropriate document to go out to your judges! From there you will relax until the voting begins and you get a message detailing that process!

  7. You have until 23:59 on 18 January 2021 or until we hit 320 participants to submit a story.

 

What’s the prompt Mr. Fox?

 

[SP] Everybody's looking for something.

 

Submission Link

 

164/320 participants (As of: 00:00 EST 19 Jan 21)

 

Good Words my friends!

 

Timeline:

  • Jan 4: Announcement and hype train leaves the station

  • Jan 11: First Round Write begins

  • Jan 18: First Round Write ends

  • Jan 20: First Round Vote begins

  • Jan 27: First Round Vote ends

  • Jan 28: Results Announced / First round entries cleared to post / Second Round Write begins

  • Feb 4: Second Round Write Ends

  • Feb 6: Second Round Vote Begins

  • Feb 13: Second Round Vote ends

  • Feb 14: Results Announced/ Second round entries cleared to post / Final Round Write begins

  • Feb 21: Final Round Write ends

  • Feb 23: Final Round Vote begins

  • Mar 2: Final Round Vote ends

  • Mar 3: Winner Announced/ Final round entries cleared to post

 

 

  • If you have questions, please ask them in the stickied comment below! The official staff of the Simply 15M Contest are /u/Cody_Fox23, /u/archipelagomind, and /u/OldBayJ.

  • Think you have some great prompts for this contest? Send me a DM! I have some already, but I welcome plenty of others to be options to pull from.

 

 

PREVIOUS TRANSMISSIONS

 

 

What’s happening at /r/WritingPrompts?

 

  • Best Of Voting is live! Go vote for the best the sub had to offer through the year!

  • Nominate your favourite WP authors or commenters for Spotlight and Hall of Fame! We count on your nominations to make our selections.

  • New Custom Awards! - Check them out!

  • Come hang out at The Writing Prompts Discord!

  • Want to help the community run smoothly? Try applying for a mod position. You'll get a cool tattoo that counts every modaction you make!

114 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

71 comments sorted by

1

u/Cody_Fox23 Jan 11 '21

If you have any questions, ask them here and a member of the Simply 15M Administration will answer you!

2

u/iamsoconfusedabout Jan 19 '21

Hi. I tried to submit a few minutes before the dead line, but think I may have been a couple of minutes late. Will my submission be DQ'd?

2

u/Cody_Fox23 Jan 19 '21

Nope. In fact you were the last submission accepted!

Good luck!

1

u/neumonia-pnina Jan 19 '21

Do the forms keep track of emails? I think I was signed in when I submitted and now I'm going through a sort of "oh fuck" moment.

3

u/Cody_Fox23 Jan 19 '21

No, I purposely don't have email tracking on. The only things I see are timestamp of submission, what your enter as a Reddit name, and your submission.

1

u/neumonia-pnina Jan 19 '21

Thank you! That’s a relief.

1

u/tuerkishgamer Jan 18 '21

I am not an expert. Do I need to do anything special to share the Google Doc other the form?

I can also post the plain text but if it is preferred I am able to use that method.

Should I just post the link and make it viewable by anyone that has the link?

Do you need editing permissions?

1

u/Cody_Fox23 Jan 18 '21

Viewing permissions are good enough! Just past the share link into the form and we'll take it from there!

1

u/tuerkishgamer Jan 18 '21

Thank you very much.

1

u/TheCatMeows13 Jan 18 '21

Is there anyway I can verify I gave the correct username for my entry? Want to be sure I didn't have a mental lapse and mistype it.

2

u/Cody_Fox23 Jan 18 '21

You did use the correct name!

1

u/Cody_Fox23 Jan 18 '21

You did use the correct name!

1

u/matig123 Jan 17 '21

Hi Cody, will there be any confirmation if a submission was successfully received?

2

u/Cody_Fox23 Jan 17 '21

Not officially, but if you are concerned, reach out to One of the administration people and we can do that

1

u/throwthisoneintrash Jan 16 '21

Do we include a title as part of the word count or is it outside of the wc?

1

u/Cody_Fox23 Jan 16 '21

WC is unaffected by wordcount.

1

u/OfAshes Jan 14 '21

How is the voting going to work?

2

u/Cody_Fox23 Jan 14 '21

As per the Announcement message:

After stories are submitted they will be randomized and placed in a "For Your Consideration" document that will simply have Story One, Two, Three, etc. This will contain all the stories for the heat you were sorted into.

You will have a week to read, evaluate, and rank them. Voters will be given a unique ID with which to vote via Google Form to place their top three stories. This will keep multiple votes and fraudulent votes from messing with the results.

A first place vote is 3 pts, 2nd is 2 pts, and 3rd place is 1 pt. In the case of a tie, the submission with more 1st place votes will take the lead. In the case of a continued tie, a secret moderator will cast the tie breaking vote.

The document mentioned and your voter ID will be DM'd to you at 00:00 EST 20 January.

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1

u/Zyron08 Jan 13 '21

How many people make it through each round?

2

u/Cody_Fox23 Jan 13 '21

That will be determined once the final submission count is in. If we have enough to populate a good amount of heats though, the Top 2 in round one, and then the Top 1 in round 2. Final podium is decided in round 3.

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2

u/EllipsisMark Jan 12 '21

Are we allowed to have an independent editor look over our draft? Someone who won't vote in the contest?

2

u/Cody_Fox23 Jan 12 '21

We request that you do not. All entries should be "self-editted" as stated.

Thank you!

1

u/Wulgren Jan 12 '21

Thanks for organizing this! I have two questions:

Are you going to DM users to confirm with when you receive a submission from them, or is it a wait until the closing date to find out if a submission has been successfully received and accepted?

Can we update a story after it has been submitted (by resubmitting another copy, for example) or is a submission considered final?

2

u/Cody_Fox23 Jan 12 '21

Hey there!

 

Dm'ing each user will be difficult, especially at the end when everything is coming in all at once. We haven't had trouble with things not submitting in the past. Sometimes a documents permissions can be a problem and when we run into that we'll reach out to the user to let them know.

I am always happy to confirm though so if anyone wants to make sure it went through, just hit me up either here or on our discord and I can check for you.

 

As for edits, all submissions should be considered finished. As stated above:

Once your story is as polished as possible, submit it!

This is to prevent people from swooping in to grab a slot with a small piece hastily thrown together and then spend the week editing it out. The point of dropping the sign-offs was to allow more participation after all. If there is something in formatting or small grammatical changes, you can reach out to myself, Arch, or Bay. We will compare the old submission to the new and if no substantial changes are made to the story we can override it.

 

Thank you for your questions, I hope this helps. Good luck in the contest!

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2

u/AgentPeggyCarter Jan 19 '21

I juuust finished too late to submit. Is it okay if I post it to the sub if I tag it as prompt inspired?

2

u/elfboyah Jan 19 '21

If you have questions, please ask them in the stickied comment below!

So, I recommend moving this under sticky.

2

u/AgentPeggyCarter Jan 19 '21

D'oh! Thanks! One of the mods already reached out privately.

3

u/[deleted] Jan 19 '21

First time writing for something other than acedemia and I have discovered that it is something that I rather enjoy.

1

u/Cody_Fox23 Jan 19 '21

Wonderful to hear that!

1

u/4TheSmellOfIt Jan 18 '21

Thanks again for running this show!

Once submitted, do we receive a confirmation that it was submitted ok?

Thanks!

1

u/elfboyah Jan 19 '21

Not a mod, but trying to help. Mods answered this under sticky that unless they have a problem with submission, they won't do it.

2

u/TheCatMeows13 Jan 18 '21

Submitted! Great prompt can't wait to get reading.

4

u/Apprehensive-Split90 Jan 17 '21

Submitted and excited for the reading to begin!

2

u/4TheSmellOfIt Jan 15 '21

This is an awesome idea. Thank you for setting it up and running the show!

I created a new account just to submit a story anonymously.

Will I have a chance to read the other submissions? How does the judges/voting process work?

Thanks!

2

u/Cody_Fox23 Jan 16 '21

Short answer, you will! You'll be judging some stories actually. For a long answer I'm copying my comment from above:

As per the Announcement message:

After stories are submitted they will be randomized and placed in a "For Your Consideration" document that will simply have Story One, Two, Three, etc. This will contain all the stories for the heat you were sorted into.

You will have a week to read, evaluate, and rank them. Voters will be given a unique ID with which to vote via Google Form to place their top three stories. This will keep multiple votes and fraudulent votes from messing with the results.

A first place vote is 3 pts, 2nd is 2 pts, and 3rd place is 1 pt. In the case of a tie, the submission with more 1st place votes will take the lead. In the case of a continued tie, a secret moderator will cast the tie breaking vote.

The document mentioned and your voter ID will be DM'd to you at 00:00 EST 20 January.

4

u/rudexvirus Jan 13 '21

Ty for hosting the contest again!

I really enjoyed the prompt and am hyped for reading/voting :D

8

u/autok Jan 12 '21

Awesome, thanks for taking on this insanity again!

And can I just say that the counter is an excellent social/psychology experiment. If it were a simple deadline, I would wait until the last minute. If it were a normal prompt, I'd write my ass off to be first. But now... now there's a subtle game being played by literally everyone. Do you play chicken against the ticker? Will there be a sudden surge in submissions that locks you out? What if you rush to submit but then there are only 200 submissions and you could have been more careful? What if instead of writing your submission you write a comment about the mindgame you're playing against yourself? What if that's what u/Cody_Fox23 meant for me to do oh god

I don't know if you thought through these effects or intended them, but I just wanted to say that they have already made this contest by far my favorite ever.

3

u/Cody_Fox23 Jan 12 '21

Lol I'm glad to see you came around again! As for the counter I struggled with what to do. On the one hand I don't want to give everyone agida, but at the same time with limited suppose I don't want people to wait until the end only to find out there is no place for the story they've been spending so much time writing.

I am interested to see if we get more stories than 20/20 but with what I've been hearing and seeing I'm thinking we will end up in the 180s.

3

u/veryedible Jan 12 '21

Cody, thanks for doing this again. Would've thought you'd had enough after the headache of last time. I'm interested to see how the "first come, first serve" policy works out here.

2

u/Cody_Fox23 Jan 12 '21

I am too honestly. You have to try some things just to see if it will work right? I mean 20/20 was the first time we tried an anonymous system and that seemed to go over well. Hoping this will have another positive result, but time will tell.

I'm glad to see you around again! I don't think I've seen you on the sub since the last contest ended. I look forward to seeing what you give us this time around :D

Good luck!

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2

u/cosmopolitianmushrm Jan 12 '21

Wait what are the prompts?

2

u/Cody_Fox23 Jan 12 '21

The prompt is up in the body of this post about 4/5ths the way down. Round 1's prompt is:

[SP] Everybody's looking for something.

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0

u/[deleted] Jan 11 '21

2

u/Cody_Fox23 Jan 11 '21

All font style and sizing is normalized when it is collected together, so whatever is easiest for you!

6

u/AfraidDifficulty8 Jan 11 '21

Good luck y'all and have fun. May the best writer win.