Cemetery Dance Writing Contest

[Dan Hocker]

Here's how the voting process will go. Once the submission period is over and we give ample time for everyone to read the stories, I will post a new thread that is a "poll" thread, with each story as an option to pick. Each person will get to vote once, and we'll let it open for a week or so. Once the week is over our top 3 winners will be determined.

[jmcraven]

I am looking forward to this as well. I am a little curious as to how this will work out, as far as the actual voting process goes, but I do appreciate the opportunity.

[C.W. LaSart]

Thank you so much for clearing that up!

[Patrick]

This is a very cool contest idea! I can't write fiction worth a damn, so I'll be sitting it out, but I look forward to reading the entries. Good luck to you all!

[Dan Hocker]

People could send them to you as an attachment and you could post them.
I've seen other websites run contests this way.

I could do that. I think we'll go with this one the way it is for now, if we run into problems we'll run the next one of these we do differently. I am however planning on locking people's story posts after they are posted so no one can reply to those threads.

[njhorror]

No, there's really no real good way to do that either.

People could send them to you as an attachment and you could post them.
I've seen other websites run contests this way.

[peteOcha]

Great idea! Time do get those creative brain cells going! And good luck to all who will participate.

[Dan Hocker]

Definition of "Amateur" clarification.

In this instance, when we say "Amateur" we mean both unpublished writers and / or author's we do not publish on a regular basis. I say regular basis to give a little room, as I would not want to deny someone who may have only been published in say the magazine once or twice. I would also go so far to say that if Cemetery Dance has published one of your books you would not fall into the "Amateur" category.

[Mickmarseviltwin]

Great idea, Dan. Always good to find new avenues for short stories!

Really looking forward to submitting mine and reading some of the other entries.

cheers
Pete

[Casey Criswell]

This sounds great, I hope to give it a go!

[CurtSeattle]

Always wanted to be a writer, but never actually finished more than a few pages, so maybe I will use this as my springboard to writing domination. I can see it now.

I will follow my motto religiously, "Focus and get started tomorrow."

p.s. Posts: 1

[Menace]

Been working on a short story. Now i know what I'm going to do with it.

[Brian James Freeman]

This is a wonderful idea and I am very excited to participate! Just a few quick questions! What do you mean by amateur? Is this open to only unpublished writers? I have some magazine publishing under my belt and my first book, an anthology of short stories, is being released by Dark Moon Books this Fall. Am I allowed to participate? Also, is there a restriction on how extreme the horror can be? Thank you for your time and also for this opportunity!

Dan will post a better definition of "amateur" soon, but what we really meant was authors we weren't already publishing on a regular basis -- to give some new voices a chance to show off their work in front of our readers/collectors. So even someone who is really prolific in other markets can enter if we've missed the boat on his/her writing so far...

Brian

[Brian James Freeman]

Sounds like a great idea. So we're talking about roughly a 2500 word story?

1500 to 2000 is probably more likely once you factor in spaces.

(I've never had to figure out a character count for submissions before, so we just went with 10,000 because it would keep the stories nice and short -- no bloat!)

Brian

[samstephens]

Exciting stuff - fantastic idea Dan!

Are previously published stories okay to enter?

Thanks,
Sam