The Contest
Write the winning story about the cover page image of Renderosity Magazine issue 5 and see your story printed in that same issue!

Contest rules:

1. All entries: by entering this contest, entrants agee to grant first publication rights to Renderosity. All other rights are reserved by the writer. Entrants agree to grant Renderosity the right to print the story and publish it in the magazine interact forum at a later date.

2. Each story must be between 1500 and 2000 words in length, written in English, and must be relevant to the magazine cover for Renderoity issue #5. (The image can be seen here.

3. One submission per Renderosity member, not per screen name. If there are multiple submissions by the same person, only the last submission will be entered into the contest.

4. Explicit descriptions of anatomy, violence, or sexual acts are not allowed.

5 ) The story must be original and not be published previously anywhere, including on the Internet. Exclusive rights to Renderosity for 90 days from the Renderosity issue #5 ship date apply.

1. The winner will agree to work with and abide by the Renderosity magazine staff editing needs with regard to their contest entry's inclusion to the magazine.

2. The contest is open to all members of Renderosity, excluding Renderosity moderators, administrators, and magazine staff.

3. Submissions will be accepted until October 15th 23:59, Renderosity Server Time

Submission format:

Submissions may be e-mailed to contest@fallencity.net as a .txt attachment. (The off-site address is to ensure the anonymity of the entrants.)

At the top of the entry, please include the following:

Screen name
Real name
Title

Please single space lines, with a double space between paragraphs.
Use one ONE Carriage Return/Line feed to start a new paragraph. (That means let the sentences wrap without truncating to screen width.)
Do not indent.
Please indicate bold with *'s and italics with _'s at the beginning and end of the phrase.

Prizes:

First place: Publication in the Renderosity magazine. If the winner does not have a subscription to the Renderosity magazine, a complementary issue will be mailed to the winner.

The top 5 entries will also be placed in the Writers' Forum Backroom.

Judging:

The judges will be picked from the Renderosity staff, including magazine staff. (Crescent, who will be coordinating the contest and submissions, will not be a judge in the contest.)

The judges will pick the winning story based on originality, appropriateness to the image, and quality of writing. No authors will be identified to the judges until after the contest is over and the winner announced.

Any questions about the contest can be addressed in the Renderosity Writers' Forum. A sample of an acceptable submission format can be found below.

Crescent Jane Doe It Was a Dark and Stormy Day Thunder clouds rolled in ominously as the contest deadline neared. Oh, how am I ever going to get my story done in time? she worried. Lightning streaked across the sky as thunder boomed in the distance. Jane pecked at the keyboard furiously, hoping that the muse would suddenly bless her with a good entry. With the horrible power service in her area, she knew it was only a matter of time before the electricity went out and her story would nothing more than lost bits, never to see the light of print in the Rendie magazine. She looked at the contest image one last time, and it all came together. She frantically cleared her page and began her masterpiece. She knew she had tough competition, but this would be worthy competitor to all their stories. Her fingers raced against the keyboard until she finally put the last touch: The End. Her hand flew to the mouse to click the all-important File: Save. Crack She decided to light a candle and curse the darkness.

Am I the only one confused? I looked at the pic, and thought it was awfully familiar. I then looked at the front page and there was the pic, being touted as the cover picture for Issue #3. Can anyone blow some of the fog away? grin

ACK! Give me a second to find the correct image!!! I'm trying to IM the admin about it!

Uh oh, I didn't mean to stir anything up, LOL. Does this mean you have a position opening up on staff? *Checks her resume."

Okay, I found where I went wrong. I misunderstood the magazine people. The contest is for the image in the link above, which is the cover for issue 3, and the story will be posted in issue 5. Thanks for tresamie for getting me squared away! Hey, it's my first contest! And there will be more contests in the future. Next time, I'll get it right! Really, honest!

Kudos for all the effort expended so far.

Its a marvelous image and should draw out some beautiful words! Your work on putting the contest together is much appreciated! Thanks grin Tres

Good luck to everyone! I think this is going to be one very, exciting and interesting contest!

cool beans! can't wait to see the entries!

Great Pic. Gotta have a go at this. Thanks Crescent

Thank audre and firefly. They're the ones who made it happen. Good luck to everyone! I can't wait to see the great stories that come from this!

Backroom?

I keep bugging Spike for it. It's supposed to be here any time now. If I don't get word by tomorrow, I'll go beg again, even louder. I can get seriously obnoxious when I need to. ;-)

Is that where we find out what's inside the glowing briefcase? :)

where do we send our entries to???

where do we send our entries to???

If we use *'s for to indicate bold, and _'s to inicate italics, what do we use to indicate quotation marks? Anything special? Thanks.

mafenther - please send your contest entry to contest@fallencity.net You'll get an autoreply indicating that the entry has been received. I'll then send a second e-mail with your entry number - this lets you know that your entry is being forwarded on to the judges. Wanda Burns - just use regular double quotes for dialogue. The * for bold and _ for italics is a standard printing practice.

Sounds great thanks for letting us enter :O)

This is an intersting idea, so I just entered my story. I saw that it passed 2000 words by only a few, so I hope they won't castigate me too harshly for it. Good luck, all! Walt "Mike"

one question: is the prize, being a published author, or something else, that i can not find mentioned? being published, is exceptional in itself, but thought i should ask.

The prize is being published in Renderosity Magazine.

What's this about the * for bold and the _ for italics? Can we just type it as usual in our email body or attach it to our email with the actual bold and italics of the email or text programme that exist? I have no idea about printing stuff. I just took it from the guidelines above that we type our story and send it via email. Is there more to it than that?

Please use the * to indicate bold. It simply means having a line that says:

I hate using bold!

when you want to indicate:

I hate using bold!

Same with italics.

Italics can be annoying.

for

Italics can be annoying.

The reason for this rule is that different word processors use different codes to create bold and italics and it screws things up when it comes to printing time. (It can also be difficult for the print setter to see the bold and italics depending on the font and word processor.) You may notice on some websites where there's question marks showing up at odd times - that's because the person wrote their stuff in a word processing program then cut and pasted the text into a web page. It just doesn't translate properly.

Just type up your entry in something like Notepad (please don't use the Enter key unless you are making a new paragraph) and attach it as a .txt file to your e-mail. (Quick tip: You can spell check it when you're done by copying the text into your word processor and have it spell check your story.)

It really does take a lot of extra time for us to reformat the entries if people don't follow the rules. (And it greatly increases the chances of errors in the final story presentation.) Besides, part of the idea behind the contest is to give people experience in writing stories for publication, and these are standard submission requirements. (Actually, publications usually insist on things like courier font as well, but with .txt attachments, changing the font is a snap, so we're not concerned about that part.)

If you have any other questions, please feel free to ask!

Cheers!

Thanks for the explanation. I have not done any written submissions on line so this is all new to me. I have no problem with the rules. Just need to understand them. Thanks again.

Hey can this be a colaboration?? I might want to write something with my wife, Can I do that?

Collaboration is fine, although if you win, we are not responsible in any way for any fights as to whose part was responsible for the win. ;-)

Hey sounds good to me. The only real fight would be whos name went first on the by line. G

I have a question. How do you double space the paragraphs, with only one carriage return? Wouldn't that make the paragraphs single spaced?

Each line inside the paragraph is effectively single spaced due to the Word Wrap. The idea is not to hit Enter at the end of each line. Instead, just keep typing and hit Enter twice between paragraphs, otherwise described as putting a carriage return - or a blank line - between paragraphs. (Hey, calling it a carriage return wasn't my idea, although I am old enough to remember using a typewriter!) ;-) You can look at the story sample to see what I mean. (Post 2 in this thread.) For those who are interested: we've gotten more story submissions over the last few days, so this contest is definitely underway!

my story is under way. 1000 words now and only have the introduction and scenario laid out. hmmm,...guess i'll be chopping and cropping by stories end. even if i do not win, i have discovered something wonderful about myself: i can be a writer afterall. better find me an editor, though. i have a tendency to over-punctuate.

Well, feel free to come on in and submit stories here! Although you can't submit your contest entry to us until the contest is over (if you didn't win - if you did win, we'll be reading your story in Rendersity Magazine), you can certainly bring in other stories, and you'll definitely get a bright group of editorsand writers here to help you.

"by the way, my story is done!" exclaimed Mike. "Just polishing up, dontcha know."

Post 28 answers it. If it's not clear, please let me know.

To recap:

Nothing special is needed for quotation marks. Just *'s to surround text that should be in bold and _'s to indicate italics.

so sorry. i just saw it, Crescent. thanks.

Yup. If you're not in the top 5, you can post your story here. The runners up will be posted in the back room. I'm not sure if I can post the winning entry until after Issue 5 comes out. (Then again, I still have time before the winners are picked to worry about that question.) Good luck to everyone!