[AOTM] September Contest: by Herr Mullen

[Nate Hunter]

Herr Mullen will be hosting the October Contest, and henceforth until further notice I leave his capable hands in charge of running the AOTM contests. He will post details when he is ready to do so, and the contst can be considered open once he does that. Make sure to read his rules and guidelines, please.

[Herr Mullen]

Here are the guidelines for the October Contest for Author of the month.

This month, Judges may enter.

Submission Guidelines

Pairing: Free for All - As it implies, anything goes. No restrictions on straight/homosexual, digimon, human, etc. Whatever you want to write you can enter.

Rating: General Lemon Audiences - If your story is something that would require warning away of people who would simply be disturbed or disgusted by the content (excluding the obvious prudes who would be so affected by any sort of sex), please do not enter it. I did not appreciate being forced to read a certain Entry which I'll not name here, and that is why I'm adding this guideline -- it must have a standard style sex scene to be judged as the Lemon score.

Content: Story before Sex preferred -- I'd like stories that have a good flow and build-in to the sexual content, and though we can't expect novels in these 30 pages, some story and character building would be nice.

Minimum length: 5 pages.
Maximum length: 30 pages.
Standard Measurements: Times New Roman, 12 point. Single-spaced text (no blank line between paragraphs; use the P tag if using HTML), double spaced scenes (one blank line between scenes).

-- In Text or Word format, this means NO blank lines between paragraphs of the same scene, and one blank line between shifts in POV or scene; HTML entries will be forgiven this as long as they are at least 5 pages in a Word Processor

To count as five pages, a certain arbitrary mimum will be judged on the fifth page for length.

All entries must have as their subject line:

[DAD September Contest]

This may be optionally followed by the story title. The body should tell me the Title, Author, and Pairing or Pairings in the story. Please PM me after submitting your story so that I can be sure I've received it... your PM should include your e-mail address and the title of the story for verification reasons, as well as your pen name.

Entries will be accepted from September 5 through September 20, and will be sent out to judges on September 21. All entries shall be stripped of author identity before being sent to judges, to help prevent bias from the other judges.

Good luck to everybody who joins, and may the competition be fierce.

Grading Criteria

These are the criteria and scores we will be grading with for this contest. I felt rushed last time, but now I managed to dig up my old scoring system, which makes a much easier percentage score in the end:

PLOT (1-20 points)
Plot design, overall creativity, unexpectedness, twists and turns, etc.

CHARACTER (1-20 points)
The ability to capture personality, so they're not all mindless automaton droids.

LEMON (1-20 points)
Need I explain this to you?

QUALITY (1-20 points)
Simply how well it is written, descriptions, lack of overdoing it, etc.

SEMANTICS (1-20 points)
Last but not least, a lemon can be good... if you can understand what the hell they're saying.

This will be our standard scoring in the future, unless we do a themed contest, in which case Lemon will be halved and the other half will be given to a theme-related score (ie: Execution, Romance, etc.). I hope that the Review Team, sans Knight (who has informed me that school pressures may prohibit him from judging for September), will join me in reviewing the entries yet again.

These rules seem effective enough, don't they? The E-Mail for sumbittions is AOTMContest@googlemail.com and I'm going to give a theme to this contest.

Sorry to anyone who's already started, then.

However, since it's October, the theme will be Horror, or Hallowe'en. Mr. Big T will be delighted, I'm sure.

So, good luck with that. Deadline's the 20th of October, I'll send them out on the 21st. If your entry is too late, or missed, I'll send it if I can, but if it's not there by the time all the judges have finished reveiwing or by Hallowe'en, I'm afraid you just won't be entered.

[Crimson Fox]

I'm afraid my next story doesn't qualify for this month then, but I'll still be happy to help with the judging.

[DragonMasterX]

Cool, you are one of us Crimson. I'm ready to judge, and I strongly doubt myself capable of writing anything good horror themed. So I'll just be a judge again.

[Marine]

Can't say that I'm a horror stylist. 'More of a front lines kind of guy. My writing style would just put it out of place, so I'll help judge.

[Anonmon]

Horror, eh? I don't know much about the style of horror, but I have subject matter for it. Dreampt it up (literally) this morning. Made me wake up at 6:30 AM, too.

[Knight of the new moon]

Damn, my story (which was supposed to be in the September contest but got lost when I sent it in) doesn't fall into the horror category. Oh well, always next month, hopefully.

[MISTER BIG T]

I already have an idea for a story. :D


How raw and sick can it be? Seeing as this is horror, I could put some very disturbing things.

Also another big question I've got as it's not answered in the rules, does this have to have only regular Digimon characters or can there be people from other shows or original people or something?

[Herr Mullen]

I'd rather keep it Digimon: it's on topic.

At least make it tolerable, horror-wise. You made me feel very, very ill last month.

Just a warning: December's theme will be Celebration, if you're planning that far ahead.

[Herr Mullen]

Well, I haven't had a single submition. So, I'm going to say the theme for this month's contest is a guideline, as such the contest guideline will be omitted.

So get something in fast. Only six days to go!