Tuesday 31 December 2013

SF twitfic contest for young writers

To celebrate the recent successes achieved by the We See a Different Frontier: postcolonial speculative fiction anthology, we're going to run another "twitfic" microfiction writing contest over the first couple weeks of the new year. If you are under 20 years old, this is your chance to win a handful of lovely prizes by writing a short story that fits within a single tweet (with space for hashtags) on the topic of colonialism-themed speculative fiction.

The rules:
  • To be elligible to enter, you must not yet have reached your twentieth birthday on the day you post the tweet
  • Your entire story should be under 125 characters long. Post your story in a tweet along with both the hashtags #wsadf #YAscifi
  • Your story can be in any of the subgenres of science fiction, fantasy, horror or even surreal or magical realist, whatever works for you, so long as you include the theme of colonisation from the perspective of the colonized
  • For an idea of what sort of stories themes might work, see the original call for submissions for the colonial SF/F anthology
  • The closing date for entries is midnight UTC on Wednesday January 15th, 2014
  • Prize-winning stories may be used in promotional contexts and other materials for the We See a Different Frontier anthology. All other rights, including full copyright, remain with the authors.
    The prizes:
    • One winner will receive a hardcopy of We See a Different Frontier; a one-year e-book subscription to Crossed Genres magazine; a signed copy of Sofia Samatar's A Stranger in Olondria; a reading slot in the outro of an instalment of one of the Escape Artists fiction podcasts; a copy of Ilike Merey's graphic novel a+e 4ever from Lethe Press.
    • At the judges' discretion, one or more runners-up may in addition be offered e-book copies of the WSaDF anthology.
      The judges:
      The winning story and runners-up will be selected by the panel of judges, made up of:
      • Malinda Lo (author of Ash and Huntress)
      • Catherine Krahe (Alpha Workshop and Strange Horizons)
      • Regina de Búrca (TFF co-editor and YA author)

        4 comments:

        Anonymous said...

        Is that <20 or <=20?

        Djibril said...

        Let's say if you have not yet reached your 20th birthday at the time you post the tweet.

        Anonymous said...

        Okay, thanks! That lets out the person I was thinking of pointing to this.

        Djibril said...

        Due to the low uptake of this contest, the judges and organizers have decided not to award a prize, since the pool of entries was too small to make such a selection meaningful. Thanks to everyone who entered, helped spread the word, or offered prizes. If we can think of a way to read a larger audience of willing young authors, we may try to do something like this again some day.