Writing Contest: Mandela Effect, $30 SBD In Total Prizes

@originalworks and The Writers’ Block have joined forces once again to bring you a second writing contest! This one calls for 500-1,000 words of your best fiction, so fire up that imagination and get those fingers warmed up!

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First place winner will receive $15 SBD. Second place winner gets $10 SBD. Third place takes home $5 SBD. $30 SBD in all, courtesy of @originalworks.

HEADS UP!

This is my "heads-up" post. The contest won’t officially be open for submissions until 12:01 a.m. on Saturday morning, 10/28/17, and will end at midnight on Sunday, 10/29/17, according to the time zone you live in. I’ll make an additional post just before the submission window opens that will call for links in the comments. Links to entries provided in the comments of this post will be disregarded.

Don’t rush to submit ahead of everyone else. Order of submissions will have no bearing on the judging process. The deadline is somewhat fluid due to the time zone issue. Judging will begin Monday, 10/30/17, and winners will be announced early next week, date dependent on how many entries have to be read and evaluated.

CONTEST PROMPT

Write between 500 and 1,000 words about some aspect of the Mandela Effect.

This should be fiction, a story with a complete arc that includes beginning, middle, and ending. Please do not submit essays or autobiographies. I’m not interested in theories, explanations, or personal experience. Entertain me! Introduce me to a character whose life is impacted by this phenomenon in some way. Take me on their journey, and make me believe it.

TIPS FROM THE JUDGE

I will be the only judge in this contest. And I’m tough. Be forewarned. If you lose me in the opening lines of your submission, I won’t keep reading. In this regard, I have much in common with J.A. Konrath. Read his article HERE about how not to start a story.

In fact, I encourage you to read many of the articles on writing posted at the Writers’ Block website. They can be found HERE. Do yourself a favor and submit your story to the Fiction Workshop at The Writers’ Block in plenty of time to work on it before the deadline. Let our editors improve your chances of winning. Learn how to find us HERE.

I can’t stress this enough. Workshoppers are not the only writers eligible to enter my contests. But typically, unworkshopped stories don’t stand a chance of winning. Why? Because at the first sign of a comma splice, confusion of “lay” versus “lie,” telling rather than showing, headhopping, or any rookie mistakes like those, I will stop reading and, most likely, set your submission aside. Correct grammar, spelling, and syntax matter to me. The mechanics of the writing matters to me. The execution matters to me. All of these things will factor in the judging, as well as how closely your story fits the prompt.

The Mandela Effect fascinates me. I’ve had some brushes with it myself lately. I am certain I saw the movie “Shazaam” back in the nineties, and once upon a time, South America was south of North America rather than east. There were four people in the Kennedy convertible, not six. Does any of this matter? I have no idea. But it can matter in your story, and I’m very interested to see what you come up with.