Need time? How does two and a half months sound? :)
Prose that Blows 11 - It's All About The Feels
Hello everybody! Hope you all had a good Christmas. From the amount of messages I’ve been getting about it, I figure it must be around about time for another Prose that Blows.
Apologies if I’ve been giving the impression that the next competition is imminent and then dragging it out a bit. I haven’t seen Notso in a while, but we had discussed and agreed upon a topic for this competition back in the summer so I just needed to flesh it out into a post and put it up here. The idea was originally Notso’s.
This eleventh iteration of the popular Prose that Blows is all about emotion… specifically emotion-fired inflation. What we want you to do is write a story where the inflatee’s emotional state and state of inflation are intimately linked. This can take one of a number of forms, it could be that the emotion somehow causes the inflation, but we want you to be as creative as possible about about how the link is manifest. We’re not just saying focus more than you normally would do on the emotions the inflatee feels, we want to see it become a plot point.
Rules
- All the general rules apply.
- There is no specific rule for this one since it would be very difficult to put into words how I might disqualify a story for not following the theme, but I will let you know if you’ve submitted a story which in my opinion shows little or no regard for the them… as per the general rules.
Word-Limit
- The word limit for this competition is 1000 words. This is a shorter word limit than the last one but I feel the nature of the theme is more suited to a shorter story.
Award Categories
Voting will be held to select winners for the following categories.
- Best overall story
- Sexiest story
- Most original interpretation of the theme
- Best depiction of a negative emotion (i.e. fear, disgust, shock, anger, pain, hate, jealousy)
- Best depiction of a positive emotion (i.e. delight, pleasure, love, relief)
- Most sympathetic inflatee
- Least sympathetic inflatee
Submissions
- To submit a story, email it to the organisers at prosethatblows@live.com
- All submissions must be received no later than 12PM GMT (7am EST) on the 28th of February 2015
- Any submission may be amended before the deadline, and organisers may suggest that a submission be amended should it fail to meet the competition guidelines.
- Further dates for open and close of voting will be announced by the organisers once the deadline has passed.
Thu, 03/12/2015 - 07:46
#3
Inflate123
Tue, 12/30/2014 - 11:09
#4
Very original theme! Can't wait!
Tue, 12/30/2014 - 11:14
#5
doubleintegral
Oh man, I just came up with a great idea for this.
Tue, 12/30/2014 - 14:42
#6
I must ask, can a kemonomimi character (Like one of my OCs here: http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2014/351/8/4/commissioned__shelly_the_cheerleader_by_pufferfax-d8a5mrp.png ) be a part of the contest?
Now, I love this theme since I always enjoyed the idea of someone inflating due to their emotions. I am cool with doing a normal human as the inflatee, but for inflation I seem to favour kemonomimi designs as the inflatees, I just find them so cute when they inflate more so than normal humans or full anthros.
Could I get confirmation on this Carnatic?
Thu, 01/01/2015 - 18:29
#7
You could have done had you not asked. But now unfortunately it wouldn't be an anonymous story anymore if you do do it (unless more than one person uses the same type of character).
You're free to submit a story with such a character on the off chance this happens, but I'll return it to you for reworking if I feel it's going to be obvious who wrote it.
Wed, 12/31/2014 - 17:08
#8
CorpulentArtifice
There are so many possibilities with this... It's just a shame that it's one entry per person. xD
Thu, 03/12/2015 - 07:45
#9
Inflate123
Write as many as you are inspired to write, submit your absolute favorite one, then release the rest after the contest concludes. It's not uncommon to see longer edits of stories or multiple stories appear in the Library or in dA galleries after the contest has concluded.
Thu, 01/01/2015 - 18:32
#10
Extra note, see my reply to big gas balloon above. If you have any specific questions about the content of your stories, I strongly advise that you direct them to me in a PM. Otherwise you could be giving away something that will make it easy for people to identify whose story is whose.
Tue, 01/20/2015 - 13:48
#11
EMAIL UPDATE
I have been sent messages by a number of you, stating that the email address prosethatblows@live.com has been bouncing. This has now been fixed, it was simply a case of Microsoft suspending it as it hadn't been used in over a year. It should work now.
Wed, 02/04/2015 - 00:21
#12
I'm looking forward to participating. Thank you for organizing and all the hard way!
Wed, 02/18/2015 - 16:35
#13
UPDATE
New submission deadline - The deadline for the submission of entries is now Sunday the 15th of March.
I have decided on the two-week extension to the deadline as we haven't had many submissions yet and with only 10 days remaining to the original deadline... I don't know if people are still writing stories and there will be a huge flurry in the last few days, but from past experience there is no flurry and even if there is, it doesn't leave me much time to check them all. I know a lot of you have told me that you wish to entry but haven't send in any entries, so perhaps an extra two weeks (which means you now have over 3 weeks, that's less than 50 words a day ;) ) will encourage some people who thought their chance to enter had passed, to enter.
So I now fully expect that flurry of entries.
Wed, 02/18/2015 - 22:55
#14
Gah, this is so frustrating! I have so many ideas but I can't figure out how to make any of them work!
Mon, 03/02/2015 - 16:44
#15
Not long now. We have enough entries at least that we don't need to worry about putting the deadline back a second time, it stays at the 15th (or Ides)* of March.
Please accept my apologies if you sent me a submission and are still waiting for me to confirm I have received it and it meets the criteria to be entered. I keep remembering at the most inconvenient times and never when I'm sat at my desk with time to go through them all. If I remember I will do them over lunch tomorrow.
*in exactly a year from how we'll have a betrayal themed one I think just so I can have the deadline on the Ides of March.
Fri, 03/13/2015 - 19:00
#16
I wish I had known about the extension before hand
Thu, 03/05/2015 - 09:21
#17
doctorbo
Deadline extension? I'll try to come up with something then!
Wed, 03/11/2015 - 19:26
#18
doubleintegral
You'll have my entry before the deadline.
Maybe.
Wed, 03/11/2015 - 22:33
#19
Same. Emphasis on the maybe.
Thu, 03/12/2015 - 06:22
#20
Good to hear from both of you... we're on 8 entries so far so if you do get yours in, that will bring us up to 10, which I'm more than happy with.
Thu, 03/12/2015 - 07:40
#21
Inflate123
If you have even the slightest desire to enter a story, I strongly urge you to do it. PtB has really been a high point in the community since it started, and it really goes on to inspire other writers, to show them they can do it, too. That's especially true with these small-world-count editions. It's a very achieveable goal.
We have many more writers than eight or 10 among us. We have hundreds more readers who know what they want to see in a story but have never shared what they see in their heads. This is an opportunity that no one from either group should pass up.
Fri, 03/13/2015 - 21:30
#22
Could you clarify the cut-off time? The original cut-off was at 12PM GMT on the specified day, is it the same here?
Sat, 03/14/2015 - 11:01
#23
I'm guessing the time hasn't changed from 12pm GMT. The deadline is 15th March, tomorrow.
Sat, 03/14/2015 - 19:18
#24
Yes it is, but if you need the extra few hours and you email in to say so then I see no reason not to accept a few slightly late entries.
The deadline was set with a time as well as a date mainly because with everyone being in different timezones it seemed I would have to clarify not just the date submissions needed to be in, but also a time in GMT to avoid confusion about whether the deadline had passed. As far as I'm concerned the deadline is tomorrow and I'm not too strict about what time tomorrow.
Mon, 03/16/2015 - 11:45
#25
Just announcing that the deadline has now passed and we have 10 entries. Thank you very much to all who have entered.
I'm out all day tomorrow and then I'm in and out over the course of the day on Wednesday. Thursday I'll have to catch up with work that was missed the previous days so I think it could be late Thursday or Friday before I get the entries up so that voting can commence.
Mon, 03/16/2015 - 21:54
#26
doubleintegral
I ended up having to pass on this contest. My original idea that was so great didn't really jive with the rules of the contest, and I had trouble coming up with another suitable idea. Since I've already written a story in which inflation is closely tied to emotions (particularly arousal), and I consider that story to be one of my best, it was going to be tough for me to recapture that in a satisfactory manner.
Looking forward to reading the entries, though.
Tue, 03/17/2015 - 16:56
#27
Post it here so we can judge that DI
Tue, 03/17/2015 - 17:23
#28
doubleintegral
The first story that I wrote in this theme was "Their First Time" about two years ago. It's in the library.
My original idea for the contest was to show what would happen if a Vulcan woman truly let her guard down, but then I quickly realized that such an idea (i.e. using characters from another work of fiction) is kind of against the spirit of the rules. The idea seemed less clever if you just made it about a normal person and not a Vulcan. I never came up with another idea that I thought matched or surpassed "Their First Time", and my writing the last few months has been pretty uninspired anyway, so I decided to sit this one out.
Wed, 03/18/2015 - 10:01
#29
In the case of using a non-specific Vulcan character, it's not so much it being against the spirit of the contest as it being a character that requires background knowledge from another work of fiction and therefore doesn't stand alone as as story. I don't know if that's how it was worded when you and Pakona ran the competition but it's how it's worded now.
It's a bit of a grey area really, as surely most people have heard of Vulcans, even if they've never watched Star Trek (I've never watched it for more than a few minutes when nothing else is on but I've heard of Spock and know what his character is), but then there may well be people who aren't aware what they are and wouldn't get anything that requires you to already know that they're supposed to be driven by logic. Also if they were allowed then where do you draw the line? I know there are many people here who are fans of anime which has a wealth of different tropes and character types but I also know there are many people (myself again) who don't know the first thing about anime (everything I know about anime can be summed up in the phrase 'Japanese cartoons with massive eyes'), and therefore a story set in an anime universe which expects you to already know about how a specific type of character will behave, won't be universally accessible.
But of course there are some character types derived from fiction which have pretty much become universally known, such as elves and whatnot... so I don't know I'd actually say you can't use Vulcans, I'd just discourage it in the interests of creating stories which are standalone and accessible.
Wed, 03/18/2015 - 21:53
#30
doubleintegral
You're right, it is a gray area, but overall it simply didn't pass the "spirit of the rules" smell test, hence why I abstained.
Wed, 03/18/2015 - 15:26
#31
LutherVKane
I actually wrote something this time around, but unforeseen circumstances kept me from making the deadline. No worries, though, I think the most important thing about Prose That Blows is that it gets people writing. Counting the ten from this run, the series as produced over a hundred stories. Pretty darned impressive.
Great! I fear I lack the motivation and time to participate and submit my own story, but I do very much look forward to seeing what everyone can do. Good luck, everybody! ^^