Teenlit Halloween Contest

Yay, it's the YA forum's first contest. Throughout October, we're going to have a contest for Halloween. Whether you want to write about scary creatures or trick-or-treating fun, I'm leaving the prompt wide open to anything that fits with the Halloween theme, as long as it's YA.



Rules:
- No more than 500 words
- Include a title in your entry
- You can use an excerpt from a longer work, but make it self-contained
- One entry per person

How to enter/vote:
PM me your entries starting October 1 at 12:00 a.m. EST until October 15 at 11:59 p.m. EST. Put "Halloween Contest Entry" in the subject. Don't forget a title for the entry in the subject.

I will post the entries on the 16th, and you will have until October 30th to vote. People will vote for their top three in a PM to me.

Winners will be posted on Halloween!

I'll post prizes once I work them out, which should be before October starts.

LOL, I just followed the same-ish format that wyntermoon used for the kidlit contests.

I'm just glad I have so much room in my inbox now.

That's why I posted so early. I wanted to give you guys time to plot and write

So for our first place winner, we will have a $25 gift certificate to Amazon. If we get enough entries, I will add 2nd and 3rd place prizes too.

Nope. I will put up the entries for everyone to read and vote for their top three choices. There will be a point system so each voter's 1st pick will get 3 points, 2nd pick gets 2, and 3rd pick gets 1. People participating can vote too, and yes, they can vote for their own

Yep, it's almost a week until you can start sending in the entries to me.

I received a question about the self-contained stories from a novel. I've actually done that one before, in the kidlit Valentine's day contest. The scene was from the middle of DownLoad, and in it one of my MC's, Kristie, was trying to figure out what the other, DL, looked like, because he was invisible to her, and so she traces his face with her fingers and ends up on his lips. Obviously in the novel, the world had already been built and the reader already knows that Kristie can't see DL and that he is a cyborg. I think I added Kristie saying, "Some stealthy cyborg Inviso-assassin you are," or something like that to quickly orient the reader to the situation (the line worked well with what was going on), and then tightened tightened tightened the scene because it was 250 words over the max word limit. If the scene didn't call for people to know that he was a cyborg or invisible, I could have ignored that information.

So that's my suggestion, is to quickly orient the reader to the situation, then go into the meat of the scene, just as you would in a short story.

In less than three hours, you can start sending me your Teenlit Halloween Contest entrees. But you have until October 15th 11:59 p.m. to send them in, so don't stress if they're not ready yet.

A third of the way through submission time, folks!