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Paper Swans flash fiction competition

edited September 2014 in Writing
If anyone is interested in folding some words into flash fiction, there's a competition with a closing date of 7th September here: http://paperswans.co.uk/flash-fiction-competition-5/

Comments

  • Pst. Tiny Nell. Over here B-)
  • Thanks, TS, but I'm eschewing all competitions that rely on votes after my last experience.
  • What was your experience, Claudia?

    I've just submitted my entry.
  • C2C2
    edited September 2014
    . Glad I read below.
  • What was your experience, Claudia?

    I entered a travel writing competition recently. I was in a rush to enter before the closing date and didn't fully grasp how the voting was organised until after I'd entered. The competition was based on the twenty entries with the most votes achieving the shortlist. Although quite a few Talkbackers were kind enough to vote for my entry - I was unable to gain enough votes as I don't have huge numbers of facebook friends etc...

    Competition organisers who find their shortlist or winner based on how many votes a competitor can rustle up seems a most unfair, unbalanced way to do it which is why I won't support the voting system again.

  • Thanks Claudia - I won't bother either.
  • I remember your story, Claudia, and voted for you. I understand your viewpoint, and I did wonder about that with this competiton. It does say entries for Paper Swans must be kept anonymous. I'm sticking to that, so I won't be seeking any votes, but I wonder how many people will follow that rule.

    Although it would be fairly easy for the Paper Swans editor/admin to google entry titles and excerpts and see if they pop up on other sites, and disqualify anyone found to be trying it on.

    Speaking of that, I googled my own work, after I tried self-publishing, to check that it wasn't being pirated anywhere. Lo and behold I found someone in a business database with the same surname and first and middle initials, who had stolen my website profile and linked to my website. They included a postal address and telephone number for themselves, somewhere in the USA. I'm not sure what they were trying to achieve, but I got them shut down with a complaint of fraudulent activity to the website administrators.
  • edited September 2014
    My entry is up on the Paper Swans website. I wonder if anyone can guess which story is mine. I won't tell you if you're right, of course ;)

    Well, not until voting ends.
  • Mine's up there too and, to honour the spirit of the competition, I'm giving nothing away either.
  • Well done TS and Montholon.
  • Thanks, Carol. It would be good to see a Talkbacker win, but purely on merit, of course.
  • Fingers crossed.
  • Good luck, Montholon!
  • Likewise, T_S!
  • Ah, we didn't win. But I liked the winning entries!

    Only thing I wasn't pleased about with most of the entries, including my own "Let Me In" attempt, was the formatting. It seems the editor copied and pasted from our submitted documents into the website and didn't edit the layout. Hence there are no paragraph breaks for those entries that were clearly submitted in standard manuscript format, i.e. with indented paragraphs (which haven't translated over to the website for some reason). If I'd had the foresight, I would have used a blank line between each paragraph in my Word document, which it appears a couple of writers did.
  • Oh, shame. But never mind. It's another piece to proudly add to your collections and there will always be an opportunity to recycle, I'm sure.

    Yes, isn't it annoying when your work isn't presented in the way you'd like. I find that often happens with electronic submissions.
  • Mine looked OK, actually, so I can't blame the formatting for my not winning! Ah, well, on to the next one!
  • edited September 2014
    I'm not blaming the formatting. I must be clear on that. I didn't even expect to win, but I enjoyed the opportunity to try more flash fiction and have it out there for people to read, as FF is something I've overlooked until recently.

    Formatting wouldn't make a difference to my vote in a competition, as I know it isn't the writer's doing. But you expect a certain standard in the editing of a publication, even if it is an online journal.

    Especially as they want to set up as a small press, they should be taking care over such details.

    I would submit to them again, to be honest, for the iPamphlet. But next time I'll go in armed with the knowledge that, if I want my work to be displayed in a better way, I need to disregard standard manuscript formatting and use blank lines between new paragraphs instead of indenting (I assumed that's what you did in your submission, Montholon, as yours does indeed have a clear paragraph break). Oh, and they don't do italics, as the last two sentences were italicised in my original typescript. That was lost in the translation, too.

    Definitely on to the next one, anyway.
  • Bad luck, Tristram Shandy and Montholon.

    Apropos formatting etc - in a couple of on-line submissions I was alarmed to see red underlinings on my English spelt words! One only has to hope that the judges know better!
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