Guidelines
SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY PROSE POEM/FLASH FICTION CONTEST
Adult division: 18 and over, $10 entry fee per story/poem; multiple entries allowed
Prizes: $500 to first place; OddCon membership + books to top 3Youth division: under 18 as of Jan. 1, 2011, NO entry fee, but send no more than one entry
Prizes: $50 to first place; OddCon membership + books to top 3Deadline: January 15, 2011
Details: Send 500 words or less of speculative (SF&F) fiction or prose poetry (paragraph form). No previously-published work, but simultaneous submissions are allowed, and multiple adult submissions are encouraged. $10 entry fee must be paid for each adult entry submitted. Youth entries are free, but entrant must be under 18 as of January 1, 2011. Please do not enter before October 15. See definitions of "speculative," "prose poetry," and "flash fiction." Read the winning stories/poems for 2010!
2011 judge: Marion Boyer
2010 judge: John Rezmerski
2009 judge: Joe Haldeman, home.earthlink.net/~haldeman/
2008 judge: Bruce Boston, hometown.aol.com/brubostonJudging process: Blind judging. Preliminary readers who are SF writers and fans will select the top manuscripts in each division to be sent to the final judge. All entries are read by several different readers. We send not only the entries receiving the highest cumulative scores to the final judge, but also those that are the top picks of individual readers. Convention committee members, their friends and families, and degree-program or professional students of the judge may not enter. Winners to be notified and results posted by March 1, 2011. Winning poems/stories will be read at OdysseyCon, published in the program, and posted on the website.
Entering: pay Adult entry fee of $10 per story/poem via PayPal to treasurer@oddcon.com (click button below to pay), or mail a check payable to OddCon to address below (postmark by January 15). E-mail your work (maximum length 500 words, excluding title), pasted into body of e-mail or attached as .doc or .rtf, to contest11@oddcon.com. Put last name, first initial, and CONTEST: Youth or Adult in the subject line. Be sure to include your name, date of birth if Youth entry, mailing address, phone number, and the name/e-mail under which payment was made, if not the one used to enter. Receipt will be acknowledged within 3 days. Please do not enter before October 15.
IMPORTANT NOTE! Sadly, one of our 2010 youth winners did not furnish contact information other than an e-mail address, and never responded to notification. All entries without a street address AND telephone number will be discarded. If you win, we mail you books. The information will not be used for anything other than this contest. Also, we send notification of receipt via e-mail; if you do not hear from us within 3 days of sending your entry, please adjust your spam filter accordingly. Notification does not come from the contest e-mail address.
Postal mail: Please do not send postal entries unless you have absolutely no access to e-mail. All judging is done via electronic media, and the transcription process from hard copy is unreliable at best.
Mailing address:
(for checks)OddContest
Odyssey Con
P.O. Box 7114
Madison, WI 53707Questions? E-mail contest11@oddcon.com or call 608-635-3966.