Short Fiction's first "Writers Challenge" short story competition

The competition is now closed to new entries

We now have seven very good entries to our writing competition - please click here to read and rank them

The Challenge we set...

OK - see the rules about timings and voting below, but here's the rules the stories have to abide by to be entered in our competition;

The stories must be between 500 and 3,000 words.

They MUST start with the following line; Hubert Granice, pacing the length of his pleasant lamp-lit library, paused to compare his watch with the clock on the chimney-piece.

TheyMUST end with the following line; "Here -- take this; it makes me sick," he said abruptly, thrusting the paper at the reporter; and the two men turned and walked in silence to the gates.

Everything else was up to the writers. Genre, characters, and how we get from a to b while entertaining the reader was all up to the authors.

Click here to view the current entries and their scores.

The Rules of the Challenge

OK, on to the small print of Short Fiction's first writer challenge;

1) Last day of entry is March 31st (No longer accepting new stories)
2) Stories will be posted for viewing from approx 5th Feb.
3) Anyone can vote (registered or not), but only once per story (yes you can vote for more than one), on a score from 1 to 10 (ten being the best score). Anti cheating software will be built in.
4) Voting will be allowed until April 21st, when the competition will close.
5) A 'secret' formula will be used to calculate the winner, based on number of votes and average voting score achieved (only average score will be displayed against the stories during the voting). This means it is my decision who actually wins, and my decision is final and that's it! ;-) (getting your story up early isn't a guarentee of winning using my system)

Competition... so does that mean a prize or entrance fee?

As this is free resource for everyone, I'm not going to charge an entry fee, so I'm not in a position to offer a prize. (NOTE: if you are a company who would wish to sponsor a prize for this challenge, click here)

The competition will allow everyone who reads the stories to vote, so you'll have the satisfaction of having your story voted best by your peers, something worth more than money I'm sure.