Mystery Flash Fiction Writing Contest Rules
This is the first Mystery Flash Fiction writing contest on my blog. Submission guidelines are posted below.
Please tell yourself and all your friends to ENTER! The more the merrier!
Winners will be posted two weeks post contest entry deadline. Winners will ONLY be posted via my blog, so if you haven’t subscribed, please do so BEFORE you enter the contest so you can be sure find out if you’ve won.
Here’s a screen grab from the right hand side of my main page where you can subscribe:
JUDGES:
Vanessa Shields
Mark Bacon
CONTEST OPENS:
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 9AM EST
CONTEST CLOSES:
Friday, September 13, 2013 11:59PM EST
WINNERS ANNOUNCED ON WWW.VANESSASHIELDS.COM on
Friday, September 27th
CONTEST GUIDELINES:
- Write a mystery story in 200 words or less. If your story is over 200 words, we will read it, but it will be disqualified from the competition.
- Post your entry in the COMMENT section of this blog post. NO EMAIL ENTRIES WILL BE ACCEPTED.
- Please use this format for you submission (in the comment section):
NAME: *you may include your email address here as well if you’d like
TITLE:
WORD COUNT:
STORY:
- Please include the email address we can contact you at when submitting your story through the comment section. (This way, you won’t have to post your email in the comment section for everyone to see – unless you are comfortable doing so.)
- You title is NOT included in your word count.
Here’s what it will look like on your screen:
- ONE SUBMISSION PER PERSON.
- There is no fee to enter this contest. (You’re very welcome!)
- Winning entries will be posted on my blog and Mark’s blog.
PRIZES:
HONOURABLE MENTION –
A set of the coolest bookplates you ever did see.
THIRD PLACE –
A set of writing journals.
SECOND PLACE –
A copy of Poetry On Demand Volume 1 & 2, and a e-version of Mark Bacon’s Cops, Crooks & Other Stories in 100 Words
FIRST PLACE –
A copy of Trouble is My Business by Raymond Chandler, a copy of The Rose Metal Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction edited by Tara L. Masih, and an e-version of Mark Bacon’s Cops, Crooks & Other Stories in 100 Words.
As this is my first official WRITING contest, I am feeling generous in terms of giving prizes, so please submit and make me feel like it was worth it!!
VANESSA SHIELDS 
Name: D. Mahoney
Title: Devil’s Food
Word Count: 100 including the title
“Act of God, that’s what they call that. There’s no murder here.”
The old man’s body was inert beneath a large toppled tree.
“But no one liked my father,” his daughter nattered. “No one liked him.” She wrung her hands.” I know they killed him.”
“There’s no proof. Who would know how to drop a tree so that it would fall at exactly the right moment? That tree was rotten.”
Two blocks away a chainsaw snarled. Tree trimmers were in the area. One had extra cash in his wallet. His grandmother promised to make his favourite cake.
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First submission! Thanks, Dorothy!!! Good luck!!!
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Name: Eva Antonel
Title: Clean Dust
Word Count:199
“I was terrified I’d fall to my death if I got too close to the edge.”
Her eyes move away from the third storey balcony we were looking at.
“What else do you remember?”
“The tall, narrow bathroom window and how you could see into the neihbour’s bedroom if the light was just right.”
“I never noticed that,” she says, as we make our way into the courtyard of the tenement we left forty years ago. “And here, this doorway leads to the cellar where we stored the root vegetables over the winter.”
“And the coal,” I say.
“Yes, the man with the horse-drawn wagon dumped it next to the cellar windows and the men shoveled it in.”
“I was too young; I just remember the warmth of the stove in the corner of the room.”
“That’s all a child needs to remember,” she says.
“Not the hushed voices talking about the girl they found hanging there?”
She sits on the nearby bench and looks past me at the dormers of the attic.
“Do you remember grandmother hanging the laundry up there?”
“Yes,” I say, “the air smelled like clean dust. Just like father the morning he went away.”
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Thanks, Eva!! Good luck!
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very cool story Eva!!
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Name: Anthony Henry Joseph Maria
Title: Fishing
Word Count: 190
There wasn’t much I knew about her.
“That’s an interesting concept,” she said smiling, then played with her hair brooding.
If I could have stopped time in that instant, said something about her father, maybe things wouldn’t have gone the way they did. But I didn’t.
“Yeah,” I said touching her shapely shoulder. “It’s nothing original really. I mean it’s certainly been done before. It’s pretty simple, and we pay cash.”
She looked troubled, but I could tell it was only a matter of time. She would give in.
“You’re so pretty,” I said definitively. “You could be a star someday. You have the look. Have to start somewhere though, right?’
She looked at me searching.
“I could really use the money. I’ve been auditioning a lot, but haven’t booked anything in a while.”
Her eyes were green, and sparkled in the light of the blistering sun.
“It’s only a matter of time,” I replied. “So are we going to do this?”
I smiled at her. She stamped her foot on the pavement, her arms folded, and her head bobbing slightly. She really was beautiful. But that didn’t really matter. Not anymore.
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Name: Karen Rockwell
Title: Missing
Word Count: 48
Missing
“I don’t know,” she said, and she meant it. Naked oblivion spilled from her thin, wind-chapped lips, filled up her wide near-tears eyes, sprang from her ruddy face, from her panicked expression, like a rash of question marks, as she offered up the dog-eared wallet photo of a toothless grinning child.
Detective Macey sighed, then forced a smile at the child’s mother. “We’ll do our best.”
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correction! Word Count: 63
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I thought I posted, but I can’t find it! Perhaps I forgot to hit “Post Comment” So here it is again…slightly altered…
Name: Karen Rockwell
Title: Missing
Word Count: 77
Missing
“I don’t know,” she said, and she meant it. Naked oblivion spilled from her thin, wind-chapped lips, filled up her wide near-tears eyes, sprang from her panicked expression, from her flushed ruddy skin, like a rash of question marks, as she offered up the dog-eared wallet photo of a toothless grinning child.
The constable sighed as she handed the photo back to the child’s mother.
“We will do our very best,” she said through a forced smile.
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Name: Mike LeClair
Title: Captured
Word Count: 200
I’m walking in the thick of the rain towards the bar where the distress call came from. Seven tenants in the apartments above are missing, all female. The bar owner is currently being held for questioning for assault and an alleged association with the underground sex trade.
Morgan, a once proud city that lost all hope after the assassination of its war hero mayor and the corruption that followed his cremation.
I light my second cigarette under the angled brim of my hat as rain pelts on and around me while I make my way past gutter overflowing, then past the green neon that plays off the reflective yellow tape around the entrance. The 911 call came from a friend of one of the missing girls and she sits in a corner booth in the dim bar with two policemen standing by her, one waving an SLR in an anxious reporters face, warning him. Although advised, the reporter pulls a Polaroid from holster, the flash creating uproar between him and the officers. While grabbed and escorted outside he repeatedly asks, “What happened to your face?” Further, almost outside he’s yelling, “Lady, what happened to your face?” His Polaroid flashes again.
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Name: Terry Ann Carter
Title “This Floating World”
Word Count: 84 words
Tokugawa period. Japan. This floating world of pleasures. This world of samurai warriors, geishas, poets, prostitutes. As a ukiyo-e artist I am intent on my next wood block print. A death mask.
After some sexual adventures I will prepare a tea ceremony for my sensei. The exact proportion of poison in the tea bowl.
I will use a chashaku carved from a single piece of bamboo.
My chasen will whisk the potion into the raku bowl.
Must hurry. The boating party is about to depart.
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Thanks, Terry Ann!
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