The 1,000 Word Herd Competition: Year 2
We’re back! Welcome to year two of the 1,000 Word Herd Flash Fiction Competition, a competition & fundraiser for TL;DR Press. Entrants have the chance to win $125 top prize and a total prize pool of $500+!
1 week. 1,000 words. 2 custom prompts. $500+ in prizes.
TL;DR Press is back with our second fundraising event: The 1,000 Word Herd Competition! Sign up to participate in this week-long flash fiction competition, with $500 worth of prizes for the top 25 placing stories!
The competition costs £5 to register + tax/fees.
We are also proud to offer each entrant guaranteed feedback on their story from the judges. Offering writers a chance for feedback is one of the Press’ core missions, along with our philanthropic mission to create anthologies to benefit charities.
This feedback means we only have 300 spots – once they’re gone, they’re gone!
Registration opens March 1, 2021, and closes on March 31, 2021. The competition begins at 12:01 am on Friday, April 3, 2021 and ends at 12:01 am on Saturday, April 10, 2021. You can find all of our rules and regulations here on our website.
Click here to go to the Eventbrite page and register!
How does it work?
The 1,000 Word Herd Competition will last for one week from the Eastern time beginning (12:01 am) of Friday, April 3 to the Eastern time until 12:01 am on Saturday, April 10, 2021 (All day Friday, April 9 + 1 minute). Each entrant will receive two individual prompts at the beginning of the competition: A character and an object/situation. There are no genre restrictions. Each entrant must create a 1,000-word original flash fiction story by the end of the competition and submit.
The judges will read, score, and provide feedback on each story to create a Top 25 Winners list. The top 25 stories will be announced, and prizes will be given to the winners as well as an ebook publication made of the top stories to benefit the World Literacy Foundation (more below under “Publishing”).
You can find all of the rules and regulations on our website.
How can I join?
Sign up through Eventbrite before the registration deadline ends at midnight, Eastern time on March 31, 2020, or before the 300 slots fill up.
You will receive an email at 12:01 a.m. (or a few minutes after given mass email lag!) on April 3 with your individual prompts and the form to submit your story. You will have until 12:01 am on Saturday, April 10, 2021, to write a 1,000-word MAX flash fiction story based on those prompts.
Fundraising
We want to keep this competition as transparent as possible. This competition is partially a fundraiser to help cover the Press’ financial needs throughout 2021. The prizes are our first priority. The Press will not receive any donations from entry fees before prizes are fully funded. The Press will retain none of the proceeds of the eBook sales – 100% of sales will go to the World Literacy Foundation, as is the case with all of our charity collections (and thus why we need a separate fundraiser!)
The Press is run by a volunteer-only group of writers who take no compensation but it still has expenses, such as insurance, proof copy purchases, cover art, tax filing, software licenses, and other expenses of a small non-profit publisher. We work to be as low-cost and low-barrier as possible for the writers in our community, and to continue doing that we need to raise funds. So, what better way than a competition, where we can also support some of the amazing writers in our community and produce a publication to benefit a charity?
We are splitting the ticket sales between the cost of the prize money and funds for the Press. We will ensure that the prize money is funded first, then any additional sales from tickets will go to the Press. In the event that we cannot fully fund the prize money, we will do everything in our power to raise the money through other means. This was not an issue in our first year and we are excited to grow the competition this year! We will refund any tickets sold should the competition be cancelled for any reason.
Prizes
1st Place: $125 USD and a free eBook copy of each of our TL;DR Press collections to date
2nd Place: $75 USD and a free eBook copy of each of our TL;DR Press collections to date
3rd Place: $50 USD and a free eBook copy of each of our TL;DR Press collections to date
4th-10th Place: $15 USD and a free eBook copy of each of our TL;DR Press collections to date
11-25th Place: $10 USD and a free eBook copy of each of our TL;DR Press collections to date
Publication
The Top 25 Winners will be published in an eBook anthology in addition to their prize money. The anthology will benefit our charity of choice for this project: the World Literacy Foundation, a global non-profit organisation working to ensure that every young person regardless of their circumstances has the opportunity to acquire literacy skills to reach their full potential, succeed at school and beyond.
Thank you to the World Literacy Foundation for partnering with us!
Check out last year’s collection, Endless Pictures, full of 20 fantastic winning flash fiction stories and benefiting First Story, another important literary charity we were so thankful to work with.
Judges
Callum is a fiction writer and co-founder of TL;DR Press. He writes across all genres; though science fiction, fantasy, and horror are closest to his heart. His short stories have featured in various magazines, anthologies, and zines, including Daily Science Fiction, Fictive Dream, and Bandit Fiction.
He is Director of Charity for TL;DR Press, and has also worked as either a curator or editor on a number of TL;DR releases, most recently as a curator on NOPE 2 and an editor on HOPE.
It is also his second year as a judge for the #1KWHC and last time round was often most impressed by stories that found unexpected and inventive ways to utilise the prompts.
Joe lives and works in London, but dreams of living and working elsewhere. His writing has been featured in Pilcrow & Dagger, Story Bits, Bandit Fiction, New Orbit, and the Corvid Review. He won the 2018 Six Word Story competition run by Bandit Fiction, and placed in the Quarantine Quanta competition in 2020.
He is one of the co-founders of TL;DR Press, and has been involved in all of the collections the press has published as either a curator or an editor as well as the cover artist for eight of the ten currently released collections. He was also one of the judges of the #1KWHC in 2020, and loves reading stories where the prompts are used in ways you might not expect.
Sarah is a speculative fiction writer and editor. Her work can be found in The Arcanist, Story of the Week, and TL;DR Press’s anthologies. She has curated Carrying Fire, a women’s anthology of fiction and poetry, and has acted as an editor for NOPE, a horror anthology, Kindred, a family-themed anthology, and Beneath Strange Stars, a speculative fiction anthology. Sarah has run flash fiction and short story workshops through TL;DR Press and loves to facilitate spaces for new writers to grow.
Returning for a second time judging the #1KWHC, she loves to read flash fiction that creates an atmospheric setting with characters she can root for (or against).
Penfold writes fiction and creative nonfiction, and frequently stumbles around the fuzzy, itchy area in between, in search of better answers, deeper questions, and more inappropriate metaphors. His stories have appeared in previous TL;DR Press anthologies and Story of the Week on Medium. He is a recurring editor with TL;DR Press and was curator for Kindred, the press’s family-themed collection. This is his second time judging for the #1KWHC, and he looks forward to once again being astonished by the creativity that the brevity of a mere thousand words can bring.
Frequently Asked Questions
Find all of our official rules and regulations here. If you have any questions, please ask us through tldrpress@gmail.com
Can I sign up more than once?
Because we only have 300 slots and we want to provide feedback to as many people as possible, this year we are limiting entry to one entry/one story per person. Thank you for your enthusiasm!
What are the formatting guidelines?
Our house style (which we will also include in our email to participants) is simple:
- Indent paragraphs except for the first line.
- Double spacing.
- Typed in 12 pt. and in a standard font, such as Times New Roman, Calibri, Arial, Georgia, Helvetica, etc.
- Submit in a .doc or .docx format. Do not submit a PDF.
We recommend using our submission style guide. However, this is not mandatory.
Find other rules such as anonymity and title page in the rules and regulations. Only anonymity (not putting your name INSIDE your document, we will scrub document titles before judges receive them as Google Forms tends to add names and that is a known issue), including the prompts, and word count are necessary to be considered.
We are welcome to experimental styles. While we may make copyediting/formatting changes to stories that will be published, we will not penalize stories for not staying within a specific style. If you have any questions, please ask us through tldrpress@gmail.com
We want to make this a fun and rewarding experience for all participants, and thus we are not citing a specific, extensive style to follow.
Community
Competitions are better together. Share using the #1KWHC hashtag on Twitter or share our competition on Facebook!
Need some eyes on your entry, or just some encouragement along the way? TL;DR Press manages a writing community on Slack, apply here to join!