Thought I'd post this to give everyone a shot at entering. 100 word maximum. Runners up in each language receive $2000 http://www.aerogrammestudio.com/2014/08/11/museum-of-words-flash-fiction-contest/
$20k? For flash fiction? That makes the going pro rate of $0.05 per word look like crap. Thanks for sharing.
Look at last year's winner: The Sniper Every day, while waiting for the bus, a child pointed at me from a balcony with his finger, and pulled the trigger as a rite his imaginary gun, screaming at me “bang, bang!” One day, just to keep the routine play, I also pointed at him with my finger, yelling "bang, bang!” The child fell to the street like struck down. I ran to him, and saw that he half opened his eyes and looked at me stunned. Desperate I said "but I just repeated the same as you did to me". He responded then sorrowful: "Yes Sir, but I was not shooting to kill".
The Reddit discussion: I have to agree, "The Sniper" is not very special either. In fact, I don't think it's an original story. At a minimum I believe I shall do a little more investigating. The ID is supposedly to keep people from sending in more entries than allowed. But that's not a very satisfactory answer since there are other ways of limiting multiple entries.
So the Reddit discussion is worth scanning. There are some people who think the contest is legit and has been going on for four years and others who think the information requested is suspicious and the winning stories suspect. I'm a bit busy today and can't do thorough investigating, but we have until November so there's time.
For last year's winning stories and the names of the judges: http://www.museodelapalabra.com/en/short-tales-contest/3-edition/item/626-jury-s-final-decision-flash-fiction-competition-museum-of-words
Let us hope the author of this piece is not a school teacher. He who has been to the Lounge lately, let him hear.
Actually, I think it was originally written in (what appears to be good) Spanish. For some reason, they've translated it incredibly badly.
Most of the entries are in Spanish. Here are 300 of the entries from the last contest: http://www.museodelapalabra.com/images/Libro_III.pdf It looks legit or it is a very elaborate scam. You would think by this time they'd have addressed people's concerns about the passport numbers, but on the other hand, maybe ID theft is not yet rampant in Spain. Any of our members from Spain have any insight on the matter?
they have prizes in english, hebrew, spanish, and arabic. The winner comes from those four languages. "The Sniper" was written in spanish. Seems like an insanely large prize for flash fiction but I did (admittedly only a little) research and it seemed legit. If anyone can show that it is fake or a scam I'm happy to find out...and saddened to find out as well
