Nefarious Muse Fiction Competition

I’m pleased to announce the 2008 Short Fiction Competition at Nefarious Muse. It’ll run through February, and the winner will be announced on March 15th following a vote by you, the readers.

The idea for a short story competition came when I was mulling over the recent lull in submissions. When I first relaunched Nefarious Muse, I received a few very good submissions quickly, but that didn’t last. This is my fault, of course, because I hadn’t been doing a good job promoting it. I didn’t want to spam message boards and email addresses (because who needs more of that bullshit?), but what other way to spread the word? I figured money would do the trick. Everyone likes money, and hell, I’d just spend it on whiskey instead.

So here are the basics:

Prize: $100USD gift certificate (via email) to Amazon.com

When: from February 1st to February 29th at 12:00am PST

Rules: only original unpublished short stories between 500-5000 words. One story per author is eligible. No excerpts, poems, essays or fan-fiction.

The full rundown can be found here.

The point of the competition is obviously to increase traffic to Nefarious Muse, to increase submissions. However, you’ll notice there are no ads on the site, so I don’t want traffic for traffic’s sake. I want the site to grow, to foster more of a community vibe.

I hope you’ll take part.