Hello Oddysee!

I’d like to announce that I am holding a contest that all of you are invited to participate in!  For the November newsletter, I want articles… I mean a TON of articles.  I want to see Cains and Evly pulling their hair out as to where to fit them all and maybe holding some in escrow for later months’ filler material.  So, I’m holding a writing contest.  Here’s what it’s about…

1. Write something up… your choices are:
   • A review of a game, either present or past (I love reading reviews about retro-games), and either a video game, card game, board game, tabletop RPG, party game or drinking game.  I don’t care if it’s serious, humorous, positive or negative.
   • A review of damned near anything else… got a favorite gun, car, recipe, sport, makeup, TV show, movie, recreational drug, restaurant, or… anything?  Tell us about it!  I don’t care if it’s serious, humorous, positive or negative.
   • An article about any of the above.  An article is less of a review of how much something rules or sucks and more of an analysis as to why you believe it does or some significant point you’d like to make about something.  Why did Star Wars Galaxies have the greatest in-game economy of any MMO ever produced?  Why does Ohio State continue to be the best college football team ever?  How is the technology portrayed in the Deus Ex games relevant to our future as a species?  Why would William Shatner’s hair win over Donald Trump’s hair in a hair deathmatch?!
   • A work of fiction.  Sky’s the limit on this one.  Write a story.  Do your best.  I don’t care if you’re inventing your universe as you go along, or writing it in an existing one such as Star Citizen’s, Mass Effect’s, Star Wars’s, Black Desert’s, JRR Tolkien’s or William Gibson’s.  Please, no pr0n.
   • A work of comedy.  Everyone likes something humorous.  Websites like Cracked.com make their living off it.  Write something funny.  Real or fictional.  Jokes, story or whatever.  It could be just a funny monologue, or some crazy, wacked out made up story (or not so made up story) about what happened to you on the way to the eighth pub on your ten-pub-crawl.
   • Something else… if you got some idea that’s not on this list, hit me up.  I’ll probably be open to it.
2. Submit me your idea before you start writing.  This is to prevent me from getting 12 reviews of Star Citizen.  Topics are on a first-come-first-serve basis.  I’ll give you the ‘ok’ typically within a day.  If there is a conflict, I’ll tell you and any related ones from people who have gotten to me first.  Use your best grammar and language. Length must be more or less one page of 11 pt text.  See some of the newsletter articles for examples (hell, as Cains pointed out, most are written by me anyways).  I’m not a length or word-count Nazi, but I do expect it to be substantial.  The length of this contest notification isn’t a bad size to aim for.  I will be acting as copy-editor for these, which means I’ll be correcting spelling, grammar, and align writing style to fit the subject better.  If it needs a lot of work, I’ll send it back to you to fix up.  Pictures are a bonus, but not required.  If you do embed or use images, please zip up the images you used at their highest quality you can get and give them to me on the side so I can upload them to the Oddysee website easily.
3. Do it TWO MORE TIMES. That’s right, for this contest, I want THREE submissions.  If it’s a review, I want three reviews of the same subject matter.  If it’s a story, I want three short ones, or one big one broken into three parts.  Deadline for the three submissions are:  Oct 20^th, Nov 20^th and Dec 20^th.  That gives you a whole month to work on each and me time to edit it up and prepare it for the newsletter.
4. Feature Image and Icon image. Since these are going to be used for the newsletter, they need a feature image which you must provide.  These are the huge, eye-grabbing graphics at the top of the article, like the keyboard at the top of this one which I found after 20 seconds of searching Google images for “keyboard”.  I like to use nice, large images for my submissions, so when I search the web for one, I look for things that could pass as desktop wallpapers or pretty damned close.  I need at least ONE feature image provided with the first submission to use.  If you only provide one, it’ll be used for all three of your submissions.  Personally, I like to mix it up, so if you want to give me a different image for each submission, I’ll use them appropriately.  Also, the newsletter needs an icon image.  This is the little square image next to the article and should be 168×168.  If you can’t resize it, don’t worry, just get me anything rougly square and I’ll do that for you.  Once again, I need at least ONE of these, though you can submit three different ones if you like.
5. There can be only one… or maybe more… Of course, every contest needs a prize. Since this one requires not one, but three submissions, it should be a pretty good one.  Thus, I offer completely out of my own pocket your choice of the following:  A $50 Amazon, Steam, Star Citizen or other gift card of your choice… or, if you live in the continental United States (mostly because I have the hardest time shipping internationally, sorry guys) I also have a brand-new-in-box unopened ASUS STRIX GeForce 970 4Gb Factory Overclocked video card.  I bought it a while back but decided not to use it in my personal system build.  It’s not the hottest tech out there, but it’s still a damned good card.  I’d rather see it go to somebody to use rather than sit under my bed collecting dust.  January, I’ll judge the submissions and announce the winner who can then pick their prize – and if there are a couple REALLY GOOD submissions, I may pony up for multiple prizes.  Hell, if they’re ALL good, I may be out a decent amount of money.

6. This contest is only open to Oddysee members. Submissions should be provided in some form of text/rich text format… either TXT, RTF, DOCX, Google Docs, or anything else I can open.   Feature Images in any image format.  As mentioned, if your submissions contain embedded images, please provide those separate as well on the side for easy upload since I’ll need to copy-paste these into our website’s CMS.  If you want to take a crack at writing your submission directly in our site’s CMS, I’m sure something can be arranged.  Talk to Cykhat for details.  I’ll love you to death (though it won’t affect chances of winning 😉  )   Email me the submission at demonseed (at) oddysee.org

That’s it, those are my terms.  I want to see something amazing happen.  It also should go without saying, that if you want to continue to write for the newsletter after the contest, we’d be eternally grateful.  If this is a huge success, I’ll probably do it again at some point in the future.  Community is built by the labors of everyone involved, so let’s get involved already. 😉