The Protagonize Winter Challenge

With Christmas less than a week away, and many of us enjoying holidays at home with our loved ones, what better time to launch the Protagonize Winter Challenge competition?

This time around — and in the spirit of the season, of course — we have a real prize, kindly donated by none other than one of our more prolific members, smac972. He was also kind enough to design the promotional banner you see to the right, and help out in figuring out the rules for the competition and judging.

The prize, you ask? A full year’s Plus subscription to Protagonize. In addition, you’ll get a nifty badge for your profile, as was awarded to the victors of our previous Tales of Terror contest.

Here’s how it works:

The guidelines for this contest are quite straightforward: write something about kindness, and  tag the story with the tag “Winter Challenge“.

The contest will run until noon Pacific Time on January 4th, 2010.

The rules

Keeping ’em short and sweet this time:

• Any registered Protagonize member can enter the competition.
• All entries need to, in some way, relate to the subject of kindness.
• Only prose is allowed, no poetry. (As the banners says — save it for the Winter Tournament. :)
• Stories entered in the contest must be solo, no collaboratives this time.
• Mature content is okay (although there should be a good reason for it.)
• All stories entered must be tagged “Winter  Challenge“ (remember the quotes!).
• Only new stories (posted after this blog post) will be considered. Please don’t tag your old stuff or we’ll just un-tag it. However, deleting an old, orphaned entry and reposting it for the competition is fine.
• Multiple entries are fine if you so desire, as long as you adhere to all of the other entry rules.
• All entries should make a note at the beginning of their story’s author guidance stating the following: “Content Entry – only Protagonize subscribers can rate.”

Addendum: As mentioned, mature stories are okay, but your story will not be featured if it’s mature. Your author profile will be featured instead (and yes, you’ll still get the badge.) Please keep this in mind when writing.

Judging

We have a rather unique method of judging this competition:

• Any valid Protagonize subscriber can be a judge for this contest, including anyone who subscribes before the contest closes. That means that only users bearing the Plus, Pro, or Community Supporter badges will have their votes counted. We can tell who you are. :)
• Subscribers who have rated must leave a comment on the story letting the author know that they’ve voted.
• The top-rated story as of January 4th at 12:00pm  (noon) Pacific Time will be the winner.

Everybody loves Raymond PRIZES!

• The top rated entrant will be rewarded with a free Protagonize Plus subscription for one year.
• The winner’s entrry will be featured on the site for the week as the Editor’s Pick.
• The winner will receive an achievement badge on their profiles declaring them the winner of the 2009 Protagonize Winter Challenge.

Spread the word!

Feel free to send your story to your friends on Facebook, Twitter, etc., using the Share button on posts. If you post a link to the story on Twitter, mention @protagonize and we’ll retweet it to all Protagonize followers! Just make sure to use the #protagonize hashtag if you’re talking about your story on Twitter. :)

That’s it! If you have any questions, please feel free to ask below, or over in the Protagonize Pub group.

The competition starts right now. Gentle(folk), start your engines!