The 2016 Baen Fantasy Adventure Award contest opened for submissions on January 1.
All entries must be received by midnight April 1. Each entry is limited to a short story of no more than 8,000 words, and there is one entry per author. The story may be epic fantasy, heroic fantasy, sword and sorcery, or contemporary fantasy. Additional guidelines may be found here.
Entries will be judged by Baen editors with finalists also being judged by authors Eric Flint and Larry Correia.
Baen executive editor Jim Minz wrote:
We are delighted to partner with Gen Con and its Writer’s Symposium again to present this award. We appreciate the deep history between gaming and adventure fantasy. We love games and gamers, and we know that Gen Con is the perfect place to seek out and showcase great fantasy talent.
The Grand Prize winner will be published as the featured story on the Baen Books main website and paid at industry-standard rates for professional story submittals. The author will also receive an engraved award and a prize package containing $500 of Baen Books and merchandise.
Second and Third Place winners will receive prize packages of Baen Books worth $500 and $300 respectively.
The website cautions —
What we don’t want to see Political drama with no action, angst-ridden teens pining over vampire lovers, religious allegory, novel segments, your gaming adventure transcript, anything set in any universe not your own, “it was all a dream” endings, or screenplays.
Finalists will be announced by July 1, and the winners will be notified by July 7. Eric Flint will present the award at the Writer’s Symposium at Gen Con, to be held August 4-7, 2016.
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
Religious allegory is out. Completely out.
So, JCW, who nowaday seems not to be able to write anything but religious allegory, has been abused once again by people he thought he could trust.
No matter how much I loath his views I can see how awful it is to be betrayed, and on the receiving end of abuse. I will never forget that the bell tolls for us all.
Even those who are missing their clappers?
Damsels who inflict distress? Is this what a heroine is? I would think that better describes a villain. Some days I am certain we aren’t speaking the same language.
Tasha Turner: “Damsels who inflict distress,” being a pidgin parallel structure, sounds like the kind of thing I’d pick to headline an item head in the Scroll. Somebody please gently smack me if that happens…
Yeah, “damsels saving the distressed” would have been a much stronger line there. My goodness, that’s even the premise of Baen’s long-running, incredibly successful “Chicks In Chainmail” anthologies (I own all of them, buying them as soon as they’re released. So good.) That’s what the women in the stories do.
I’m kinda sad they had to put in the “no angsty vampires” “no D&D transcript” and “no it was all a dream” parts, but those are probably still coming into the slush pile. Unfortunately, the people who write that crap think “They don’t mean ME!” and send it in anyway. Good luck, editors; presumably they’ll throw those out before Eric and Larry have to see them. Hope they have interns to do the first pass.
I hope they haven’t, by omission, let themselves in for a shed-load of Shaggy God stories (aka “. . . and I will name you – Eve.”). I’m not sure “religious allegory” covers that.
So, JCW, who nowaday seems not to be able to write anything but religious allegory, has been abused once again by people he thought he could trust.
I don’t think anything of JCW’s that I have read is allegory in the strict sense, i.e. a narrative where one thing stands for another thing. Would that it were; it would be easier to work out what it is about in that case.
Because Clarence the Kleptomaniac from Cleveland copped the clean copper clappers from the closet?
Pingback: AMAZING NEWS OF FANDOM: 1/10/2016 - Amazing Stories