Blue Dwarf's 9th Birthday Novella Competition!

Added : 9th March 2009

Hello everyone. I am very very very proud to announce that the Blue Dwarf is almost 9 years old. To celebrate this momentous occasion, I wanted to do a competition and to give away an actual prize! We've done this before, I think SMAndy and Chris Kentlea both have very cool-looking BD mugs – which I hope they use EVERY day!

 

The prize

It's really cool. That's all you need to know! It will be a custom Blue Dwarf - themed trophy made especially for the occasion. It will be hand-made and one of a kind! I'll post some photos in a later article because It's not quite finished yet.

The competition

Unfortunately I'm not giving this prize away for free! You will have to do some work for it, but that's okay because it's something that I know every one of you is very good at. Create a story!

There's a lot of wacky stuff that we write about in BD, but also there's a lot of things that are very difficult for us to do because of the way the BD group is written by multiple members. Sometimes I get messages from members with really cool ideas for *action* plots that just wouldn't work so well, but would make cool stand-alone stories.

So the idea is to make a stand alone story. I'm suggesting this because it would be very cool to have a few stand-alone stories to show new members or other people what we're all about, because pointing people to the most current messages will just make them say “WTF?”

Also with a good self contained stories under our belt, with a clear beginning, middle and end mean that whenever someone comes to us wanting to make a comic, animation or possibly a game, we could go “here, make this – It's really cool!”

Word count – There is not strict wordcount. A novella (small book) is between 17,500 words and 40,000. I'm not expecting as much as that, but if you want to – please go ahead!

Format – Could be a script, could be first person, could be a story written as normal. If it's a script, there's more chance it might get turned into a comic or animation at some point in the future.

Theme – We toyed around setting a theme for this but didn't want it to be too limited, so all we'll say is that it has to be Red Dwarf or Blue Dwarf related.

Starting points – Struggling for ideas? Here are some ideas for your story:

• BD/RD crossover
• Lister travelling into stasis was a conspiracy to hide nanobots
• JMC's first encounter with the Mollopods
• Groundhog-day type scenario set on the BD, caused by stasis leak (I'm suggesting this because it would be dead hard to post about on BD normally!)
• Ace Rimmer encounters the Hymenoptera
• Kryten's early years (maybe on the BD?)
• Transcript for BD the film

These competitions haven't been incredibly popular in the past, with only a few entries, so I'm going to post constant reminders of this one! And the prize will be worth it, if just as a souvenir marking the Blue Dwarf passing nine years. Nine years! That's amazing dudes!

 

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