In my college town, there's a newspaper called the New Times. Each year, this newspaper holds a contest it calls "55 Fiction." Looks easy--write a complete short story with no more than 55 words. But it's not as easy as it looks!

The Magespace, for its latest contest, is going to borrow this premise, except we'll update it a bit for the Shadowrun times. Instead of 55 words, each story can contain up to 61 (as in 2061).

Prize

The prize for this contest will be the winner's choice of one of the following items:

• Native American Nations Volume I
• Native American Nations Volume II
• Lone Star Sourcebook
• Harlequin

Contest Rules:

1. Entries must be submitted to winterhawk@magespace.net no later than April 1, 1999. Entries received after that date will not be considered. Winning entries will appear on the Magespace approximately two weeks later.
   
   
2. All entries must be the original work of the submitter.
   
   
3. All stories must take place in FASA's Shadowrun universe.
   
   
4. Each entry must contain no more than 61 words. Hyphenated words count as two words unless both words can't stand alone (for example, "re-educate"). Numbers count as words. Each individual part of a name counts as a word (so "Ulysses S. Grant" would be three). Punctuation doesn't count toward your total. You can use fewer words than 61, but not more. Any entries containing more than 61 words will be disqualified.
   
   
5. Each entry must contain a complete story. Submitting character descriptions, incomplete stories, etc. might entertain the judges, but it won't win the contest.
   
   
6. Each entry must have a title.
   
   
7. Entries must be submitted in plain-text format. (We accepted HTML before, but we got so many weird permutations created by so many HTML editors that we decided it would just be easier to do it ourselves. Exception: If you want to submit it using ONLY common tags (bold, italics, underline, paragraph, line break), that's fine. Just please, no fancy stuff. I just have to strip it out when I post the stories. And I won't disqualify stories that indent with bazillions of non-breaking spaces, but I'll get really annoyed about it, so please don't do it. Thank you. :) )
   
   
8. You can enter as many times as you like, but each entry must be in a separate e-mail.
   
   
9. Please mark each entry "61 STORY ENTRY" so I can keep track of them.
   
   
10. As always, this contest is in no way affiliated with FASA.
    
    
11. The judges for this contest will be me (Rat) and my ever-stalwart GM and SO, Dan. Judges' decisions are final.
    
    
12. If you are well known to one or both of the judges, please submit your entry using a different email address (such as Yahoo or Hotmail).
    
    
13. Have fun!

As with the previous Magespace contest, you retain all copyrights to your work, but we reserve the right to post any or all entries on our site for as long as we like. (Naturally you can post them wherever else you want as well).

To get a look at some of the winning entries for the contest that inspired this one, take a look at:

http://www.newtimes-slo.com/55_fiction/55_story.html