I thought about this too - I think most people would interpret midnight as ‘00:00’ which belongs to the start of the day, however unless you specify the midnight of 14th/15th like kb57z said, it can be unclear.
I personally take midnight to be the end of the day, even though technically it’s changeover point between days.
I think 12 noon might be a simpler deadline.
Congratulations to princec in his victory! Great work everyone
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Congrats to Princec, and thanks to everybody who participated!
I apologize that I’m replying to older comments, but I wanted to address some of the earlier comments about pre-published stories.
First off, totally respect where you guys are coming from. If Martin wants to change the rules in the future, I’m totally with it. That said, yup, I published a story that I had previously published at the NCMC. Though various database imports, it ended up on this site which is the spiritual successor of that old favourite. It’s fair to say that it’s been published here before.
Last story challenge, there was a bit of discussion about submitting perviously published stories. Here’s where Martin came down on it:
I won’t keep you from using one of your older stories, maybe improve it a bit, and resubmit it for a challenge.
However, this might not be exactly fair, especially if that story happens to be a well known classic.
Source: Discussion about Story Challenges - #6 by Martin - Community for Gay Kinky Stories
When I saw the Supernatural challenge was being discussed on Discord as a likely next challenge, I contacted Martin, asked him if we could quietly take the previous story down because I didn’t want to ‘give away’ whose story it was, and set about editing the story.
The version published under the story contest is an edit that I did during the period of the contest, almost a decade after I published the original piece. It tightens it, adds a very little bit, but mostly improves the writing. The Shadow On My Wall is a deeply personal story to me - it’s about coming to terms with realizing you’re gay, about realizing that the part of you that feels foreign is actually a part of you, and about learning to accept yourself as a whole person. I’d been itching to revisit it, regardless of the story challenge, because I felt that Derek with a decade more experience was in a good position to make it better.
(Sorry for the drop-in English class on my not-so-subtle metaphors. For extra credit, please submit a short essay on sunlight as a metaphor in the story.)
I did not for a second think that the story would win - and I was right! It’s not that hot of a story. There isn’t too much mind control. Believe me when I say that I didn’t submit it in an attempt to game the contest, but more because there was something I wanted to revisit and honour, and the contest seemed like a good opportunity to do that work.
I wanted to take a second to write this out so that the folks who had issues with a pre-written story might better understand the intent behind the submission.
I think it’s a fine idea to change the rules to say ‘nothing that’s been published before’, but I’ll admit to feeling a bit miffed at being called out (by story title earlier in this thread) for doing something that was discussed and ruled allowed in the previous contests feedback thread, especially when I’m under an obligation to keep it anonymous, preventing a response at the time.
I hope that we’ll figure out which rules work best for the community going forward. These contests are a ton of fun, and I love seeing what everyone comes up with.
(Oh, Martin, the ‘when is midnight’ problem crops up a lot for native English speakers too. Often times contests will close at 11:59 PM to make it explicit. It’s a bug in the English language.)
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Just for your information:
The new challenge has just been started, and to avoid any confusion, I’ve changed the deadline date shown. It will now show the day on which you can still submit your story until 11:59pm UTC
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