Prose that Blows 11 – It’s all about the feels.

Hello everybody! Hope you all had a good Christmas. From the amount of messages I’ve been getting about it, I figure it must be around about time for another Prose that Blows.

Apologies if I’ve been giving the impression that the next competition is imminent and then dragging it out a bit. I haven’t seen Notso in a while, but we had discussed and agreed upon a topic for this competition back in the summer so I just needed to flesh it out into a post and put it up here. The idea was originally Notso’s.

This eleventh iteration of the popular Prose that Blows is all about emotion… specifically emotion-fired inflation. What we want you to do is write a story where the inflatee’s emotional state and state of inflation are intimately linked. This can take one of a number of forms, it could be that the emotion somehow causes the inflation, but we want you to be as creative as possible about about how the link is manifest. We’re not just saying focus more than you normally would do on the emotions the inflatee feels, we want to see it become a plot point.

Rules

• All the general rules apply.
• There is no specific rule for this one since it would be very difficult to put into words how I might disqualify a story for not following the theme, but I will let you know if you’ve submitted a story which in my opinion shows little or no regard for the them… as per the general rules.

Word-Limit

• The word limit for this competition is 1000 words. This is a shorter word limit than the last one but I feel the nature of the theme is more suited to a shorter story.

Award Categories

Voting will be held to select winners for the following categories.

• Best overall story
• Sexiest story
• Most original interpretation of the theme
• Best depiction of a negative emotion (i.e. fear, disgust, shock, anger, pain, hate, jealousy)
• Best depiction of a positive emotion (i.e. delight, pleasure, love, relief)
• Most sympathetic inflatee
• Least sympathetic inflatee

Submissions

• To submit a story, email it to the organisers at prosethatblows@live.com
• All submissions must be received no later than 12PM GMT (7am EST) on the 28th of February 2015
• Any submission may be amended before the deadline, and organisers may suggest that a submission be amended should it fail to meet the competition guidelines.
• Further dates for open and close of voting will be announced by the organisers once the deadline has passed.