If last month was about something quite familiar to fantasy fiction, this month we're going to something that's, well... pretty far removed:
Sports.
Don't knock it - some of the best stories in Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror have been written about sports. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, The Golem's Mighty Swing, Summerland, all blend a modern sport with fantasy - and who can forget the Real Ghostbusters episode where they play baseball for the fate of the world? (I've clearly got baseball on my mind! So how about Spacejam?)
There's the familiar fantasy sports - slightly romanticised versions of medieval 'games' - from the tournaments of A Game of Thrones to the duels of Sharps.
And, of course, there's the made up stuff: Rollerball, Ender's Game, The Player of Games, the X-Men's Danger Room,...
So, this month... we want you to write a story (or poem) with some sort of sport or contest as its center. This could be a real sport, a quasi-historical competition or something that you just full-on make up. It could be a board game, a joust, the Superbowl or the legendary Man U / Man City RaptorBrawl of 2987. Go wild.
As always, fan fiction is not allowed. The Hunger Games is doing well enough without us.
Rules:
1. This can be prose or a poem.
2. A sport, game or competition must be a core element in your piece.
4. Prose must be 500-1500 words long. (Yup, I've cut it by 500 words. I'm mean.)
5. Poetry must be 100-500 words long.
6. You will be disqualified if you exceed the limits, full stop. That's why they're called limits. (Again, mean.)
Entry will close at Noon (GMT) on the 1st November 2013, barring any extraneous circumstances and voting will be open for the month thereafter.
The winner will have their piece displayed on the main Fantasy Faction website in December 2013.
(Tip: Check out some of the great sportswriting - from folks like Grantland Rice and David Halberstam. These are folks that specialised in writing emotional action scenes, so there's plenty to learn! Ditto, if you just flip to the sports section of the daily paper, you'll find professionals than can describe 80 different ways of "kicking a ball", and describing a physical event to people that weren't there... you don't need to like sports to learn from sport journalism.)
