1st Annual Summer Slam **Final Announcement**

[Humilatron]

Thank you to everyone who has participated in the Annual Summer Slam! This was a big experiment and I think overall it worked really well. This will also be my way out of GirlSPNS. As I've said before, I've moved on to CHYOA, but I do have plans to still host the Summer Slam again next year starting in June. My last story however on this site will be the ROA submission. It's been a great journey truly.

I do have ideas for the next Summer Slam because it will not be identical to this year's. It'll always be different and evolving. But before we even talk about next year's Summer Slam, let's award this year's champion. Who is surprised that it's Executionus? Probably no one. But nonetheless. Congratulations and here's a sticker I made for you.

[Executionus]

Among the many reasons that the sticker is hilarious, it managed to trigger a memory of when young-teen me constantly used a red gel pen to mark over things. I did that to an absurd level for years.

While I'm happy to have won the contest, it's a tad bittersweet considering that over a third of the entrants forfeited (You, LL, SDS, RP). This even included the finals. It's weird too since the contest was usually designed around small single-part low-word entries that could be typed in a day or so. I don't know how to prevent that problem in future events.

I think part of the problem is that most people rarely visit or post on this site, where I'm the weirdo with nearly 1,000 posts. In my defense, I had over 10k posts on two different forums back in the early 2000s, so technically I'm only operating at 10% of my maximum power.

[*Lady Lucia*]

Aside from the whole aspiring writer career thing, my biggest hang-up was the shift in attention/motivation that I tend to maintain for other other contests. Even when I've procrastinated until the night before a deadline, I've at least had all those non-writing days to think and outline and do all the other mental prep work that makes finishing up a contest entry fairly smooth despite the time pressure near the end. These rounds, however, didn't lend themselves as well to 'living with a story' like a normal contest would feel like.

Not that I'm bashing Humilatron in the slightest--in fact, I'm pretty sure the whole point of this contest was to break the usual easy formula of 'write a story about XYZ.' It challenged everyone to go a bit out of their comfort zones by adding their own style and spin to other writers' ideas, which led to some interesting results. Really good opportunity to flex some creative muscles, but I just didn't have the time or energy for that final push near the end. Even though the word count was manageable, it was more the matter of creating a whole new work in a limited timeframe that did me in. Kudos to those of you that were able to pull that off. :P

--Lady Lucia

[Executionus]

It challenged everyone to go a bit out of their comfort zones by adding their own style and spin to other writers' ideas,

Truthfully my really unfair advantage in this contest was the fact that taking other people's works and redoing them as my own is very-much NOT out of my comfort zone. Hell, just look at all of the famous works I've turned into ENF parodies (Hunger Games, Hitchhiker's Guide, Tales from the Crypt, Freddy Krueger, The Grinch, literally Jesus, etc). I even wrote a side chapter for Nikolai's A Lesson in Karma which was later canonized.

Hell you guys would laugh if you could see how many parodies and fan chapters of things I've done outside of erotica in my life. I've done more parodies than Family Guy! There is a legitimate chance that I am not exaggerating with that line btw.

The weird way that I write actually makes it easier for me to work with already-established characters, since I prefer to have the characters pull the plot for me. I've helped several writers on here with advice on where to go with their own stories, and I've advised a bunch of people I know in real life on that sort of thing too.

So yeah, that's a big part of why I had no problem with that side of this contest at all. My biggest enemy was the word limits, since I kept having to simplify my dialogue scenes in order to avoid going over the limit. I usually use a ton of dialogue which eats words faster than Pac-Man with 420 munchies.

[Humilatron]

I’m glad it was challenging. The intent was to do just that. I mean when you have a contest with a lot of heavy hitters, I do think there needs to be a bit of a mix up otherwise it ende up being just the same people on top nearly every time. At least here there was a chance of people unexpected coming back on top. I’m been observing these contests for awhile as well as the writers on this site. And my goal was to design a contest that challenged all of them. The result was exactly what I was intending other than the drop outs but those can’t really be helped. The reason for the word count was actually to avoid the length bias voters tend to have. It’s still challenging avoiding author bias which I’m afraid does happen (when people don’t even bother to read all the stories and just vote for the ones the names that they know). The element of surprise is also intentional. Instead of testing writers abilities to write stories after planning and outlining. The whole point was to put people on the spot which was my greatest handicap I could have put onto y’all. Even the completely random prompts. I’m at least happy we made it to the final round. And the best part is you won’t even know what will happen next year. So I can keep the element of surprise. If you thought this year was a tough contest, just wait. I’ve only begun with the challenges.

[Executionus]

Even the completely random prompts.

You know, that ended up being my favorite part of this contest: Everyone being assigned a random word to base a story around. That was definitely a fun idea and something that could be done again.