As per usual, I am super stoked about ONC this year. It's a chance for me to finish projects with me managing to finish all but three of my thirty-one ONC projects so far. The three I've not finished - I admit that they didn't make it past the second round, but that's not the reason they're not finished, as I have finished another piece that didn't make it past the second round. It's more that those pieces were harder to write than I realized when I got into writing them, but I think they're getting nixed was actually a blessing as I didn't feel rushed to finish these pieces, and I can now take my time with them. And as I've said, they're harder to write.
As for my ONC history, as I've said, I've taken on thirty-one projects for ONC nor have I missed any ONC. Which one of the first things I can see writers thinking from seeing me write more than one story for ONC is that they want also to tackle more than one story. This brings me to my first tip for ONC.
Don't bite off more than you can chew.
Sure. Tackling more than one project may seem like an awesome challenge, but it isn't easy.
In my particular case, I am a writer who participates in NaNoWriMo every year, which is an annual event where you have to write 50k in a year. Given that, if I were to write 50k per month for ONC, that would work out to be 150k over the course of ONC, plus whatever other projects I am working on, such as the Froday Flash Fiction Challenge. Typically the works work out to be 25-30k, so that word count would cover five to six stories for ONC, but I actually have taken on more than that.
The point here is don't give yourself too much work for ONC.
Part of the reason I have so many projects every year is because when I get an idea in my head, I can't not write it - I'll not maintain focus if I do. For other people, they need to focus on one story at a time, so taking on more than one story for ONC isn't a good idea, so I suggest picking your best idea and saving the other ideas to work on after ONC. Also, keep in mind you can use more than one prompt as long as one of those prompts is the main focus for your story, so don't rule out combining ideas if you are able to and can only work on one project at a time.
As for those who can work on more than one project at a time, someone who does well at NaNoWriMo might be able to take on five to six projects for ONC. Goodness knows, I actually did see a few others with that high number of stories, whereas in the previous years, I was the only one turning in that kind of number outside of one writer who I think did K-pop fanfic and got eliminated because they decided to tell the story in journal format rather than narrative format. In this same regard, someone who doesn't do well at NaNo wouldn't want to take on that many projects.
Yet, in saying all of this, the FAQ section isn't out yet, so we don't yet know if we're allowed to submit more than one story or if they've decided to place a cap on the number of stories one can submit.
Don't be hard on yourself for not passing a round.
For starters, you can still collect the stickers. Second, I had a story eliminated one year during the first round because I accidentally submitted it as a cowritten story which it was not. The first round is actually pretty easy, so if your story isn't a wall of text, you didn't make the mistake of publishing extra content before the start of ONC (Feb 1), your story followed the prompt and didn't have what was obviously personal kink of the writer it's likely you didn't submit right. Speaking of which...
Contests aren't the place for your kink.
I bring this up because I come across this every year, though less so last year when the judges made it clear that the handling of topics in an uncomfortable manner isn't going to fly, but because that can easily be construed as them vetoing certain subjects I think using the word kink helps to give an idea of what they don't want to see.
