Welcome to the Final Three, SmackDowners!
With AngusEcrivain's unfortunate departure, you three move on automatically. I will still get Round 6 Results up, but with the Open Novella Contest going on and vacations and such on the horizon, it made sense to get this seventh round up as soon as possible.
Let's get into it.
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Prompts will be down at the bottom of this part.
With all the other stuff going on, why not make this a short one (with a long deadline)?
Word count is: 1,500–4,000 words.
The lowest-scoring person will be eliminated from SmackDown: MadMike's Revenge.
As usual, submit your stories to mikemarsbergen@hotmail.com, preferably in .doc or .docx form, but I will also accept Google Docs.
The deadline for this round will be February 1st 2018 at 6:30 PM EST/11:30 PM UTC.
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Judges, each of you will be judging all three stories. We'll be going for a total of 45 points.
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Now for prompts:
For this round we're gonna be doing something a little different.
The round's title—Three of a Perfect Pair—makes me think of connections, of a trio being linked together in such a perfect way they're akin to a couple.
The three of you—elveloy, bloodsword, and Reffster—are tethered to one another this round. But not in any way that will negatively affect you.
The three of you will each write one chapter of a hypothetical novel. You can write it in your own style, and you decide whether your chapter is humourous, serious, a mixture—whatever you wish. There's no need to mimic the style of your fellow competitors (that is, unless you want to).
The novel's primary science-fiction sub-genre will be BioPunk, but you're welcome to stretch the boundaries as much as you desire and add whatever else you'd like.
BioPunk can be considered the biological equivalent of CyberPunk, delving into a world where people "hack" their own DNA (and the DNA of others, possibly against their will or without them even knowing). Like other -Punks it typically features a backdrop of totalitarian governments and megacorporations.
Our hypothetical novel begins with Corbin—a genderless android (pronoun: they/them/their) created by the NorReich megacorporation—emerging from a fugue state in an alley, with a biocutter in their hand and a dead biomodded person on the ground in front of them. They don't know why they killed the person—or even if they really did. They don't know for how long they had been in said fugue state. They don't know who the dead person is. They don't know where the biocutter came from. And Corbin also doesn't understand that they aren't human.
The body is decomposing fast from the biocutter wound, as the tissue is destroyed and the DNA is broken down.
A phone implant buzzes from the underside of the dead person's forearm. Corbin presses the button under the skin and puts their head against the person's ear to listen.
A modulated-sounding voice says one thing before hanging up: "I know what you did."
And from there it's a mystery...
You've each had a number (1, 2 or 3) picked from a hat. 1 has had a chapter number randomly selected from chapters five through fifteen, 2 from chapters twenty through thirty, and 3 from chapters thirty-five to forty-five. This hypothetical book of ours has fifty chapters.
Please name the chapter when you submit it, because naming chapters is cool.
1. Reffster - Chapter 8
2. bloodsword - Chapter 22
3. elveloy - Chapter 38
In addition to the above:
You must utilize King Crimson's song, "Three of a Perfect Pair." I leave it to you how you do it.
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Sound good? Get writing!
YOU ARE READING
SmackDown: MadMike's Revenge!
Science FictionLeft beaten, bloodied and bruised in a ditch somewhere, @MadMikeMarsbergen lost the Pot 1 Finals of SmackDown: The Second Coming to @torontojim (who later ended up winning the Grand Finals, too). Now he's back to get some revenge on all you competit...
