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CL Fiction Contest: Cold cash, hot theme

Deadline for submissions is Dec. 22 at cltampa.com/fictioncontest.

By David Warner on Sat, Nov 26, 2011 at 9:23 am

Incorporate the theme into your story any way you like — you can go with temperature, tension, sex, cops, track & field, gas & electric, missiles, Miami — whatever “Heat” means to you. Judges are Parker, myself and CL columnist (and e-novelist) Catherine Durkin Robinson. We'll announce the judges' Top 10 choices shortly after the Dec. 22nd submission deadline, at which point readers will get a chance to weigh in on their favorites.

Cash prizes are $500 for the judges' #1 selection and $250 for the readers'. The winning story or stories will be published in print and online on Jan. 5, and there’ll be a public reading by the winners and the judges at CL Space, Creative Loafing’s events space, on Sun. Jan. 8.

So get it while it's hot. Turn up the heat. Write something in the heat of the moment. Get hot under the collar about the number of "heat" cliches I've used in this blog post, and then resolve to write a story so good, so original, it burns all the clichés away.

While you’re grazing on turkey leftovers, we invite you to participate in another tradition: the Creative Loafing Fiction Contest. It’s been a few years since we've held such a competition, but thanks to the interest of the University of Tampa’s Jeff Parker, newly appointed head of the school’s MFA in Creative Writing, we’re launching the contest once more at cltampa.com/fictioncontest. Deadline for submission is Dec. 22, and we'll be offering cash prizes to both judges' and readers' top choices. The theme: Heat.

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