1 week. 2 prompts. 1,000 words. $650 in prizes.

TL;DR Press is back with our fifth installment of the 1,000 Word Herd Competition! Sign up to participate in this week-long flash fiction competition, with $650 worth of prizes for the top 25 placing stories!

The competition costs $7 to register + tax/fees.

We are also proud to offer each entrant guaranteed feedback on their story from the judges. Offering writers a chance for feedback is one of the Press’s core missions, along with our philanthropic mission to create anthologies to benefit charities.

This feedback means we only have 300 spots – once they’re gone, they’re gone!

Registration opens March 18, 2024, and closes on April 14, 2024.

The competition begins at 12:01 am on Saturday, April 20, 2024 and ends at 11:59 pm on Friday, April 26, 2024.

You can find all of our rules and regulations here on our website.

How does it work?

The 1,000 Word Herd Competition will last for one week beginning on Saturday, April 20, 2024 at 12:01 am US-Eastern time, and ending on Friday, April 26, 2024 at 11:59 pm US-Eastern time. Each entrant will receive two individual prompts at the beginning of the competition, a character and an object/situation. There are no genre restrictions. Each entrant must create a 1,000-word-maximum original flash fiction story by the end of the competition and submit.

The judges will read, score, and provide feedback on each story to create a Top 25 Winners list. The top 25 stories will be announced, and prizes will be given to the winners as well as an ebook publication made of the top stories to benefit a charity (more below under “Publishing”).

You can find all of the rules and regulations on our website.

How can I join?

Sign up through Eventbrite before the registration deadline ends at midnight, Eastern time on April 14, 2024, or before the 300 slots fill up.

You will receive an email at 12:01 am US-Eastern time (or a few minutes after, given mass email lag) on Saturday, April 20, 2024, with your individual prompts and the form to submit your story. You will have until 11:59 pm US-Eastern time on Friday, April 26, 2024, to write a 1,000-word-maximum flash fiction story based on those prompts.

Fundraising

We want to keep this competition as transparent as possible. This competition is partially a fundraiser to help cover the Press’s financial needs throughout 2024. The prizes are first priority; the Press will not receive any donations from entry fees until prizes are fully funded. The Press will retain none of the proceeds of the eBook sales – 100% of sales of this eBook will go to a charity, as is the case with all of our charity collections (and thus why we need a separate fundraiser!)

Our charity this year is Trans Lifeline, is a grassroots hotline and microgrants 501(c)(3) non-profit organization offering direct emotional and financial support to trans people in crisis – for the trans community, by the trans community. Thank you to Trans Lifeline for partnering with us!

The Press is run by a volunteer-only group of writers who take no compensation but it still has expenses, such as insurance, proof copy purchases, cover art, tax filing, software licenses, and other expenses of a small non-profit publisher. We work to be as low-cost and low-barrier as possible for the writers in our community, and to continue doing that we need to raise funds. So, what better way than a competition, where we can also support some of the amazing writers in our community and produce a publication to benefit a charity?

Ticket sales for the contest cover both the prize money and funds for the Press. We will ensure that the prize money is funded first, then any additional sales from tickets will go to the Press. In the event that we cannot fully fund the prize money, we will do everything in our power to raise the money through other means. We will refund any tickets sold should the competition be cancelled for any reason.

Prizes

1st Place: $150 USD and a free eBook copy of each of our TL;DR Press collections to date including the 1KWHC 2024 winning collection

2nd Place: $80 USD and a free eBook copy of each of our TL;DR Press collections to date including the 1KWHC 2024 winning collection

3rd Place: $55 USD and a free eBook copy of each of our TL;DR Press collections to date including the 1KWHC 2024 winning collection

4th-10th Place: $20 USD and a free eBook copy of each of our TL;DR Press collections to date including the 1KWHC 2024 winning collection

11-25th Place: $15 USD and a free eBook copy of each of our TL;DR Press collections to date including the 1KWHC 2024 winning collection

Publication

The Top 25 Winners will be published in an eBook anthology in addition to their prize money. The anthology will benefit our charity of choice for this project.

Frequently Asked Questions

Find all of our official rules and regulations here. If you have any questions, please ask us through [email protected].

Can I use ChatGPT or another AI tool to help me write my story?

No. All work must be the sole creation of the writer. The Press will disqualify any entry that they deem has been partially or wholly generated via an AI tool. Any qualifying entries later determined to have utilised AI will be removed from the featured collection and must return their prize within 15 working days of receiving notification from the Press. The Press will permanently ban any entrant that has used AI in generating any part of their submission from this contest and all future contests or anthology calls.

Can I sign up more than once?

No. We only have 300 slots, and we want to provide feedback to as many people as possible, so participation is limited to one entry/one story per person. Thank you for your enthusiasm!

What are the formatting guidelines?

Our house style (which we will also include in our email to participants) is simple:

• Double spacing.
• Indent first line of paragraphs.
• 12 pt, in a standard font, such as Times New Roman, Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, etc.
• Submit in .doc or .docx format. Do not submit a PDF.

You can find other rules regarding anonymity and title page in the rules and regulations. Only anonymity (not putting your name INSIDE your document, we will scrub document titles before judges receive them as Google Forms tends to add names and that is a known issue), including the prompts, and word count are necessary to be considered.

We are welcome to experimental styles. While we may make copyediting/formatting changes to stories that will be published, we will not penalize stories for not staying within a specific style. If you have any questions, please ask us through [email protected]. We want to make this a fun and rewarding experience for all participants, and thus we are not citing a specific, extensive style to follow.

Community

Competitions are better together. Share using the #1KWHC hashtag on Twitter or share our competition on Facebook!

Need some eyes on your entry, or just some encouragement along the way? TL;DR Press manages a writing community on Slack, apply here to join!

Judges

Callum Rowland

Callum is a fiction writer, and co-founder of TL;DR Press. He writes across all genres; though science fiction, fantasy, and horror are closest to his heart. His short stories have featured in various magazines, anthologies, and zines, including Daily Science Fiction, Fictive Dream, Aphelion Webzine, and Bandit Fiction.

He is Director of Charity for TL;DR Press, and has also worked as either a curator or editor on a number of TL;DR releases, most recently as a curator on Growth.

Joe Butler

Joe lives and works in London, but dreams of living and working elsewhere. He is the author of two sci-fi novels, Of All Possibilities and Strange Days in the House of August. His writing has been featured in Pilcrow & Dagger, Story Bits, Bandit Fiction, New Orbit, Ghost Orchid, Second Chance Lit, and the Found anthology edited by Gabino Iglesias and Andrew Cull. He can be found on twitter at @writelikeashark and on his website writelikeashark.com.

He is one of the co-founders of TL;DR Press, and has been involved in all of the collections the press has published as either a curator or an editor as well as the marketing manager and cover artist for eight of the ten currently released collections. He was also a judge for previous 1KWHC competitions, and loves reading stories where the prompts are used in ways you might not expect.

Jenna Harvie

Jenna Harvie is a writer, painter, and photographer from Atlantic Canada. She spends her days ​writing and editing technical documents for a cybersecurity company and her evenings working on her own fiction, editing, and reading anything she can get her hands on. Jenna is currently editing her first horror novel, writing a few more, and she always has a short story or two on the go. Jenna has been editing and judging for TL;DR Press since 2019, and she recently joined the Board of Directors. And when that’s not enough, she paints landscapes and abstractions and photographs the beautiful landscape around Nova Scotia.

​Visit Jenna's art gallery online at jennaharvie.com or ​find her on Instagram and Twitter with the handle @jennaharvie.

Mia V. Moss

Mia V. Moss is a speculative fiction author from the Pacific Northwest, now living in the SF Bay area. She is the author of the sci-fi noir novella, Mai Tais for the Lost. Her short stories have been published in Cat Ladies of the Apocalypse, StarShipSofa, Galactic Stew, and elsewhere. Mia is currently working on an epic fantasy series. When she’s not writing, she DMs tabletop campaigns, wildscapes her yard, and admires her ever-growing TBR pile.

She can be reached at magicrobotcarnival.com or @atomicjackalope on Twitter & Instagram.

Hannah Hulbert

Hannah Hulbert is a full-time mum and part-time writer from the south coast of England. She enjoys looking for mushrooms, doing crafts, and drinking tea, especially when she is supposed to be writing.

You can find her stories in Metamorphosis, Hexagon, and the anthology Cat Ladies of the Apocalypse, among others. Her story ‘Ruler of Waves, God of Trees’ from Growth (TL;DR Press, 2021), received a Pushcart nomination.

You can find her via her website, hannahhulbert.wordpress.com.

Penfold

Penfold is a writer, software security engineer, and semicolon enthusiast. He is a founding member of TL;DR Press and has served as curator and editor on various anthologies, as well as judge in the previous 1KWHC contests. He lives near Indianapolis with his wife, two kids, and an appalling lack of cats in the house. He is currently writing stories about the terrors and pitfalls of interacting with people in the lawless, feral suburbs of the midwest. His stories have appeared in previous TL;DR Press anthologies, and he can be found and interrogated at justpenfold.com or on Twitter at @justpenfold.