The Rules

This last updated set of rules was posted to ASSD on the May 4 2001 by Mat Twassel:

"The Dulcinea Memorial Writing Festival

There is still time to enter your story or stories. The deadline for submissions is May 20, 2001.

The complete and offical rules are posted below. These rules are the same as in the original "preliminary" inviation except that the panel of judges is now established, and two points of clarification have been added: pregnancy is an acceptable theme; oral sex (if it appears) is considered to be typical and implicit to Dulcinea's MF Rom coding.

The Announcement:

We invite participation in The Dulcinea Memorial Writing Festival which celebrates one of ASSD's best known and admired writers. The late Dulcinea's stories are available at /~BitBard/forray/dulcinea/

The Festival shall be a collection of stories to be written in the manner of "the typical Dulcinea story". For the purposes of the Festival, "the typical Dulcinea story" is defined as:

- involving the young, married couple who appeared nameless in most of Dulcinea's stories,

- being at least 600 words long but no longer than 1,100 words (excluding titles, disclaimers and the like),

- correctly coded as (MF rom cons). Light bondage and pregnancy are also permissible and, where they appear, the commensurate additional story code should also appear. Note that oral sex is common in Dulcinea stories and is implicitly included in Dulcinea's MF code.

The story must reflect the codes used. Use of other codes, not being typical of Dulcinea, is not permitted.

The judging process shall be controlled by the Festival Director, Mr. Rui Jorge or, failing him, Mr. Mat Twassel or Father Ignatius.

Anyone may enter by e-mailing his/her story in plain text to the Festival Director, Rui Jorge ([email protected]) before the deadline for submissions, which is:

***** 24h00 GMT, Sunday 20th May 2001.

Late entries shall not be accepted. Entries that are shorter than 600 words or longer than 1,100 words (excluding titles, disclaimers and the like) shall not be accepted. If it comes to the notice of the Festival Directorate that a story has been plagiarised, it shall be disqualified.

What is not forbidden is permitted. While the Festival Directorate expresses a preference for stories composed especially for this festival, the rules of the competition do not forbid the submission of stories previously posted, hopper stories, collaborations, multiple entries and so forth. Anyone not on the judging panel may enter.

JUDGING PANEL

The judges are:

• Allison George
• Desdmona22
• Janey
• Lisala
• Mary Anne Mohanraj
• Neneh99
• Vickie Morgan
• Virago Blue

JUDGING.

The Festival Director shall remove authors' names from their stories. Each story shall be submitted in this "anonymised" form to each judge.

Each judge shall consider, in her own subjective opinion, the quality of each story and whether or not that story is "a typical Dulcinea story" as defined above. Each judge shall award each story a rating of "gold", "silver", "bronze" or "dross", reflecting its literary merits as she, personally, perceives them. Judges are not constrained to distribute awards in any particular pattern. For example, a judge may award as many golds as she wishes, or none.

_Provided that,_ should a judge be of the opinion that the story is not "a typical Dulcinea story", as defined above, that judge shall be obliged to award that story a "dross" rating regardless of its other literary merits.

The ratings are confidential and each judge shall report her ratings to the Festival Director and to no-one else. The Festival Director is deemed to be competent, trustworthy and able to add. He shall reveal the individual ratings to no-one and shall therefore be the only person who ever sees all the judges' ratings of any story.

The Festival Director shall prepare an aggregate score for each entrant, awarding a score of 3 for each "gold" rating, 2 for each "silver", 1 for each "bronze" and 0 for each "dross". The aggregate scores shall not be announced and will only ever be known to the Festival Director, who shall use them to determine a winner, a first runner-up and a second runner-up. The Festival Directors invite the donation of gold, silver and bronze medals for award to the winners.

The Festival Director shall announce the results by a post to ASSD that advises which story is the winner, which is the first runner-up and which is the second runner-up. He shall then post all the stories (with full author details, in the normal fashion) to ASSM, make a Festival web page that includes links to all the stories submitted and announce its URL on ASSD. It is projected that this shall occur on or about Monday 28th May 2001.

The judges' decision, as enunciated by the Festival Director, is final and no correspondence shall be entered into. Any queries about the running of the contest shall be resolved by consultation amongst the Festival Directorate whose decision shall be final.

Festival Directorate
Rui Jorge ([email protected])
Mat Twassel ([email protected])
Father Ignatius ([email protected])"