Would you like to win a pimped out Premium WordPress Thesis Theme?

Then we’ve got the contest for you.

We LOVE writing here at Collective Inkwell. We love all kinds of writing, but we love fiction the most. Stories that move, amaze, and scare; make you laugh, cry, or FEEL IT IN YOUR MARROW – we love them all!

From the comments and emails received so far, we feel like we’ve hit on something special here with our celebration of inspiration and creativity. Nothing excites us more than kicking our first week off with a giant creative writing project/contest.

Here’s the deal.

We’ll give you two prompts to choose from. Sentence A and Sentence B, each provided by one of us. You pick one of the sentences and build a story from it! The contest will start today and run until Friday May 1st. The following week, we’ll announce three winners, hand picked by our panel of four bloggers.

The Rules

• This contest is open to bloggers of any age who keep a regular and open-to-the-public blog. One entry per person.
• Stories must be in the English language as we have no foreign language or Klingon translators here (though Sean speaks Spanish).
• Stories can be any length, but try to keep it less than 2,000 words. We don’t want a novella. Well, unless you are named Clive Barker, Stephen King or David Sedaris.
• Stories can be of any genre save for pornography. Those can be sent to our personal email at… Ha, I keeeed!
• Stories will be judged on general awesomeness and creativity. We won’t be judging for grammar, though please do bare in mind horrible grammar may distract us from fully enjoying the story. In the event of a tie, we will lock ourselves in a steel cage and fight it out until the death. Or we’ll flip a coin.
• You MUST post the first paragraph (including the prompt sentence) of your contest entry on your blog with a link back to this page. Then you must post the ENTIRE entry here (including the first paragraph) as a response to this thread. Please also include a link back to your blog post featuring the entry.
• We won’t demand that you subscribe to our RSS feed (using a button to the right) or follow us on Twitter (also, a button on the right); we believe that you should only do these things if you want to stay up to date with Collective Inkwell. Having said that, we’d love it if you could publicize the contest on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, local restroom walls, on the back of your partner’s neck in sharpie when they aren’t looking, etc… but we won’t count it against you if you don’t.
• If you have comments on another person’s entry, feel free to leave them in this thread. We all appreciate feedback or a pat on the back.

The Prizes

• First Prize: A Thesis Premium WordPress Theme pimped out by David Wright. Chris Pearson’s Thesis Theme from DIYthemes.com is hands down the BEST WordPress theme out there. From SEO-optimized back end to endless customization options to a million other things, which we’ll get into in a future post, Thesis rocks! Heck, its our theme of choice here at Collective Inkwell – and also at BloggerDad and WriterDad. Thesis retails at $87, but you’ll get your very own copy for free! Additionally, you will receive a custom header for your site as well as some basic modifications for color and design. In order to win the custom theme, you MUST have your own hosted WordPress blog. You are also responsible for uploading and maintaining your theme after delivery. We will help out with customization and the initial Thesis setup, though. Maintaining the theme’s updates and future design modifications will be your responsibility. Don’t worry, though, as you will receive your own personal Thesis license and access to the incredibly helpful Thesis support forums.
• Second and Third Prizes: Your choice of a custom banner or Twitter background page drawn by David Wright or custom writing from Sean Platt of your choice (including About Page, Services Page, guest post, SEO optimized post, general piece of ghostwriting – anything less than a thousand words).

Other Stuff

We reserve the right to modify the rules without notice. We likely won’t, but for legal reasons, or in case you get all weird on us, we added this.

Now the sentences to begin the stories

a) Well, this is odd, he thought to himself.

b) How could she have known that simply crossing the street would mean so much?

Any other questions or comments, please email them to collectiveinkwell (at) gmail.com

Good luck to all, we look forward to reading your stories!