Submitting an entry is as easy as setting out cookies for your favorite gift-giving entity:

1. Post your story where it is freely accessible - that is, anyone can read it. A blog, website, or freely shared Google Docs file all count.
2. Include a link back to specthehalls.com and to alliterationink.com. You'll get extra karma if you point people toward the current anthology.
3. Send an e-mail to submit@specthehalls.com with contact information and the address for us to find your work. Also attach an RTF file with your story in standard manuscript format for judging purposes. If your story is dark, disturbing, or the like, please say so in the email.
4. Do all of these things between 15 July 2011 and 31 December 2011. Stories must stay online at least through 2/2/2012.
5. Prizes are as follows: USD$100 for first place, USD$50 for second place, and USD$25 for third place. Winners may choose to donate prize money back to charity.
6. Stories entered in this year's contest may be invited to participate in next year's charity anthology.

Please note that with the new management in 2011, some of these rules are slightly different.

• What's Spec the Halls, anyway?
• What charity is this supporting?
• What if I've already donated to Heifer International?
• Does New Year's count as a winter holiday?
• What if I don't have a website to post my submission on?
• How many times can I submit?
• Can I submit the same story to the contest again next year?
• What about places where Christmas isn't a winter holiday, like Australia and Africa?
• Is fan-fiction ok?
• How about content that might be offensive to some people, like erotica or extreme violence?
• Can I help support this contest?

Got a question not answered here? Email steven@alliterationink.com with a subject line that starts with "Question." Please include a brief 1-4 word description of the question topic in the subject line.

Spec the Halls is a contest for speculative winter holiday-themed fiction, artwork, and poetry. The holiday may be fictional or real; it may be Christmas, Yule, Kwanzaa, Festivus, or any holiday we already know and love, or it may be something much stranger. Links to the submissions for the contest can be found at Recommended Submissions and All Submissions. You may follow news and announcements on our news page (RSS feed) or you can subscribe to Spec The Halls by email via feedburner.

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Any donations (see below) along with all proceeds from the sale of an special eBook anthology will go to support Heifer International.

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If you donated US$10 or more to Heifer International after 1 November 2011, send an attached reciept (scanned or PDF from your online donation to steven@alliterationink.com with a subject line of "Donated". I'll send you a code to get the book.

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If the holiday takes place during winter, the answer is yes. Roughly speaking, we're talking about the last week in November through the last week of January. If you're on the edges of that, it'll be a harder sell. (See the bit about non-winter holidays below as well.)

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If you do not have a suitable website or blog currently, I would recommend either Blogger, Wordpress, Livejournal, or a host of any other free blogging sites. Heck, you can post it as a note to your Facebook account - as long as the general public is able to see it. As always, you should carefully read the terms and conditions before agreeing to anything.

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Once seems a reasonable number, doesn't it?

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No. Composite Santa will come and eat you if you do that.

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You're right, there's a bit of a Northern Hemisphere (and global West) bias here; it's what I'm familiar with. We're talking about festivals and holidays that celebrate the end of the year, the low end of the cycle of the seasons, of harvest and death and rebirth, where the light recedes and slowly comes back. Give me stories of Persephone, of Saturnalia, of the Homowo Festival, of the Chinese New Year. If you're unsure that I'll easily see how your holiday is a winter one, either let me know in the entry e-mail or put it on the story page.

We're also talking about European winter festivals that have been exported elsewhere - so Christmas in Perth will obviously be warm.

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No. Please note that some characters - such as Frankenstein's Monster - are in the public domain. The specific depiction of those characters (the example of Karloff putting bolts in the Monster's neck) may still be protected. A good resource to determine all of this is here. (That complexity is why you're usually told to not do fanfic, by the way.)

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Don't break any laws, put a warning in your submission email, and if this is something that people under 18 shouldn't see, make sure that they can't stumble across it by accident. Dark stories are just fine; my story from an earlier iteration of this contest wasn't exactly cheerful positive fun.

You should probably know that I have major problems with sexual assault, sexism, racism, and anti-gay prejudice. While I'm not outright banning them from the contest, I reserve the right to not accept or promote a story that has those themes.

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You bet your patootie! If you're not interested in buying the eBook, you can donate directly right here using these buttons - the donations ALSO go to Heifer International, not to me.

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