Gentlemen, we are on the verge (lol) of having the first ever WO round that is completely dead. By that I mean that despite all the preamble and buildup, we will come away with 0 entries. 0 writing entries and by extension 0 art entries. This is my first attempt at organizing a round, and it's been a humbling experience. The timing, from the get-go, was already kind of on the bad side, as sandwiching this between the FiM SS round and the original mini round made things awkward enough. And then the Hurricane Sandy (Why Sandy?) of WO fiascoes happened, and it left a lot of us mentally drained.

Now, I'm more than happy to have discovered that not only did we reach 10 entries for the mini round, but actually exceeded my expectations on that front. But unfortunately a mini round is not the same as a short story round. With a minific you have one day to come up with a story and to write it out, but a short story takes much more planning and writing time for most of us to execute adequately. I extended the round by a couple days, but it was of little use.

There's also the problem that a lot of us are under-equipped for dealing with a round of this... nature? Sure, we've written some raunchy stuff by the standards of normal rounds, but this is something else entirely. In hindsight making a round of this type was like suddenly replacing your kid's toy gun with a real one. Sure, they might be vaguely familiar with it, but it's a very different beast that they were not ready to handle.

Also, the chosen prompt was not encouraging.

That's not to say it's now impossible to submit anything, but the chances of doing so have grown drastically slim, and I would not be surprised one bit if we came away with nothing. Nothing to get worried over. This would be, if anything, a failed experiment, and we seem to be in the process of addressing how alternative rounds ought to be schedules around normal rounds, and how frequently the normal rounds themselves ought to be scheduled.

The WriteOff is going through some growing pains (with extra emphasis on "pains" in light of some recent events) as of late, and the most important thing right now would be to learn from our mistakes.

And also to have some fun, that too.