We have nothing by way of, here answer this, draw that or write that and get free things, up just yet. But we do have plans.

Amongst these plans – we have one thing we are going to provide without a shadow of a doubt. That is the literary and art competition known as the Arcturus-Borderlands Award.

There will be nothing like this competition because there has never been anything like this competition. It is a competition organized by people interested in voice and vision for the people with the voices and the vision.

No Bullshit.

No fancy clothes.

We’ve watched other competitions online; they put charges for each story, ten dollars, twenty euros per story and get what? Maybe two thousand plus entrants, twenty euros per story multiplied by two thousand? That’s forty thousand euros. Prizes always seem relatively small, in the one to two thousand, couple of hundred maybe a book token for the runners-up.

Now we’re aware there are costs in running these competitions. Not least the people running them but also the possibility of having to pay people to judge them. We’re also aware that even at just two thousand entrants entering one story each, that, that is a veritable fuck-ton of money.

So what we are going to do is give our time for free. We’re going to organize a competition where the books are open, where month by month you can check our online spreadsheets, where you can see just how much we’re pulling in toward the prize-pool.

And that’s just it.

You’ve played poker? Maybe you haven’t, maybe you just know the basic concept of the game. Well this will work like a sort of literary and artistic poker. If you’re entering the art competition or the literary competition, you pay a diminishing fee for each piece entered. In turn, we will update the online spreadsheets each month to show the potential prize- pool.

Now, from this offset, because we are giving our time and server space for free, we hope to only be forced to take between ten to twenty percent of this pool to put toward paying judges, prize costs and server costs. Ideally of course, we hope that this amount stays around ten percent, leaving you all with ninety percent of both prize pools to potentially win at the end of the day.

We have our own in-house Jeweler designing trophies and we will get real people, a mixture of buyers (those wonderful people who choose stock for bookshops), authors and other people involved in the industry to judge the competition.

The rest is up to you.

We have promised to run a competition unlike anyone else has ever run one.

We promise to show you the in-goings and the out-goings and pledge you, the winners, everything else, in what we hope is the beginning of an annual set of competitions designed to help those with creative vision along in whatever they are doing.

All we need is a basic two thousand emails titled: I want to enter the Arcturus-Borderlands competition to: Competitions @ BigRockCandyMountain.info.

Once we have these, the website will go live and we will post up information regarding rules and entry.