Announcing the winners of Rusty Fears 7! (Patreon)

Hi folks,

Wishing you the very best for the coming week from everyone at Rusty Towers!

Today, we are delighted to be announcing the winners of our writing competition, Rusty Fears 7! As paid members, you’ll be getting one hour early access to this news, before we share our announcement blog post and socials later today.

We were blown away by the huge response from the community, who submitted close to 500 entries. The standard of writing was incredibly high, making the decision even harder for our panel of judges. A special thanks to our paid members, for your entries into the exclusive prompts, something we’d never done before in a Rusty Fears. If you’d like to see similar paid member aspects to competitions in the future, please do let us know!

Three shortlisting judges, Hattie Quinlan, Lowri Ann Davies and Meg McKellar, worked together to read through all the entries, shortlisting just five stories for each category. These were then passed to our Head Judges, April Sumner and Callum Dougherty, to pick a winner for each category.

As well as having their story released onto The Magnus Archives podcast feed, our winners have also won some Rusty Quill merchandise, courtesy of our partners Dashery and The Gilded Teafling.

After much deliberation and discussion, the seven talented winners are:

Aaron Swartz for The Uses of Analog (Video Store)

Abi Kinsella for Roses (Theatre)

Alukard for Gigantomachia (Giant)

Ben Folk for The Tooth Fairy’s Tale (Forensics)

Luka Suk for Well Fed (Waste)

Amy Hodgetts for Disconnected (Paid Member Exclusive Prompt, Sword and Sorcery)

Nairis Santini for Clunk (Paid Member Exclusive Prompt, Deep Space)

These seven stories will now undergo the Rusty Quill treatment, and will be professionally performed, produced and released onto The Magnus Archives feed. We will announce the release date for this closer to the time.

Honourable mentions:

Notes from the Back Row by Storm Bays

Sweet Little Puppet by Claire Felice

Electrified by Mykah Green

Occhiolino by Someone There

Worms by Andi Hardesty

Blood and Parataxis by Anna Papile

Christy by H Pimlott

The Department of Sentimental Waste by Oli Phillips

Fortune by Ni Vu

Running competitions like Rusty Fears is something that is hugely rewarding for the whole team at Rusty Quill because of response we get from the community. A huge thank you to everyone who entered, and a massive congratulations to our winners!

Have a good week all!

The Rusty Quill team