OOC - Blue Dwarf's 9th Birthday Novella Competition!

OOC - Hello everyone. I am very very very proud to announce that the Blue Dwarf
is almost 9 years old. To celebrate this momentous occasion, I wanted to do a
competition and to give away an actual prize! We've done this before, I think
SMAndy and Chris Kentlea both have very cool-looking BD mugs – which I hope they
use EVERY day!
The prize
--------------
It's really cool. That's all you need to know! It will be a custom Blue Dwarf -
themed trophy made especially for the occasion. It will be hand-made and one of
a kind! I'll post some photos in a later article because It's not quite finished
yet.
The competition
------------------------
Unfortunately I'm not giving this prize away for free! You will have to do some
work for it, but that's okay because it's something that I know every one of you
is very good at. Create a story!
There's a lot of wacky stuff that we write about in BD, but also there's a lot
of things that are very difficult for us to do because of the way the BD group
is written by multiple members. Sometimes I get messages from members with
really cool ideas for *action* plots that just wouldn't work so well, but would
make cool stand-alone stories.
So the idea is to make a stand alone story. I'm suggesting this because it would
be very cool to have a few stand-alone stories to show new members or other
people what we're all about, because pointing people to the most current
messages will just make them say "WTF?"
Also with a good self contained stories under our belt, with a clear beginning,
middle and end mean that whenever someone comes to us wanting to make a comic,
animation or possibly a game, we could go "here, make this – It's really cool!"
Word count – There is not strict wordcount. A novella (small book) is between
17,500 words and 40,000. I'm not expecting as much as that, but if you want to –
please go ahead!
Format – Could be a script, could be first person, could be a story written as
normal. If it's a script, there's more chance it might get turned into a comic
or animation at some point in the future.
Theme – We toyed around setting a theme for this but didn't want it to be too
limited, so all we'll say is that it has to be Red Dwarf or Blue Dwarf related.
Starting points – Struggling for ideas? Here are some ideas for your story:
BD/RD crossover
Lister travelling into stasis was a conspiracy to hide nanobots
JMC's first encounter with the Mollopods
Groundhog-day type scenario set on the BD, caused by stasis leak (I'm suggesting
this because it would be dead hard to post about on BD normally!)
Ace Rimmer encounters the Hymenoptera
Kryten's early years (maybe on the BD?)
Transcript for BD the film
These competitions haven't been incredibly popular in the past, with only a few
entries, so I'm going to post constant reminders of this one! And the prize will
be worth it, if just as a souvenir marking the Blue Dwarf passing nine years.
Nine years! That's amazing dudes!
Closing Date - 20th April 2009