One-Shot Contest: Professional Interest
It takes all kinds of people to make the Pokéworld tick: Pokécenter nurse, berry farmer, Pelipper Postalworker, TM designer, and many more besides! Despite this, most fics feature characters who are trainers (if it's a world with trainers) or members of a rescue or exploration team (if it's a world with guilds). For this year's one-shot contest, we'd like you to bring those unseen professions to the fore and put the spotlight on characters with unusual jobs--whether they're humans or Pokémon!
Story Guidelines
Your story should feature at least one character who has an unusual job, and that job should be a central focus of the story. For the purposes of this contest, an "unusual" job is anything outside of being a trainer in the trainerverse, or on a rescue/exploration team in the PMDverse. The job could be one we've seen before in canon, like box-buster or Rhyhorn racer, or it could be one you've come up with yourself.
Entries should be no more than 10,000 words long. Different writing programs will give different word counts, so be sure to check your story using this online calculator, which is the one I will use to determine eligibility. There is no minimum word requirement.
The story you submit should be a new one written for this contest, not one you've written previously that happens to fit the contest theme, and it should adhere to Thousand Roads' story guidelines. Please refrain from publishing your work online until the final results of the contest have been posted.
All entries are due by 11:59 PM UTC on July 5th, 2026. Not sure when that is in your timezone? You can keep track of the deadline with this handy online countdown. To enter, send your story to Negrek via PM or DM, or e-mail it to fyeahpokefic@gmail.com. One entry per person, please.
Judging and Prizes
Judge and prize structure are TBD based on projected number of entries. In the past, we've split entries across two separate flights and essentially held two sub-contests; that will happen again if we expect to get a high volume of entries. If not, everyone will be in the same pool. Keep an eye out for more information about how we'll handle judges and prizes this year as we get deeper into the writing period.
Feel free to ask any questions you may have about the contest in this thread here, or send me a DM if you prefer. As always, I hope you enjoy writing for this year's contest, and good luck to all the entrants!