The Initiative accepts written submissions on a continuous basis.
Submissions are received, acknowledged, and entered upon the rolls. Once entered, a submission remains entered. The Initiative does not remove entries from the rolls except as required by the Withdrawal Provision.
The Initiative does not edit submissions. The Initiative does not correct spelling. The Initiative does not comment on submissions.
The Prompt
The Initiative offers no further guidance and declines all requests for clarification. Prior entrants have interpreted the prompt to concern software, hardware, instrumentation, correspondence, telegraphy, agriculture, domestic arrangements, and international law. All were accepted. The Initiative takes no position on which of these readings was correct.
Entrants who wish to know what the prompt means are directed to the archive.
The Archive
Every submission received since 2019 is held in the archive. Selected entries are published.
The archive is not a ranking. Entries appear in the order they were received and are held in that order permanently. A commended entry and a winning entry sit at the same weight. The shortest submission on file is eight words.
The Initiative recommends reading the archive before submitting. This is not a requirement. Nothing here is a requirement.
Retrieving the archive…
Who Reads Your Story
Submissions are judged by the Kansas City Classical Society, an independent body of readers which volunteered its services to the Initiative and receives no payment.
The Society reads blind. Your name, your age, and anything you have told us about how your story was written are withheld from them until after a winner is chosen. They have said they would rather not be told even then.
The Society's decisions are final and the Society does not explain them. This was their condition and the Initiative accepted it. Correspondence disputing a selection will be acknowledged and will go no further.
Members of the Society may not enter. A member wishing to enter must resign, and may not rejoin during any cycle in which their entry sits on the rolls.
Between 2019 and this cycle, submissions to this contest were not read. The winner was the eighth entry received. This is recorded in full below and is not concealed.
They are read now. By people who volunteered, for nothing, on Thursdays.
On authorship
The Initiative accepts submissions written by people, submissions written by machines, and submissions written by people and machines together. No advantage is conferred by either. No disadvantage is imposed on either.
You may state that your submission was written without assistance, or with assistance, or state nothing. All three are recorded exactly as given and none is verified. The Initiative has no means of verification, has not sought one, and will not purchase one.
The prize
The prize for the current cycle is sixty dollars ($60), guaranteed, plus the whole of the common fund.
The Initiative guarantees the floor from its own resources. Everything above the floor comes from contributors, is held in escrow, and is disbursed in full to the winner. The Initiative retains nothing.
For seven years this contest paid two thousand dollars a year, funded by one man who was never asked twice and who declined to be named. That gift was declined by the Office of General Counsel on appearance grounds having nothing to do with him.
It has taken a crowd to replace him and the crowd has so far raised sixty dollars.
The Initiative states the figure plainly because the figure is the record. A contest that inflates its prize to appear serious has told its first lie about money, and this contest has already had one accounting irregularity and does not require a second.
Sixty dollars is what there is. It is guaranteed. It will be paid. Prizes have gone unclaimed before now; the prize is disbursed regardless.
Receipt
Every submission receives acknowledgment. The acknowledgment confirms receipt, records the timestamp, and states the position of the submission upon the rolls. It is not a notification of selection. It is not an evaluation. It is a record that something arrived and was kept.
The Initiative sends nothing else. Entrants who wish to know the outcome of a cycle are directed to the archive, which is updated when it is updated.
Who May Enter, and What the Initiative Does With What It Receives
Who may enter
Anyone may enter.
Entrants under the age of eighteen must have a parent or legal guardian complete the guardian section of the submission form. Submissions from entrants under eighteen without a completed guardian section are not entered upon the rolls.
The Initiative does not publish the names of entrants under eighteen. Minors' entries appear in the archive by age and cohort only. This is enforced by the Initiative's own records, and not by the entrant's care in filling out a form.
What the Initiative does with what it receives
You keep your story. The Initiative claims no ownership of anything sent to it. By submitting, you warrant that you have the right to submit the work and to grant the licence below. The Initiative asserts nothing further about who or what wrote it.
The Initiative keeps a copy. By submitting, you grant the Initiative a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual licence to store your submission and to publish it in the archive, in whole or in part, in any medium in which the archive appears. You may license, publish, sell, adapt, or repudiate your own work anywhere else, at any time, without notifying the Initiative.
The Initiative does not sell entries and does not license them to third parties.
The Withdrawal Provision. You may withdraw your submission from public display at any time by writing to rolls@ventriloquium.org, which is read by a person and answered. Withdrawal removes the entry from view. It does not remove the entry from the rolls, because the rolls are a record of what was received, and the Initiative does not alter records of what was received.
Submit
Write first if you like — the form is below and needs no card. A card is required only to enter the writing upon the rolls, so that a receipt can be issued and so that an entry can be withdrawn by the person who sent it.
One sign-in, no password to invent and none to lose. Anything typed into the form is kept on this device until it is entered upon the rolls, and it will still be here when you come back from your mail.
Your submissions
Notices
Notice of Reconstitution of the Panel
Office of Public Guidance · File OPG-2402-CV/PR · Classification: Public Record
1. Determination. Effective this cycle, submissions to the Killer Fart App Initiative are read. A Panel is convened. The winner of each cycle is selected from among the submissions received, on the merits of the writing.
2. The prior method. From 2019 until this notice, the winner of each cycle was the eighth submission received, by timestamp. No panel convened. No criteria were applied. No submission was read for the purpose of selection. The method was recorded in the Initiative's source code and was not published. It was identified in 2023 by an entrant who read the source, and independently in the forensic audit of Grant 2019-1847, and was disclosed in full at that time.
The Bureau does not restate this to apologise for it. The Bureau restates it because a record of what was received is worthless if it is not also a record of what was done, and because every entrant who submitted work to this contest between 2019 and the present is entitled to know that it was not read.
It was not read. It is read now.
3. What is not changed. The rolls are unchanged. The archive is unchanged and is not reordered, re-ranked, or re-annotated. Entries selected under the prior method remain recorded as winners of their cycles, because they were. The Bureau does not alter records of what was received.
What This Is
The Killer Fart App Initiative is a work of fiction and a writing contest.
The Bureau, its offices, its officers, its instruments, its regimen, its certifications, and its standards architecture are invented. The Bureau is a private body. It has no sovereign authority, and it neither claims nor implies any.
Nothing published here is medical, legal, dietary, or scientific advice. The regimen is not a regimen. The instrument does not exist. Do not follow anything described in the archive.
Entries are the work of their authors and do not represent the views of the Initiative, its contributors, or anyone else. The archive contains fiction written by adults and by children, on the subject of an imaginary device, and it should be read that way.