Congratulations to the 2024 Winners
First Place: “Time for a Friend” by Ron Wolfe
Second Place: “Lost in a Good Book” by Michael S. Poteet
Third Place: “Apparitions” by Steve Coney
THE CONTEST: Imagine a new Twilight Zone episode. Write Rod Serling’s opening and closing narrations. Give it a title and send us your entry …and you did!
Stephen Dexter on Broadway, 2023.
Last year, the contest’s sixth, we received a record seventy-two entries. This year is the all-time runner up to the record with 61 entries. It seems that playing Rod Serling is almost as much fun as watching him! That makes running this contest so worthwhile.
First-place winner Ron Wolfe has submitted at least one narration for every contest. Way to go, Ron. Perserverance pays off!
You have available to you the fruit of much honest labor: 62 stories that will take you on enjoyable flights of fancy. And a video of the contest winners, narrated by Stephen Dexter performing as Rod Serling. This is Stephen’s seventh time performing for you—pausing his busy schedule of acting, voicing, writing, and producing, to make these prizes such a treat. Check out Stephen’s website for a dizzying list of this hard-working artist’s projects on stage, on TV, and in the movies. We thank Stephen for donating his abundant skill and limited time!
THANK YOU to everyone who submitted an entry. A big crop again this year for you to enjoy. I wrote one myself, based on a short story of mine. It was not eligible to win of course; it’s an Easter Egg for you to find. We had duplicate titles again this year, a fun coincidence that reminds me of a classic Writing Class assignment: everybody gets the same title, now go write your version! And one of the duplicate-named narrations came in second.
–Steve Schlich, webmaster
Here are all of this year’s entries, for you to enjoy in the theater of your mind…
All Men Are Created Equal
Apparitions
As Above, So Below
Bearing Witness
Best Selling Dream
The Big Do-over
The Briefcase
Car Wash
Carpet Rides Aren’t Free
The Cell
The Celluloid Prison
The Daystar
The Deep Freeze
Demons May Follow
Devil Of a Date
Dot Dot Dash Dash
Election
Election Day
Emma Walsh Has Plans
__For This Coming Thursday
Equinox
A Fine State of Matter
The Friends
Game Over at Level 13
Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow
Hallway to Other Worlds
His Words Not Mine
Hooves on the Roof
I Can Quit Anytime I Want To
In the Zone
It’s a Not so Wonderful Life
Jeffty is Five
The Land of Lost Things
Last Man On Earth
Legacy
The Library of Living Stories
Lost In A Good Book
Lost in a Good Book
The Magician
Once Upon a Time
Pitfall
Relentless
A Short Little Diversion
Silencer
A Standup Guy
The Story of a Crime
Stranger Than Fiction
A Sunday Drive
The Tangled Web
That Which Is To Be Feared
The Whole World in His Hands
This Elevator Goes Everywhere
__But Up Or Down
Time for a Friend
Tiny Demons
To Play or Be Played
Transported
Trespass into the Optical Realm
Twas The Week Before Christmas…
An Uncivil War
Waiting for a Cure
Where Fancy Takes You
Write On Time
The Zone Within the Zone
ATTRIBUTIONS
Circumstance led me to use a tool that I swore never to use, and in fact asked our contestants not to use: generative AI. Finding copyright-free photos and videos, that serve the narrations I’m illustrating proved impossible. So I rationalize my use of Google’s Gemini AI this way: I still had to decide how to match visuals to the narrations, and to feed the descriptions to the software…and to curse when the software had its own ideas about what I wanted. Getting the software to draw the same people and the same objects multiple times took a lot of experimentation, and yielded uneven results. You’ll notice that especially in the varying shape of the mirror in “Apparitions.” The amusing technical term for these results is “hallucinations.” Drug-free!
All art was generated by Google Gemini AI, in response to descriptions originated by Steve Schlich, based on the winning narrations. No copyrights claimed, or violated.
