An Act of Revenge Story Challenge 2017

The comments made about taking lessons from anyone so one can write the same way makes me rather ill. If I have to write a Challenge story imitating another author I would never submit another story. My stories may never win but please leave me with the self-respect at least the story was mine instead of a imitation of another author. What makes this site great is the variety of writing. If we lose that we might as well close the site in my opinion.

We will never agree on what is good, better or best way for a Challenge so I vote we leave it as is. As it is, if I don't like the point system I simply won't vote. If I don't like anything about the Challenge I can opt out entirely. I do what is best for me in the Challenges and in my opinion that is the only way for me and everyone else to run the Challenge.

CS

I have to say I find it extremely demoralising that after 21 challenges the primary focus for many people is still the scoring system. We actually debated this to death in 2012 and I explained at length the thinking behind the way the challenges are run:

http://www.thespankinglibrary.org/forum/2_1589_1.html

Yet here we are almost 6 years later still going over the same old ground. I haven't discussed it with flopsy as yet but my own feeling is that it's probably time we called it a day as far as the challenges are concerned as the endless debate over the way they're run/scored and the fact that all the post-challenge discussion has been about the scoring system, how many entries each author can submit and who's allowed to vote and so on rather than the stories themselves is something I can well do without.

How about a challenge with no scoring? Just a topic or other challenge to get people's creative juices running?

I have never been particularly enamoured with the competitive element of these challenges.
I think that the subject of spanking fiction is too subjective to be worthwhile, for instance if I realise that a story involves children under sixteen or domestic discipline of a misogynistic nature I stop reading. Some like F/M. others M/F for another example, and may vote accordingly.
I am sure there are many other nearly diametrically opposite preferences, and there appear to be marked differences in transatlantic tastes.
This for me invalidates the voting process.

I do disagree with Februs though as I usually enjoy both trying to write to the theme and also reading others' efforts. I for one would be happier if we just commented and favourited in the usual way.

I didn't particularly like the subject of this challenge as I personally considered it open to the possibility of spiteful themes and I for one found it very difficult to conceive of an adult theme.

I don't set myself up as an arbiter of good taste, for instance I usually enjoy the fantasy of judicial themes (providing they are not too severe-which they would usually be in reality), and frequently write about them, even though I find the concept abhorrent in real life. I do worry about the legality in the UK of under age stories though.

Of course it is all fantasy and we must hopefully all remember that.

Spanking to me is a massive dichotomy between reality and fantasy, unless one is fortunate to have a partner with similar tastes as I was until ill health and age put an end to our mutual enjoyment. Unfortunately only fantasy exists now.

That does seem like a perfectly reasonable solution. I am perplexed how anyone can look at a competition with points and winners and think that the contestants (who are human and therefore prone to competition) aren't going to be concerned with that. I worked in a company that was driven by sales and ran contests all the time to increase results. I can't think of too many people who, while knowing the true goal was sales, weren't very interested in winning. If the true goal of this challenge is incitement to write, and not compete, then it seems obvious that one keeps the suggested topic as the theme and eliminate the voting. The "challenge" then becomes: "what can you come up with?" and not, "let's see who ends up winning."

(And for the record, while I was very happy with how my entry turned out, I KNEW when I submitted it that it had a zero chance of winning. I was hoping more for some good comments and the pleasure of perhaps surprising some of the regular readers of my usually F/M or F/f stories with something very different and I think I achieved that. But I ALSO knew that any story I gave high marks to would not win either and was also correct. And I am more disturbed by that. I think I am a pretty good judge of writing and recall that all of my Literature professors thought I was pretty gifted in that regard, so I wonder what that unfortunate outcome means about the voting?)

I'm sorry to hear that this discussion is making you feel down Februs. I appreciate your hard work very much and I saw this thread as a friendly discussion regarding the potential for possible improvement in order to please as many of the participants as possible. I'm still rather new to this, so it's news to me. If you however have suffered through this discussion time and time again, I do realize that you find it tiresome. But it's not ill meant in any way, just exploring possible alternative settings. I do hope that this won't affect your intentions to run further challenges or not. I do feel that they fill a certain need for many authors as the given subject forces the author to think in new directions that they usually don't. If you don't run any further challenges, it would be a great loss to the community.

I guess it depends what you regard as winning. I'm not one of the authors but if I was then I'd take the point scoring as merely a bit of fun and accept it in that light. Winning for me would be getting new people to read my stories, picking up a lot more comments than usual and simply being able to come up with something that I was happy with that fulfilled the challenge.


I've had the opportunity to discuss things with flopsy now and given all the negativity and general dissatisfaction that's been expressed. albeit largely by people that aren't regular challenge participants themselves, we've decided as I indicated earlier to call it a day.

Clearly, despite chanting the same mantra almost every challenge of 'don't take the voting seriously, it's just a bit of fun' some people are incapable or unwilling to do that and consequently the post-challenge bitch-fests are likely to continue indefinitely. The challenges actually take quite a bit of effort on our part to run so doing away with them will free up a bit of time to do other things.

Hi Februs

I wrote my reply after only having read page 9, and thought that on balance it would be a pity that the challenges are discontinued.
After reading your last post, I skimmed through most of the other posts and I can quite understand why you and Flopsy have decided to discontinue the challenges.
Of course if other authors decided they wanted to try to encourage others to write to a similar topic then they could try and see how many others bothered. I doubt that there would be much response.
Anyway thanks very much for organising these challenges, I have very much enjoyed both writing to them and reading others' contributions, and even enjoyed occasional success.

Well there you go. EVERY comment containing a criticism of the challenges was respectful and genuine in taking something that authors enjoy and improving it. Many were quite logical in pointing out scoring flaws. Not one person said to eliminate the challenges. Not one. And yet, because authors had the audacity to suggest that the scoring be changed or eliminated.........which would certainly have achieved the result bemoaned as lost, that is having winning not be important.......we have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Amazing.

No-one has said the comments were disrespectful so this is simply a misleading straw man argument.

The suggestions have all been made previously and I disagree, for reasons which I have already articulated on more than one occasion, that any of them constitute improvements.


I assume that you either haven't read what I posted in 2012 or simply choose to ignore it but there is no ideal scoring system, they are all flawed which is why it's utterly pointless obsessing over it.


Another straw man argument. We decided to discontinue the challenges as six years of listening to moaning about how the challenges are run is quite enough. Not one person asked for the challenges to be eliminated as you say but then I also don't remember us asking for suggested changes to the challenges every time we have one.