How To Fairly Judge 32 Stories?

I am having trouble keeping 32 stories straight in my mind. I will share how I am doing it so far, but I hope some of you will chime in with some tips!

1) First the time-consuming part. I don't see any way to fairly judge them without reading them, that means reading them all. Otherwise, you are just judging titles.

2) Being a contrarian, I started at the bottom and am working my way up! As I go through them, I am temporarily assigning one point to each story that really "grabs" me. So far, that is about one story in 3, so perhaps I won't run out of points before I get to the top.

3) Finally, I plan to re-read only the stories I have marked and then re-distribute my 10 points to only the best few stories.

Anybody have a better plan?

Guy, we think alike! That was *exactly* my plan.

Same here, I'm reading them all and checking the ones worth reading a second time. It is going to take awhile to read them all, but it's the only fair way to do it I think.

I wasn't expecting so many entries, I think we may need to extend the voting period to give people time to read them all at leisure ....

I read them all, then stopped thinking about them for a while (um, about a day). I went back, and there were some I recognized and some, well, I know I read some of them, but they didn't leave enough of an impression to stick in my mind.

So I re-read some of them, going "oh yeah, I read this one before" and others going "Yes, still good", but a few of the ones that didn't leave a first impression were better the second time around. Maybe it was just reading story after story, but going back some of the ones that didn't grab me seemed better. Others didn't, but some did.

It's going to be hard to rank them all - I might end up giving one vote each for the top ten stories.

Goodgulf
(Who hopes everyone reads the stories - and that most people vote)

I agree it's a difficult task with so many to choose from. Maybe for future contests we should specify stories of 1,000 words, give or take a couple of hundred words either side; a smaller word count would certainly be more manageable if there are a lot of entries.

Yes, I also hope everyone reads all the stories. Everyone obviously finds some that aren't wildly exciting to their tastes, so I suppose they will be the ones that fall by the wayside, and with what is left, I guess you end up reading some of them more than once, and award the most votes to the best of the bunch..

Anyway, it's not the Pulitzer prize, just a bit of fun, and it's really encouraging to have so many people make the effort, not only to write new stories for the contest, but to read and vote on them too.

I read them all starting at the bottom and working up. Two I really liked I found soon enough but I had a job refinding the two I wanted to give a point each to. I am sure I recognised several authors but I thought it a nice touch that it was done anonymously. Thanks are due to Katie B for organising this competition.

Thank you for your praise blimp but I really did nothing but NAG!!! LOL ALL the thanks needs to go to FEBRUS!!! He worked long and hard getting things ready!!!!!!

THANKS FEBRUS!!!!!!!

I agree with flopsy however. Next time I think the words need to be limited to 1000 words or less. It is very difficult giving all these wonderful stories a fair shake!

Katie B.

If I assign points can i take them away again - if so then its a good plan

otherwise I am not so sure

DJ

"If I assign points can i take them away again"

Sure! Try it. It works for me.

Like the rest of the library, it's actually a pretty amazing setup.