How To Fairly Judge 32 Stories?

Well, several writers here (myself included) have in the past participated in the summer Short Story Contest of the soc.sexuality.spanking newsgroup, which limits its entries to 500 words (sometimes with a leeway of 10 more)--that's not including title, category, explanatory notes, word length indication, copyright notice, etc. That's why you'll see some writers with quite a few stories of around that length posted here on the Library.

It's certainly a challenge to write to such a restrictive length, in one way it makes one work at brevity and terseness of expression, eliminating unnecessary descriptors, but it also can limit character and plot development--it leaves more effort up to the reader, I've experienced, he/she has to 'read between the lines' and figure out things that there's simply not available verbiage for the author to explain fully.

Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't... --C.K.

In my opinion a 500 word story is too long! Surely 11 words is all one needs.

"Bend over!"
She instructed.
Smiling cruelly,
She picked up the cane.

Only Joking! I like the sound of a 1000 or even a 500 word limit. Sadly I am still struggling with my Summer Vacation competition story which I feel guilty at not completing on time. I shall have to try and not leave it till the last minute if you run another competition.

Deadlines are hard.

That's my Christmas 2009 story will be posted Christmas 2010.

At least I hope it will - it's still not done.

I imagine that most people will only vote for the type of story that they like so it is not necessary to read every story that is entered. I would suggest that a synobsis of the story, in the usual place as it is done in the regular story list, would help people to look for those stories that are of interest to them.

Usually you can tell if you like a story within a few screens.

I'd hate to see people reading (or not reading) a story based off of a synopsis.

Goodgulf

To get around the synopsis problem the author could include a synopsis with the story. That way the authors could summarize their own stories in a way that they would like. Also if that was done regularly by authors it would take some of the burden off the staff.

As much as I like the sound of "take the burden off the staff" it's not something I'd want to do as we'd end up with no consistency and each author doing their own thing in a different way. We've tried very hard to standardise everything on here, whether it be layout, content icons or synopses. Having said that, we have invited any of our authors to help us out by assigning the appropriate sub-genres for their stories so we're not total masochists...

I also think that it can be fun, on occasion, to step outside of what one normally reads and try something different, even if it's not something one's expecting to like. Sometimes you are pleasantly surprised. There's also the problem of synopses being very limited and one could easily skip over something due to a misguided impression of the contents.

IMHO that's the point of this type of contest, that the normal ways of identifying a story one might prefer (author, gender and/or age orientation, sub-genre type, synopsis) aren't available, only the title is--and I've noticed that quite a few of the titles chosen are rather generic for a summer vacation story, so even that wouldn't tell much (if anything) more about the story.

I am trying to read every story completely through at least once, and then rereading those I'm considering casting my votes for. I've found that there are a few stories that I'll likely give a vote or two (out of my ten) which I might have skipped if I'd known more about them beforehand.

Some of the entries have clever endings, and if I'd stopped reading partway through (deciding that a particular one wasn't the kind of story I'd like) I would've missed them... --C.K.

A few thoughts on the contest. First, I think 2500 words is ok, but with less than that it is very difficult to develop characters and tell much of a story. Second, I've noticed that there is a large difference in the number of reads between stories. I can't fathom this. It can't be the titles because so many are generic, no hint of the contents at all. It's not the order--stories near the bottom get more hits than some nearer the top. So what is it? I'd sure like to know why some stories---with no synopsis or info (like it's m/f or f/m) get twice as many hits as others. I'd like to think that anyone who is going to vote will at least scan them all. I know I did and I can tell within a paragraph or two if it will hold my interest.

Just a thought:
Would it be an idea/possibility for a future contest to be able to as a reader make private notes with the story? They can just disappear into nothingness after the competition and help keep track of what's happening in all of them.
Or am I the only person who is to lazy to keep track of things on a piece of paper?