Winter Theme Picture Challenge - revised dates

Oh, it's a BALD eagle. I was trying to use a BALLED eagle, but he wasn't too happy when I started wadding him up.

Will that be a carrier pigeon, a passenger pigeon, or just a plain old pigeon? It makes a BIG difference for the story that just popped into my head.

Don't worry, we'll see how many stories we get and extend the voting as necessary.

It will be a pigeon of indeterminate origin thereby maximising the opportunities for author to exercise creativity and poetic licence (n.b. poetic licences can be supplied by the Head Librarian at very reasonable prices).

66 stories at 500 words is 33,000 words to read. 66 stories at an average of 2,000 words is 132,000 words. That's a novel or two. Even with just 33,000 words to read, more than half of the people who voted in the last contest failed even to read all of the stories.

I wouldn't want to change then rules for this contest that has already been announced. But how about for the subsequent contest we try something a bit different - give a SHORT timeframe to write a story (no more than two weeks) - make that part of the challenge - and limit entires to one per author (we would have had fewer than two thirds the number of stories to read in the latest contest if that had been a rule). A shorter timeframe might encourage (not require) shorter stories, and some authors simply might have to skip a contest if they had time constraints.

A question had been raised by ordalie in a previous thread was how to limit the number of stories. Two ways to limit the amount of reading (in a future contest), without being exclusionary, would be a) to put a limit of one story per author; and b) to shorten the timeframe for submission.

Just food for thought.

Given one of the primary goals of the challenges is to encourage people to write we'd certainly not want to limit the number of stories, as we've said several times in the past the voting part is purely for fun .. and people can read the challenge entries at any time after the voting has finished.

I agree with Februs, the contests are for fun and it doesn't matter if you don't have time to enter, or read,or comment, or vote... there will always be another contest coming along.

We have extended the reading or voting periods as needed in the past, so this will be no different.

I chose not to vote in the contest previous to the 500-word contest because there was simply too much to read - 50 stories averaging 2600 words apiece. Sebastian, one of the most diligent readers here has expressed his concern.

People can (and do!) write all the stories they want (except me, of course, when I'm fighting writer's block). Those with multiple entries in the contest are, by and large, the authors who routinely submit story after story whether or not there is a contest. If they write several on the theme, why not have them simply pick their favorite as an entry in the contest? Maybe it would be less daunting for a new author to write ONE story if he/she was competing in a contest with 30 entires rather than competing against the tide of stories submitted by the prolific? Maybe that would actually encourage a new writer.

As for the short time-frame - have you ever see one of these cooking shows where teams of chefs have to compete to complete a meal within in a short timeframe? As a different kind of challenge, why wouldn't that be fun, whether o not ti limited the number of entires? I'm not saying that ALL contests have to be run under that rule.

I merely suggest. Others can decide.

As we said .. it's about encouraging people to write and not about voting or competing with each other .. some people were complaining that they had TOO long to vote so the basic conclusion is you can't please everyone and we simply have to go with what we think is the best compromise which in this case is plenty of time to write and no limit on submissions. We're also not interested in imposing short time frames for writing as we would much prefer to allow authors the time to write their best quality work.