story challenge

@catmama

I'm glad you have your priorities in order!


Are you sure you didn't finish in 9th or 10th place in a recent challenge?

No idea! Most likely I beat you to the bottom spot of last place

Well I'm about 2/3 of the way through. OMG what a talented bunch of 'spankauths' you truly are. I am in awe of you all.

Well, hold on there, MN. You're no slouch yourself when it comes to being a word-woman. Thank you for your kind words though. I'm sure I speak for all the authors.

I've finished (phew!). I can only echo MN's sentiments.

I had a comment very recently from a stalwart of SL on one of my two entries for the last challenge! So they don't have to vanish. In any case, listing 10 of 57 would still leave 47 stories, most of them good in some people's eyes, unlisted.

As for the size of the task involved in reading them all, I am a strong believer that it's unfair to authors to vote on some stories and not even read a bit of the others. However, I own up to skimming if about a quarter of the way through, I find a story not at all to my taste. This still allows for picking up and giving credit for a good surprise ending, say.

I also notice that when I've checked out "Activity" during the life of the current challenge - several times - only on average about 10% of the people reading something were reading a challenge entry. Personally I stop reading other stories until I've cleared the batch of challenge stories, but the 10% finding suggests either that:
- There's a sizeable group of readers so keen (or addicted) that during a month they read all the challenge entries and about five or six hundred others; or
- A lot of people read the only challenge entries only when I'm never on the site, like 3 a.m. GMT; or
- A lot of people use the site a fair bit but don't engage with the challenge at all; or
- Challenge stories on average get read much more quickly than others; or
- Many people read only a few of the challenge stories and presumably vote on them, but then go on reading non-challenge stories.

Whichever is true, it suggests most people don't find the size of the challenge intimidating.

We are about halfway through the voting window and there are 14,000+ votes. Generally there are around 20,000 at the end so this challenge is running about as expected. Voting will slow down now because most readers who are inclined to participate have done so and the novelty of 56 new stories has worn off, but that's to be expected. There should be a voting surge toward the end as readers try to get in under the wire with their picks (just like the authors did with their stories). All in all, about par.

And as BH has noted above, I still get a lot of traffic on old contest entries (I don't know if being in a contest has anything to do with it though) so they don't disappear.

Guilty here too!


There are undoubtedly people in all the categories you describe.


Actually, no stories totally disappear. Despite the drastically reduced frequency of views after stories disappear off the "Latest" list, there are some readers to find them, whether challenge entries or not. Upon checking my AP stats page recently, there were ten different stories on the list of ten most-recently viewed, NOT ONE of them being new within the past six months (and only 1 appearing among my 25 most recent). These had been viewed by 9 different members, none of them familiar to me as frequent readers or commenters. Whether doing searches or using the Lucky Dip, they were finding old stories.

I hope that I can complete the challenge stories. I have read 25, so far. I must say that the stories have excellent plots and are very well written. I really enjoyed what I have read. My problem is that I have difficulty reading as many stories, per day, as I use to read. My eyes are not good. MY only complaint, for me, is that many of these stories are very long. I prefer shorter stories. I will try and continue with the rest of the stories.

Yes i have to agree with Sebastion on the preference for shorter stories. I know we have a minimum number of words and perhaps one challenge we can have a maximum as well. I am aware of previous challenges with a max of 500 words but I was thinking say in the 2000 word range.