'Through The Keyhole' Story Challenge' 2012

Yes, but we have so many "graders" that these individual preferences tend to average out. Also, our preferences aren't a static thing. They tend to be a moving target. We may "mature" as readers and gradually discover new genres that we hadn't tried before, and those new experiences may gradually or even suddenly inform our preferences.

Also, we all have little "flings" as readers and so have temporary preferences.


Just as we have our "likes", we have our dislikes; and they matter! Again, these can be a moving target. I developed one particular new dislike while reading through the challenge stories, but recognized it was probably just me. Therefore I tried not to let it impact my grading, though I believe I did comment on it. There was some "reverse sexism" going on that started to grate on me. Males were depicted as impulsive childish creatures who, at the slightest sexual inspiration, would drop their pants to play with themselves, even if there was a significant chance of discovery. Females hardly ever acted that way.

I must admit that I don't bother about literary criteria. Me, who tries to avoid writing any stories, reports or essays since decades and can hardly write one English sentence without a mistake is certainly not the right person to use this sort of criteria. I think anyway that it's a kind of automatism: If a story strikes me it is probably because it is well written and has fulfilled some literary criteria, even if I don't know which and why. So my votes just reflect what I like and what I don't like, but I think that's what authors want to know and all what I can offer anyway.

@mati
Dein Englisch ist besser als mein Deutsch und auch besser als mein Englisch

C'mon, get your votes in. Narnarf2go. And if it deserves 10, give it 10. If you try to rank 94 entries in a range 1–10, there's no point in making your maximum 9.

For one obvious reason, there would be no way to require any particular reader/voter to follow an established set of criteria in scoring the story--although some voters might make gallant attempts to do so.

IMHO it's best to simply allow readers to apply whatever individual criteria they so desire; I personally don't take the competitive aspects of these Challenges all that seriously.

However, I did award at least a dozen 'ten' scores in this Challenge, whereas in other ones it's been about four or five 'tens'... --C.K.

Yes, B was the true statement. Congratulations to any who guessed it.

Goodgulf