Through the Keyhole Story Challenge 2012 - Results

Congratulations to the winners and thanks especially to the readers who wrote such an exceptionally large number of comments to my story entries. This is really valuable feedback. I may have to suspend my policy of replying to each and every comment, however, due the large number of comments I received (but I'll try). So I'll take this opportunity to thank everyone who did. It was really greatly appreciated and is tremendous encouragement. But time is precious right now, since as some of you may know, I've "gone pro". I won't say any more about that here---details are on my blog. That doesn't mean I'm going to stop submitting stories to LSF or that I'm going to have my content removed from LSF, it just means that my time for this hobby is now divided among several projects.

I did find out several things as a result of the challenge. First, these challenges seem to stimulate my muse. When I first saw the challenge description I thought, 'oh, no, how can I make some original out of this?' But after doing nothing for 2 weeks and letting my subconscious work on it, ideas began to flow. Second, I found the 2500 word limitation very difficult to deal with. All my stories ran right up to the limit (they allowed 10 extra words. thankfully) and the final edits were painful. I even tossed out one potential entry (The Legend of Sophia the Fair) because I just COULD NOT cut the thing to 2500 words. And note, the commercial versions of these stories will be longer than 2500 words by a considerable margin.

So on balance it was a very useful experience and it was very gratifying to know how many people liked my stories. I'll probably keep on entering these things, so bring it on.

Well, of the three stories that ended up with over 300 'reads,' by title two of them clearly appeared to refer to a girl being spanked (although in one of them the title was a misdirection) and the third one had a clever-sounding title (which actually, when spelled differently, turned out to refer to a young woman being paddled)--so it certainly does appear that a story's title influences how much it's going to be read during a Challenge, without anything else for a potential reader to go by.

Ideally, of course, a reader/voter should read and rate (vote on) every story in the Challenge... --C.K.

I'll just add my two cents and say congratulations to all the authors but particularly to the library as a whole, having read every story I was amazed by the overall quality considering the fact that the challenge entries weren't validated.

As the maximum number of words was limited I couldn't bring my competition story to its logical conclusion.

This is why I've written a sequel with the predictable title of Back to School - Part 2 (plug) which can now be viewed.

I'd like to add a "well done" to everyone who entered and a special "well done" to everyone who managed to read all 94 entries before voting. It certainly is a challenge to do that, maybe a restriction of one story per author would help.

Congrats to all and thanks for the comments & votes

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