LSF short story challenge

Congratulations, all, and thank you to Flopsy and Februs.

Congrats and plaudits to the winners and runners up.

Being a numpty i did not put comments to the stories as did not realise they only show after voting closed. ah well, every day is a school day.

Congratulations to all, thanks as ever to Flopsy and Februs - and thanks and a big kiss to all of you whose votes lifted my story to 3rd place!

Congratulations to the winners and everyone who entered. I felt it was another successful challenge and hope to see another down the track.

Well done everyone. The writers, the readers, the commentors, who ever you are, thanks a lot and I hope you all had a great deal of fun.

CS

Congratulations to the winner and everybody who contributed as authors, voters and/or administrators. It's quite fascinating that we now have 15 challenges with 15 different winners - it says something about how many excellent writers there are on this site. And especially as some my own favorites have yet to win

Well, in the days of newsgroups being quite popular on the internet, I was generally a participant in the soc.sexuality.spanking newsgroup's annual Short Story Contest every summer, wherein the entries were limited to 500 (or so) words of actual story text (not including title, author's notes, etc.), which is how almost all of those very short stories of mine came into existence.

There were volunteer reviewers assigned to read and comment on each entry, which there were various categories for (those being determined by whoever had volunteered to be the 'SSC dictator' and run it that summer), and they did end up awarding 'prizes' for the top three places in each category via their (the reviewers') votes. (I was a reviewer for the SSC's final 2-3 years.)

Anyway, my point is that writing to a severe word limit was challenging, because the story's plotline, characterization and descriptive prose had to be restricted quite a bit, while I also had to refrain from employing most of the adjectives and adverbs which I'm fond of using--it was "bare bones" writing, often requiring 2-3 sacrificial 'edits' to get the entry down to a suitable length.

It was ironically bemusing to me when a reviewer's comments included the suggestion that the story's plotline and/or characterization should or could have been "developed further" by the writer, who had only around 500 words to work with. (The last few SSCs did have categories for 1,000 words, and one even for 2,000, but entries to those were limited for each author.)

There was one 500-word LSF Challenge which managed to produce 66 stories, but I'm uncertain whether it would ever be tried here again. Perhaps a 2,000-word-limit Challenge might be interesting at some point... --C.K.

Just my personal view on things but I think in general the LSF has an overabundance of what outside the LSF would be called "snippets" although our own classification has shifted things somewhat with our snippets really being no more than a paragraph or two. I think in general, it's good to try and encourage some longer, more developed submissions although ultimately it's down to personal preference and no doubt some people prefer to read items under 1,500 words.

One thing we were considering, and have debated in the past, was to hold an additional, supplementary challenge, purely for F/M submissions. We realise that this might not appeal to the majority readership but then no-one would be forcing them to take part, as either submitter or reader, and we'd still have the 2 main challenges as usual.

Anyway, we'd be happy to hold an F/M challenge next year but only if there was sufficient interest and we'd be assured of getting a minimum of say, 25 entries. Opines welcomed...

I for one am very interested. As you say the majority of members may not tend this way, however a good story is a good story, not matter what the gender classification. At other times we could limit other Challenges to F/F etc etc to be fair to all.


CS

I think it's worthwhile to have Challenges with a variety of different rules/standards/classifications - such as F/M only, limitation to shorter stories only (maybe 1K or 2K word maximum), limitation to LONGER stories only (maybe 8K or 10k word minimum), poetry (even though I won last place in the only previous poetry Challenge), perhaps one with a limited time-frame for writing (say, a deadline only a week after being announced), as well as the different themes that have been offered. Variety is never a bad thing - it challenges people to try something new, and perhaps allows a different group of authors to shine.