Think it's done out of spite now. I'm Def writing for this one this time around. Because of what I voted for.

 

I don't see why, unless it becomes a serious pattern the only result seems to be we get about twice as many stories come it. We don't loose anything by having two cool prompts occasionally. If people are enthusiastic about both, good, they both are good options.

The general consensus last time was that we should keep Azkaban since that was the most obvious DLP prompt yet 90% of the story's actually submitted ended up being Daphne.

 

It should have been 95%,I agree

 

Okay. @TheWiseTomato did a fantastic job writing that. I hadn't read it before but I just enjoyed the hell out of it. Write moar Wise.

Not sure why it was relevant to this thread though. I guess maybe it could be said to sort of incorporate one or both prompts but not really?

 

I second this. Its a great motivator. I started this back when we were on IRC and for the people that were active then its a great motivator.

Remember: You're not expected to meet a wordcount total to participate, its just a friendly competition to get your brain going and putting words to paper. I've written more words through doing this than I have in a long time. So I think it has merit.

I liken it to working out (atleast for me). Its boring to suffer alone, lets suffer together!

We all like to write, you can use it for comps, or your own work. You're not required to share the words that you're writing and it can be for anything (looking at you 500 club).

I also think its a great resource because we're all there and we all want to help.

 

My thoughts on word count.

Many short story competitions in the science fiction and fantasy genres classify 'short stories' as <7500 words. I would personally prefer that we limit our regular competitions to that amount, as 7500-17500 (the current cap) is considered a novelette. I also personally feel that stories that long written by non-pros like (most) of us tend to allow us to be sloppy with editing.

Now that we've had quite a few competitions with the 17500 word limit, how do you all feel about lowering it to 7500?

I also like the idea of doing Q4 competitions as 'shorter' comps. My initial idea was to say October/November would be <7500 (no minimum) and that a December only competition would be <2500.

Currently I am working with Oct/Nov being 2500-5000 (see current Q4 P1 thread) and a December Flash competition being 900-1100 (voting for the extra short comp would probably be via poll - not requiring the in-depth 200 word review).

Thoughts in general? My personal preferences are for Q1-3 being <7500 words, Q4.1 being 1500-2500, and Q4.2 being 800-1000. It would free us up at the busiest holiday time of year by allowing for shorter stories and easier reviewing.

 

This is an excellent point - I haven't been paying attention to the total lengths of the winners (the best stories always fly by the fastest) but if more than half of the winners and runner ups have been >7500 that's a damned good reason to keep the word limit high (which I'm also fine with).

 

Thoughts?

Voting is gonna work differently for the Flash competition.

Let's say we have 7 entries. You all pick 2 entries that you like and just vote for those 2 (or, if you only want to vote for 1, that's fine). Unless everyone picks the same 2 entries the poll should showcase a clear winner - you won't be able to change these votes though once you've made them.

Regarding AUTHORS voting this time. What do you all think of allowing Authors to vote, but one of their 2 votes has to be for their own story? So they effectively only get a single vote but it removes the moral issue of voting for your own story or deliberately not voting for it or whatever else.

Issue is that it would probably give away some of the authors - if a story only gets one vote, we'd all guess it was the author.

Or just continue our policy of encouraging authors to review but not rate/vote?

 

Agree with Utsane.

I've covered ideas for a system that allows authors to vote before here which explores how different voting systems might be gamed.

Requiring all authors to vote, but not allowing them to vote for themselves is fairly robust to gaming so long as anonymity is maintained.

 

I'd already planned to use a non-DLP poll for this - ideally one that allows me to see what everyone voted for (to make sure no one voted without reviewing) but doesn't allow anyone else to see until voting is complete. That might cover your concerns @Silirt - I'd already considered some of them... but you're right that an author might vote for what they think is a 'clearly bad' story to give themselves a boost. I'm not sure that will have a major impact, however.

@Utsane - my initial assumption was that we'd have the same or perhaps more entries, but I've had other people imply that they expected fewer. So at this point I dunno who will be right.

@Halt - I'm gonna go read that again.

 

That’s... a very good question. I’m so glad you asked...

What do you think, padawan?