Author: admin

Hurro!

The first weekly winner is “Supposing” by Sharon Cohen. Prize of $50 AUD (which depending on where you are in the world can buy you a decent meal, a small sandwich or a modest house).

Why I love “Supposing”

I was completely lulled by the melodramatic tone. My initial thought was that it was another heart-breaking sad story. Then came that toilet flush!

Suddenly I was thinking – how long was this person in the bathroom? How long does it take to soak a pillow with tears? What happens when they come back to bed? Do they discover the narrator with swollen eyes and salty skin?

The comedic twist is perfectly matched to counter the over-the-top melodrama preceding it.

Congratulations Sharon!

Thanks for making it a hard decision

Or not! Argh! You people with your crazy writing skills making this so frustratingly difficult to choose a weekly winner. So many good entries. So many great entries. So many excellent-oh-my-god-that-is-amazing entries. If I had multiple weekly prizes I could have easily awarded them.

I’m not going to comment on the stories right now because I don’t want to skew the competition. Let’s just say that there are many amazing entries, possible future winners and a lot of damn talented writers out there. When the competition is over I’ll write a post about the various entries I love.

I’ve been following links in posts back to websites and again I have to say you are a talented bunch. I admit I had a little professional jealousy when I read various blog posts. Thank you all for entering the competition and putting your work up on my site.

On the stats and voting

For those interested in statistics …

Some stories have a very small spread of scores – say mostly sevens and eights. Others have a greater spread – some tens, some fives, some ones. Others have widely varied scores – a bunch of tens, a bunch of ones and a few in the middle.

The problem is that each of these stories can show up with the same overall score of eight-ish.

The stories with widely varying scores do generally fit into the love it or hate it category. This I put down to how particular readers react to certain stories – demographic differences.

Excluding outliers (the single one on a story that has mostly eights, nines and tens for example) gives a more accurate rating for some stories. As the number of people scoring the story increase, it becomes less necessary to worry about this. I will say this – there are some fiveish – sevenish stories that really do look like they fit into the love/hate category. Lots of tens and lots of ones.

Also, you may have noticed that new stories can leap to the top of the sidebar list and then drop down again. I deliberately left the scoring so only a very few votes could push a story up to the top. As I hoped, this means that more people read them and score them – quickly pushing them to a more accurate rating.

Ok, enough stats.

The competition continues …

Thank you all so much again for taking part in the competition and spreading the word via twitter, websites and other places around the interwebs. I love two sentence stories and I’m very chuffed that so many people out there like them as well.

One week until next prize, another week to another prize and then a week later comes the big $150 first prize, $100 second prize and $50 third prize!

I’ve had a lot of fun with this. Thanks for keeping me entertained.

Cheers,

Mat