RCL Contest Results · 11:05pm Jan 24th, 2015
The Royal Canterlot Library has issued their next interview, focusing on Pineta's "Breaking News and Weather." Their article on my own "Appletheosis" has been pushed below the fold, thus bringing my silly little contest to a close. Thanks to everybody who deigned to participate! There's only three of you, which is good, because I only brought three medals with me.
I've checked the various proofreading copies that were provided to me, and totaled up the edits to the best of my abilities. Since other people know more about The King's English than I do, I tried to be generous and accepting when deciding what constitutes an error. If you tried to send me your entry but don't see your name mentioned here, send me a private message as quick as you can and I'll slip it right in. There's still time to interrupt the ceremonies an stop the presses and so on!
And now, the winners!
First Place is... drum roll please... Burraku_Pantsa, at a whopping 53 edits!
You win a chocolate medal covered in gold foil! In addition to--as mentioned earlier--a short story written by me, using a plot and character cast of your own choice! Send me a PM, and we can discuss the details.
I've recently heard a lot about this person as a writer, and I've seen recommendations of their works appear on quite a few other blogs that are far more firmly entrenched than my own! I'm definitely going to have to check out some of his stories and see what all the hub-bub is about. I'd recommend you do the same.
Second place: Nekonyancer, at 31 edits!
You win a vanilla medal, covered in delicate silver leaf! Real vanilla extract, too. Not the cheap stuff they put in those big discount tubs of icecream.
I had an inkling that Nekonyancer's participation would be a forgone conclusion, since this fine upstanding gentleperson has been spending the last couple months proofreading one of my own earliest, longest stories. He apparently provides editing services to a lot of other authors, and I hope they appreciate him as much as I do: I know my writing ability has improved significantly since hes started helping me. Even though I spelled "he's" incorrectly in the previous sentence.
Third place: Icy Shake, at 22 edits!
You win a strawberry cheesecake medal, covered in intricate bronze inlay.
This year's surprise contender, Icy Shake came out of nowhere and secured a solid position, despite having handicapped himself by scoring my failure to use Oxford Commas, instead of the actual uses. I also noticed that he chose to count punctuation appearing outside of quotation marks as flaws, which is technically more correct, even though going with the alternative would have netted him significantly more points. I choose to believe he stuck to his principles. I salute you, sir! This relative newcomer has written no stories of his own, and has posted only two blog entries so far: One of them asks deep and intriguing questions about complexity and morality, and their effectiveness as story elements. The other is about boozeahol! Apparently, a "Big Macintosh" could very well contain three parts St. Germain... Tabitha St. Germain, I wonder? Probably not.
In the end, our participants included a writer, an editor, and a reader. An interesting degree of diversity.
My congratulations to all three entrants.
I claim credit by proxy as I'm the one who pointed this out to BP.
Actually, unless you're using "since" as a synonym for "because," I think it should be "he started helping me." ^^;
Hmm...
I demand a SECOND contest, in which we edit this blog post! This declaration obviously has nothing to do with the fact that I lost the first one.
Congratulations to Burraku_Pantsa!
Burraku Pansa? It's a conspiracy! D:
I'd like to add my congratulations to Burraku_Pantsa as well!
Duncan, thank you for hosting this competition; it was a fun exercise, and useful in revealing some of the areas that I overlook myself. However, I think you may have been overly kind in your description of what amounted to a complaining-about-an-episode post.
The Oxford Comma is a personal affront to alicorns everywhere.
I think you should apologize to the royal sisters, Twilight and Cadence.
(rimshot)
… But yeah, I try to avoid these things because going to the mat over grammar "mistakes" that are acceptable under a different style guide (even the lack of comma's got its defenders) seems like nothing but a recipe for petty internet argument.
(And then there's the question of when a correction stops being a nitpick and just starts becoming insane. You used "a highly opinionated" rather than "an highly opinionated", for example, making you correct to every single English speaker except for a group of highly opinionated fruitbats with delusions of pedantry.)
It's a neat idea for a contest, and everyone obviously had fun, but as a former professional copy editor I'm going to sit over here in the glass house of my double-spaced periods and sentences starting with conjunctions, and be very careful about not throwing stones.
I remembered this was a thing just recently. And man, part of me's wishing I'd never given you the fic idea I did, just so I wouldn't've had that excuse to not try getting around to writing it myself. Canon's sort of stamped out its appeal by now… Ah, well.
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I dunno. It's been an awful long time, but I do have the inkling of an idea on how to do this, and I still think it'd be a good take on an alternate history. I'd love to give it a shot... but I've been so unproductive lately, it's kind of depressing. I need to be careful with my promises.
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Mm, I know where you're coming from. And like I said, for me at least, the appeal of writing that idea has faded—whether or not you do wind up writing it yourself, I won't be disappointed at this point, so definitely don't feel like you have to make any promises.