five-hundred and FIRST

Congrats on 10 full pages of comments!

I like how there's this huge roiling debate going on now about scoring, when no one even pays attention to the ladder anyway as far as I know.

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Maybe we should make a new thread about this, or use the Scoring thread?

Yes, please.

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And thus the discussion thread dies an ignoble death.

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None of this goes beyond high-school level maths.

I agree.

At the same time I doubt most adults are comfortable around even high-school level maths. One of the things I do for a living is helping a lawyer with her math; my observations were partially based on how I need to dumb down my explanations for her (and her clients) to understand the math.

I was going to talk about how specific suggestions I made might be easier for a common person to grasp, but, well, better save that for after a decision on whether being easily understandable is desired. I will say, though, that being easily understandable reinforces objective 2: Encourage participation, since it's easier to be motivated by things the person understands.

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Honestly I think the real issue here is that no system can actually really do all four of these well; any system is going to have to trade off between #1, #2, and #4, because their goals are somewhat at odds.

I agree. With the added complexity that objective (1) is impossible to be completely fulfilled if you think of performance as the skill level demonstrated, which is something that would take consistent judging across events to evaluate; the place achieved depends not only on the author's skill or the number of competitors, but perhaps more on who are the competitors, so using only the place and number of competitors will always be suboptimal (though still the best feasible alternative for a fully automated system without a paid for judging panel).

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The main debate on this page seems to be over how to handle multiple entries.

I feel that "one well-received fic and one poorly-received fic" is evidence of an author testing their boundaries, and that should be encouraged at least as much as someone sticking to a single "safe" story which they think people will like.

Yeah, I agree. I think that, at the very least, the author should not be punished for doing that.

3-x would be an error, IMHO, because it would be an incentive to submit trash. While I think most authors would resist the temptation, awarding those that fall to it is a very bad idea.
3-a and 3-b seem acceptable; I would make it harder for extra fics to improve the author's score — perhaps having extra fics need to land in the top half, or even the top quarter, in order to increase the author's score for the event — in order to further reduce the incentive to just submit every incomplete piece of writing the author has lying around, though.

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Like I said earlier, with a fixed score for the winner and the last place, and a points distribution function that goes from first to last, the 11th place in a competition with 41 participants earns as many points as the second place in a competition with five participants.

(Or, in a more generic formulation, the (n+1)th place in a competition with (4n+1) participants always earns the same number of points. This can be further generalized, but I'm not in the mood.)

3575323 Doesn't have to... if anyone has anything left to say about this contest.

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I think that's all died out in favor of talking about scores. :/

Alright, behind-the-scenes info time.

The story you got was not my original idea for the story. The original idea was that the famous last words were the capstone of the ending to the Daring Do series, an ending so legendarily awful and treacherous that it gets Rainbow Dash up in arms, resolving to complain in person to Daring herself, while Twilight urges Rainbow to accept it and not harass daring despite Twilight's own disappointment in the ending. Rainbow would have issued her own famous last words by assuring Twilight that nothing could go wrong or something like that.

What stopped me from going with this idea was that I didn't trust myself to convey my frustrated feelings at the Mass Effect 3 debacle in a way that wasn't just whining, and the fact that I couldn't think of last words for Daring Do that would inspire such a fervor in Dash. So while I thought of Daring's last words, I hit upon the irony of Daring being a famous dead pony and constructed the scenario that made the cut. My intention was to tell a resonant joke about how Daring's life would translate into death, which I think owes inspiration to Rick and Morty (which you should all be watching).

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Just finished. I decided to read every review of everything because I don't value my time that much. Several of the reviews of my own story didn't bring up any issues with it, hence why I asked the question directly.

The biggest point of contention I'm seeing here is that there is essentially no conflict in this story. Pascoite is kind of miffed, while horizon congratulated me for pulling it off anyway. The idea of including conflict didn't pass my mind at first because I was preoccupied with the joke and it was a short enough story that I thought conflict wasn't necessary to sustain it.

I'm thinking of changing that now, though my best idea for how to put conflict in is to have Daring Do feel more conflicted about her impending death, with something in the murals letting her break her composure about something she regrets. But if I went this way, it might lead to the story becoming less focused and distancing it from the original prompt, plus some people seemed to like her contented and appreciative attitude just the way it is.

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I'd like to hear more about the cultural implications of conflict and your reservations about this Japanese term. What you're talking about sounds important, but I'm not sure I follow your reasoning here.

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As per usual, I spent more time pinning down the central conceit and outline of my story than I did putting words into the box. Not sure how much that counts as hard work.

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Basically, the idea that a culture values stories that are explicitly not about conflict destroys any argument one can make about conflict equating plot. It becomes an argument couched not in fact, but in cultural norms.

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Makes sense. I'm interested in learning when and why a story can succeed without conflict. The idea that conflict is always necessary for drama is something I might have to unlearn just a little bit.

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I'm only irritated by kishotenketsu because I can't honestly figure out how it works. :( (Though I can at least remember how to spell it from memory!)

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Taking Japanese language courses in college was a horrible mistake that ruined my GPA, but I at least remember enough about the language to know how to spell most any Japanese term in the latin alphabet without thinking too much about it.

3575478 What's that got to do with write-off scoring policy?!

IMHO, re. adding conflict: If your story wins a big contest, don't mess with it.

Genre fiction writers insist that all stories must have conflict. Literary fiction editors hate stories that have overt conflict. You have a story that a lot of people like a lot; therefore, it works. At this point it no longer an experiment, but data with which to guide other experiments.

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The main problem I have with people asserting that it is different in the east is that I don't really see it any more strongly than I do in the West; almost everything I've seen over there is conflict-driven. Some of it may not rely on the same ideas of conflict as we have, but conflict is still present and identifiable in essentially all of the media I have consumed over there. Even something like the Season 1 finale of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, which is very Slice of Life, deals with the tension between the two protagonists. It may be low-key, but it is present, and actually pretty central to it.

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It sets up conflict between parts of the story, because the tenku is discordant with the rest of it and therefore draws our attention and engages us because we want to know how it is incorporated into the rest of the story. It follows the universal engagement curve, it simply achieves its climax in a different way.

Ironically, in some ways, news reports are far weirder than kishotenketsu, because news reports usually don't follow the universal engagement curve but rather the inverted pyramid.

I need to stop putting off writing that blog post.

First and most importantly, congrats to the winners! Nicely done!

Also, thanks to everyone for their reviews and feedback on my entry, 'Lessons of the Heart'. I took those items and more into account as I edited and expanded the piece to meet the 1K minimum for this site. Hopefully this reads a bit better now, lol. :)

Thanks again to everyone involved for hosting these! It was a fun time.

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I wanted to drop a final follow-up to last month's prizes:

At this point, all but the final $10.00 of prizes have (long since) been distributed. Most were simple PayPal transfers. A few were trickier, because once you move away from using PayPal, transfer options become a little trickier. (Lesson learned for next time.) In particular, thisisalongname's prize was sent via Steam, which doesn't let you actually transfer cash/credit (in increments less than $20, anyway), so there was some back-and-forth over picking out a game on TIALN's wishlst that cost exactly $5.00. But that's done. Also worth noting: Chris asked me to donate his $10.00 prize to charity on his behalf, which I did, and commend him for.

Poniac ended up asking me to choose a recipient for the final $5.00 myself, and since (A) I had awarded my own $5 to Eakin and (B) it made things easier for another non-PayPal user, I chose to double Eakin's Honorizonable Mention prize. We're still working out the exact transfer details, because I've been all over the place this month, but at this point I'm gonna close the books on the contest round and handle that $10 award as a personal debt.

- H

I just wanted to thank everyone for helping me with Moving Heaven & Earth, which has now been retitled to Dusk. It has been very significantly expanded and reworked, and now clocks in at 5001 words (though FIMFiction exaggerates the word count as usual).

Dusk



Celestia raises the Moon for the first time.

I ended up drawing the cover art for this story as well; I think I'm getting better at it.

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I renamed the Council to the Circle and - hopefully anyway - between the two stories established them as being a bunch of elitist autocrats rather than a democratic group, as it was not my intention that they be some sort of democratically elected leadership.

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The character of the Archmage was changed significantly and given a bit more depth, as well as made into less of a moustache-twirling villain (which is good, because she doesn't have a moustache. Best not to mention it, though). I also worked to more clearly establish the stakes, and why the Circle might care.

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Hopefully you find the expanded version of this and its prequel, Dawn, as good as you found the original.

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Yeah, this story was probably a bit on the big side for 750 words. Probably would have been better if I had restricted it to the second scene in the contest.

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I'm glad you enjoyed this story. I know I was very amused by making the Famous Last Words the first in the story, as well as allowing me to use them as the hook.

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Hopefully the expanded version satisfies you; the story was sparse originally, and rewriting it allowed me to put a lot more setting details into the piece.

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Could do with an expansion

Indeed.

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Hopefully the extended version does right stuff, and avoids doing the wrong stuff.

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I tried to make the Early Modern English more consistent in the rewritten version.

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Hopefully, the rewrite addresses both of these issues; Luna is arrogant, the Archmage is made more sympathetic and less of a moustache twirling villain, but, hopefully, it still maintains the mood of the piece.

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I'm glad you enjoyed the original verison of this story, and I hope that the expanded version kept its punch.

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I hope that the expanded version satisfies, and that I resolved the issues with the lacking first scene in expanding the tale.

Thank you all again for your feedback; I appreciated it muchly, and incorporated some of it into the expanded version (as well as its prequel, Dawn).