Christmas Engagement Win

[rhetoretician]

Today it was announced that While You Tell Yourself the Truth  tied for the "Most Adventurous" award for SIYE's Christmas Engagement Challenge.  This will make it a "Featured Story" on SIYE.

While I'm thrilled and grateful to be so recognized, I also have some mixed feelings.  For one thing, the story tied with

Comments

[sovranspecific]

I'll start by saying how honored I am to have won diddly-squat, given how good the other stories (yours included) are and how very far from the stated 'theme' of the challenge I wrote. You can ask Chreechree, who was my front-line beta for Phoenix; I started out writing the story because I wanted to write it and fully understanding that it was not the sort of thing that would win. I was quite proud of it both as a story and as a writing experience, but I remain a bit surprised that it won anything. Thank you for the effusively kind words above.

Moving on . . . I honestly believe that the challenge suffered a bit, or perhaps the awarding suffered a bit, by the choice of categories. The subject of the challenge did not lend itself well to action/adventure. At the same time, there were several entires that made good use of angst and/or drama. And, as several people have pointed out, there is a difference between fluff and romance, and some of the entries showed that difference quite clearly. So I'd say that the categories should have been overall, romance, fluff, angst, drama, and humor. That would have allowed for more accurate distribution of recognition, I think.

Since there was an act/adv category, the judges had to do the best they could. Our two stories, of the ones I read (about half . . . I had to maintain some standards), contained the most action/adventure. I can't really say which action was better written: I thought they were both quite good, modesty aside. But the single action sequence in my story was far less important, in my opinion, than the two in yours. Yes, my prologue helped to establish the background and the tone, but I did seriously consider posting Phoenix without it. I think your action was much more important to the plot and purpose of your story, and thus I would have chosen it for that award. Obviously, I was not a judge, but I would have felt quite strange if Phoenix had won action/adventure outright.

As an aside, I have no idea how to use italics in LJ posts. I should learn that.

[rhetoretician]

As for the effusion, I found the story moving and, as I got into it, very skillful. I gush, but it's well-informed gushing.

I agree that the categories were a bit weird, but then I thought the whole Challenge was a bit weird. If I were to assign a category to mine, it would be -- what? -- "Best Ethical Symbolic Wedding?" "Most Romantic Contraceptive Charm?" "Best Use of Hermione in a Supporting Role?" "Most Serious Twins?" To some extent, once you create categories you limit the range of what it's possible to say. Come to think of it, as soon as you create an award (or count the reviews in preference to reading them) you limit the range of what it's possible to say.

I think that the real advantage of the Challenges is that they use judges. Josh said, a few days back, that awards determined by a qualified panel are bound to be more reliable, or to reflect real quality, than those elected by the flock. I was proud to be in the company of all of those stories and all of those writers -- which is more than I can say, sadly, for the DSTAs most of the time.

I think you're right about how the Action/Adventure thing panned out.

Oh -- LJ uses HTML tags for fonts; I just type them in myself.