Still no idea.
With the last contest I spent some time going through the album for other pictures that could tell me what I was looking at. With this contest, I glanced at a few pictures but realized I didn’t want to use the picture as literally as before, so it didn’t matter. I grabbed what I needed and off I went.
Only a few hours left to vote! Plenty of time to read a few short stories and send us your thoughts!
Yeah…even enlarging the picture I still can’t tell what’s on the banner beyond it being five people, three standing and two sitting. Could be a museum or library, could be an Italian restaurant, who knows.
Just a couple more hours, and only fifteen votes. It’s still anybody’s race, and I think these writers deserve some recognition. Come on, dopers!
With the closing of the poll, the Feb. 2011 SDMB Short Fiction Contest has ended. Allow me to first congratulate our writers -
elfkin477
chrisk
Le Ministre de l’au-delà
GIGObuster
Spoons
Justin Credible
Jules Andre - take a well-deserved bow, everybody.
And a very special congratulations to **Justin Credible **, whose outstanding story Happy Valentine’s Day, Sweetheart! was chosen as the favourite, making him the winner of the PoeHenryParkerSaki award. Bravo!
I’d like to thank the mods for their ongoing moral and technical support. I’d also like to thank everyone who took the time to read, to comment and to vote.
I will see about another short fiction contest sometime late in April. Meanwhile, for those interested, there will be another Poetry Sweatshop in late March.
Best wishes, everyone!
Le Ministre de l’au-delà
Yay!!! Thanks for all the votes, everyone. It means a lot to me to win a contest like this one.
Just to elaborate on my story a bit, I knew going in that I wanted to write some kind of revenge story. At first I was just going to have the man be a sort of Dexter-like character and have him hunt and kill the wife, or possibly even have another twist at the end where she ends up killing him instead. But I wasn’t happy with that, and I wanted to use the picture in an unteresting way, so I thought what the hell, I’ll go all out and go full on cosmic horror.
In my original draft, I went into more detail about Robert finding out about Nicole’s past and about how he came to acquire his arcane knowledge, but with that draft being about 300 words over the limit, I had to cut a lot. Also, in that draft, it was expressly stated that the freak weather was due to Robert’s actions that day.
But, ultimately, I had to trim it down and I just decided to leave some of the particulars of the story a mystery.
Congratulations everyone, and especially Justin Credible, well done!
As for my own story, I was pretty surprised at the variety of reaction and interpretation, and even how people seemed to draw different conclusions than what I intended. Such is always the case in writing; the ultimate goal is to put down the idea you have in your head, and there will always be something lost in translation.
Pedestal isn’t supposed to be heart-warming or touching, it’s supposed to be a little sad. John is on a date with a great girl (I should hope she came off as likable!) but he’s sabotaging it with his infatuation with an idealized memory of a girl he once knew. This story is about how memory can distort itself over time, and how much that can affect us in the present.
Alexis never died (don’t know where you got that from chrisk! :p), I had put it in there she just went away after college. I tried to show that John had no idea what she was doing, but that he was comparing Becky to Alexis without any idea of who or what Alexis even was anymore, and the comparison was not favorable.
I have a tendency to over-explain, so I was trying to give the reader a chance to pick up on clues I left behind. I guess I went a little too far the other way, judging from the comments. I really appreciate the feedback, the only reason I feel a bit niggled about it is because I had plenty of room to add in more detail and emphasis. So this was definitely a failing of mine to provide the proper level of explanation to make the story clear. Whoops! Thought I was being too ham handed going in to begin with! One of the things I wanted to try differently in writing this was not giving anyone I know a glimpse of the story before I submitted it, to see if they could get the idea of the story as I intended it without knowing beforehand, or even knowing the story was mine. Fun exercise, I recommend it with your own test readers, if they’re honest and you aren’t too sensitive.
Congratulations to Justin Credible, and a “well done” to everybody. All the stories were terrific and entertaining, and I enjoyed them all.
As for my own (“Starting Over”), my thanks go to those who commented favourably on it, and especially to those who mentioned the believability of the characters. That’s what I was striving for–two people whom you might have met, or maybe even know personally. I did comment earlier on how I found character development to be a little more difficult because of the word limit, but maybe it wasn’t as difficult as I thought. Thanks again!
And of course a big thanks to Le Ministre for organizing and running the contest. Looking forward to the next one!