The first round of judging has been completed and we’ll soon be issuing a shortlist. We’ll also then consider whether we have enough suitable material to release another anthology and then whether that anthology will be hard copy, electronic or both.
The brief was rather tricky this time: participants had to write a story that happened at the same time as a world-stopping event.
The judges put the stories into three piles, thinking not just of the winners but also about stories that would be good enough to go into an anthology. There were the yeses, the maybes and the nos. We also put the stories into rank order within each category. Now we have to line them up and establish our winners. Then we have to see whether we have enough stories that are good enough.
Some of the nos became nos because of problems we meet with all sorts of submissions:
- The story wasn’t story enough.
- The characters didn’t work.
- Point of view shifted too often.
- There was too much telling and not enough showing.
-There was a good story but the writing itself might need too much editing.
There were also some very specific problems relating to the content this time:
- The event wasn’t really world-stopping.
- The story was about the event rather than having the event as a background.
-And the really tricky one – you could take the event out and the story would still work, so why have it there at all? In other words, we’d be rejecting some very good stories simply because they don’t match the brief.
Another consideration will be, if we go ahead with the anthology, that we don’t have too many stories about the same event. The book mustn’t be all 9/11, 7/7 or the day that John Kennedy was shot. I have been pleasantly surprised in the sample I’ve read that that has not been the case.
More news soon. Watch this space, follow me and Bridge House on Twitter, keep an eyes on our web site and if you entered, keep checking your email.
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