Good News ...?

 

This was quite a tricky one this year. We were kind of asking you to write about good news that wasn’t perhaps good news after all. In any case, here is the final list.

Anna's Secret Mission                                    Sara Knapp

Cinderella Rising                                               Penny Rogers

Doc's Last Trip                                                    Ian Inglis

Far from the Poppy Fields                            Gillian Brown

Floored                                                                Fiona Ritchie Walker

Fran's Birthday Party                                      Veronica Robinson

Helping Angel                                                    Peter Collins

Hero                                                                      Mike Wilson

Impossible Promise                                        Barrington Gordon

Janet, More Than a Friend                           Lynne English

Mistaken Identity                                            Liz Cox

Ms Tidy                                                                Keith Willson

Once Upon a Time in America                    Nick Padron

The Changing Pool                                           Mark Tulin

The Day IInternet Died                                  Boris Glikman

The End of the Beginning                             S. Nadja Zajdman

The Hymn of the Bees                                   Andrea Stephenson

The Liberations of Cassie Youmans          Norman Thomson

The Litter                                                             Jeanne Davies

The Pursuit                                                         Michael Noonan

The Silver Card                                                  Seth Pilevsky

Time to say goodbye                                      Karítas Hrundar Pálsdóttir

Where the Land Ends                                     Clare Dean

White Elephant                                                 Tom Kirkbright

 

 Read more here about how we selected the stories.

 

Debz and I separately awarded each text points for the story, how well the story fitted the theme, the quality of writing and professionalism. The writers’ identities were hidden from us at the time.

Story: This must have a beginning, a good story arc and a satisfying ending. Is there tension and pace?  Are characters well developed? 

Theme: As many of you know we take a vaguely Christmassy theme and hope that you will subvert it. Yes, this was a little tricky this time.

Quality of writing: Does the writing flow? Is there a strong voice? Is there a good balance of longer and shorter sentences? Is there overall a good narrative balance? Does sentence structure work well?

Professionalism: We often find that writers who present their work professionally are easy to work with. Have you followed the instructions on formatting? Is dialogue set out correctly? Are there no or very few typos, grammatical mistakes and spelling mistakes? Is the paragraphing  correct?      

 

We then both did a rank order. Every story that appeared in both of our top twenty-four made it into the anthology. That was fourteen in total. Then we took the next off mine, then the next off Debz’s and so on. All of these stories were in our top forty-eight. When we deanonymised the texts we found we had two stories by one writer so we picked the next one in the list to replace the lower ranked one.

And there we have it. We are now into editing the texts and a handful of stories have already been filed in the “Final” box.