DISCUSSION -- APRIL 2017 300-word Writing Challenge (#25)

Congrats, TJ, a worthy winner.

And well done everyone else as well, jus' cause:D

Thanks to everyone who voted for my entry, greatly appreciated. I said up-thread somewhere, that I thought this was one of my favourite stories I'd written for a 300, and I'm pleased that so many thought it was worth a vote (my best tally to date I think, in either challenge)
This was an idea I'd had in my head for a while, and it fitted so well with the image (as an idea, rather than the red coat focal point) that I thought it would be time to write it down. A may fly looking back at his life, offering pearls of wisdom garnered over the day (I know it's not strictly correct, but for the sake of the story I altered scienece a touch :eek:) The old timey, forest gump voice stuck with me, and i stuck with the character.
I am quite tempted to take this further, extend and expand. Not by much, maybe a thousand or so more words. Just to get a bit further int the character and what its all about... But I got plenty a' time to be ponderin' on that. Right?

Either way i had brilliant time writing it, and reading it aloud in a bad southern accent... After all isn't that what all this is about, having fun, collectively. I look forward to more next time(y)
 
CONGRATULATIONS, THE JUDGE!

Thank you to everyone who read my story. I do appreciate it.

I hope all of you had a great Mother's Day to those who celebrated.
 
Starbeast said:
No worries from me pal. I look beyond mistakes. I noticed a few typos out there, even I made one. Typos never effect my judgement.
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Same here, unless it was littered with them. That would be particularly bad in a 300-word story!

A story did lose a vote of mine because it was well over 300 words though - it looked suspiciously long, so to make my whittling down easier, I checked. It took ages to get my January entry down to 300 words, and I feel 15-20 words extra can be a significant advantage in such a short piece.
 
Just to say Alex's comment about a story being well over word count has been noted, and we're on the case checking all the stories again.
 
Nice try, Peter, but no. :p

Alex can't immediately recall which story appeared to be over word count, but it looks like it might be a case of Word's wordcount facility counting punctuation which we as mods don't count (so, for instance, we ignore things like * * * that appear as paragraph dividers but which Word counts as three words) and perhaps a misunderstanding of the rules over hyphenated words which we allow as the whim takes us. ;) (That is a joke in case anyone reads it seriously! We have guidelines the word count pixie uses when assessing joined and hyphenated words, and when in doubt the pixie asks for a formal ruling from the Supreme Court of Word Count.)

Anyway, both Ursa and I have carefully re-checked every entry in April's Challenge, and they are all within the 300 word limit. So panic over. :)
 
Apologies everyone - I've gone through myself and checked more word counts than I've ever checked before, and they were fine. I'm impressed by how many hit 300 exactly. Who knows what happened - I use Google Docs, but I'm pretty sure I would've double-checked elsewhere, as my paranoid-self does for my own stories. Maybe some stray words got caught up in the wrong broadband line. I didn't realise word counts were checked by moderators already, so thought it was up to the voters if they were so inclined (like personal opinion on whether a piece is speculative enough etc.). Anyway, I feel like an idiot now. :oops:

The Judge has sentenced me to 10 days writing "I must leave word counts to the Staff Members" on that same blackboard you see at the start of The Simpsons. I'm now going to change my identity - new home, new name, new haircut etc. - and reappear on the forum in a different guise. :)

Jo Zebedee said:
Indeed. There's always someone out there who might turn up :)
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Thanks for the stealth vote. At least I think it was that way - you may have implied it there. It's an honour - I posted in another thread when I joined the forum that The Nymph of Hampstead Heath was one of my favourite short stories, and I probably didn't even know you were a regular poster here at that point.
 
AlexH said:
Thanks for the stealth vote. At least I think it was that way - you may have implied it there. It's an honour - I posted in another thread when I joined the forum that The Nymph of Hampstead Heath was one of my favourite short stories, and I probably didn't even know you were a regular poster here at that point.
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Oh how cool - and very kind, thank you :) I always liked that story so it's lovely someone else does, too :)
 
Just to confirm, if anyone wants to check word count, feel free. Even Alex. ;)

The word count pixie isn't infallible, especially when he's been on the rosemary and dewdrop gin, so if you are definitely, definitely sure a story is over the limit we need to know before voting starts. We obviously don't want to be inundated with PMs querying everything, though, since it takes up all our tea time, and those cream cakes don't eat themselves, so please don't use the pixie-phone in a cavalier fashion. If a story has been up a day or two while over word-count, then it may be a mistake has been made, but equally we might have noticed, but we're still considering it, or we might have made a decision about a joined word which isn't obvious to a non-mod.

However, as TDZ and I have remarked recently, if we see a story which appears to be over word count within the one hour edit window we'd always PM an online member to give him/her a chance of putting it right. The word count pixie isn't always around in that hour's window, though, so if a non-mod is, and thinks a story is over word count and so alerts the member whose story it is, that's something we'd be very happy to see happen.



By the way, I should have said every story from April's Challenge was under the limit save for Phyrebrat's which came in at exactly 666 words for some strange reason. :eek: :p
 
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