TEIN
Are you asking what I meant by
If anyone wishes to volunteer to be the extra/dummy author, please PM me to that effect.
in the stories thread?
If so, it's for the "Guess the author" game at the end.
The stories in this challenge are not posted by the authors but are sent by PM to the challenge runner, (This month it's me) who posts them all under his or her name. That way you won't be tempted to vote for a story because it was written by a friend of yours (or indeed not to vote for someone because you don't like them), and the authors are only revealed after the end of voting.
This also allows for a game of guess the author.
Once posting is closed, the challenge runner gives out a list of all the authors and people try to match the authors to the stories.
It was originally expected that guessers would produce a complete list of the months entries with an author against each, which of course would make it difficult if you had entered something yourself, as you would either have to give yourself away by guessing that you'd written your own story or get one of your guesses deliberately wrong in order to put your own name against someone elses story.
So we decided to put up one more name than the total number of entries. Then you could just leave your own name off the list and use the dummy authors name instead.
It was all a bit optimistic, as it implied someone was likely to be able to guess them all correctly, which is very far from the truth, generally, but the practice continues.
If you were asking about something else, then I'm sorry, I've misunderstood.
P.S. Story 5 is now up.
