Wednesday, August 11, 2010

contests, contests, contests...

Last week, the finalists for the Emerald City Opener were announced. I was not one of them. I was disappointed but in 4 years of entering, I've only finaled once (my first year when I won my category). Now, I won't see the comments or scores on my entry till sometime in October, but I'm already anticipating what I've seen as standard with contest entries - One judge will probably love your work and leave a comment like "Can't wait to see this published!" and at least one judge will probably hate your work and tell you that you need to take up knitting or basket weaving.

I try to ignore the extremes and just look for commonalities among the comments. Did all your judges tell you that you need to work on passive voice? Did more than one judge tell you to vary your word choice or sentence length?

Angie James, who heads up Harlequin's digital only imprint Carina Press, had a great post today about when contest judges disagree.

When Contest Judges Disagree

2 comments:

Colleen M. said...

I read Angie's post about that today - it was a good one!

Sheila said...

There's some good advice there -- goes for getting critiques from crit groups, too. If it's just one person's opinion, I'd say take it with a grain of salt; but if all (or most) agree on the same things, I'd say they might be on to something...