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Iluvatar · 06-02-2004, 02:02 PM

Hey, it took the four 2001 judges considerable time to hash out those rules along with you, Ntanel. It wasn’t just Molly and Neranz. I personally think they came out pretty good too and were even applied to the MudCons with few changes.

I’ve always considered the topical or theme concept to be the best as well and it worked well for all the contests I’ve seen. Regardless of the genre, how a story is written is always pretty much the same when it’s to be used as a base theme for a zone that might be written to support its concepts of a theme. With a good base, other short stories can be created to expand on the base and totally flesh out the resultant zone.

I’m not sure you’re going to find sufficient judges to exclude them from judging in categories either they or people they work with submit in. What worked is when a judge felt there was a conflict of interest, like the submitter worked with them, they recused themselves from judging that story and it defaulted to the contest manager to judge. I and I expect Keolah would like to submit stories this time and any judging would be a perceived conflict in my opinion which is why I volunteered to be used as a judge only as a last resort.

After the numerous stories Sir Vorpal Tribble submitted at once, I recommend only one submission per contest too. The actual size you accept really depends on how much space you want to dedicate to publishing on your website but what you stated sounds pretty good if you’ll specify the format. In a .doc or .txt file I think it works out to somewhere in the neighborhood of 3-3.5k words. There is a consideration needed for the number of submissions though and the max I’ve seen so far is 11. With the forethought in this contest, there might be considerably more. That means it might be really harsh to actually put all the stories submitted up on the site because of space but I would recommend putting judge critiques up per story. We did those critiques as constructive criticism with both praise and suggestions for improvement for the next short story.

Hmm, rather than a banner of the durations mentioned, perhaps we can weasel an icon from Synozeer on the TMS homepage with a link to a bio and the actual stories. There’s some decent space for it on the left of the page. We might even be able to put the stories submitted into a post in one of the forums here too. Any other ideas?

One last thing about names…Regardless of the name submitted as author of a story it really doesn’t matter to a competent judge who wrote the story. A large part of this is both personal satisfaction as well as advertisement of the quality of the zones you build and the Mu* you work for so I would recommend using your most commonly known nom-de-plume.

06-02-2004, 02:02 PM	#32
Iluvatar Member Join Date: May 2002 Location: Mississippi USA Posts: 142	Hey, it took the four 2001 judges considerable time to hash out those rules along with you, Ntanel. It wasn’t just Molly and Neranz. I personally think they came out pretty good too and were even applied to the MudCons with few changes. I’ve always considered the topical or theme concept to be the best as well and it worked well for all the contests I’ve seen. Regardless of the genre, how a story is written is always pretty much the same when it’s to be used as a base theme for a zone that might be written to support its concepts of a theme. With a good base, other short stories can be created to expand on the base and totally flesh out the resultant zone. I’m not sure you’re going to find sufficient judges to exclude them from judging in categories either they or people they work with submit in. What worked is when a judge felt there was a conflict of interest, like the submitter worked with them, they recused themselves from judging that story and it defaulted to the contest manager to judge. I and I expect Keolah would like to submit stories this time and any judging would be a perceived conflict in my opinion which is why I volunteered to be used as a judge only as a last resort. After the numerous stories Sir Vorpal Tribble submitted at once, I recommend only one submission per contest too. The actual size you accept really depends on how much space you want to dedicate to publishing on your website but what you stated sounds pretty good if you’ll specify the format. In a .doc or .txt file I think it works out to somewhere in the neighborhood of 3-3.5k words. There is a consideration needed for the number of submissions though and the max I’ve seen so far is 11. With the forethought in this contest, there might be considerably more. That means it might be really harsh to actually put all the stories submitted up on the site because of space but I would recommend putting judge critiques up per story. We did those critiques as constructive criticism with both praise and suggestions for improvement for the next short story. Hmm, rather than a banner of the durations mentioned, perhaps we can weasel an icon from Synozeer on the TMS homepage with a link to a bio and the actual stories. There’s some decent space for it on the left of the page. We might even be able to put the stories submitted into a post in one of the forums here too. Any other ideas? One last thing about names…Regardless of the name submitted as author of a story it really doesn’t matter to a competent judge who wrote the story. A large part of this is both personal satisfaction as well as advertisement of the quality of the zones you build and the Mu* you work for so I would recommend using your most commonly known nom-de-plume.