Thursday, January 12, 2006

Just a Technical Hitch

Not a happy bunny here. Think I have the bug that hit my kids on the weekend.

And my incoming email has been 95% down now for almost two days.

Infuriatingly it lumbers into life and dribbles out emails, but from any one of three or four days, no sequences and makes the senders seem mad. (Well, most of my correspondents are a bit loopy.)

I'm feeling a bit "critted out" at the moment. 47 Flash crits, 11 BC Story crits, one crit of a 4,000-worder for a client and another 31 Flashes/Stories read and critiqued since the 23rd Dec. That's 90 and this weekend there'll be 20-50 Flashes in the latest Frantic Flash to read and shortlist.

Response from others on the BBC World Service Winners is a bit slow. I scored one story 62 (being kind) another 95. (The threshold for a paper publication is 110, meaning I don't think two of the winners is PUBLISHABLE!)

So far only heard about one other story and my correspondent said, "some of the metaphors made me wince".

Do you, like me wonder who the hell JUDGES these competitions?

I read the winner of the latest Rhys Davies Awards (in Wales) and was shocked by the "quality" of the winning story. It was a cheap, immature story of a sad, near-cocky, teenager looking at a young "slag" on a bus a la Little Britain.

The winner was a young writer, and maybe she had promise, but I know the calibre of some of the writers who submitted to that competition and got nowhere and I'm bewildered by the choice.

It's a common topic for discussion in Boot Camp when new results come out. The most common word is, "Huh?"


Alex

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