My Friends Kick My Butt in FanLit!

Well, I may be a finalist in a contest with sixteen entries in my category, but my friends who submitted entries to the Avon FanLit contest whupped my proverbial hiney when the field was a whopping 513 entries. My parody did frighteningly well, finishing in the top 10%, but I'm sure that's only because it had a ton of reads because the promo was really clear and people needed a break from the standard entries! So I don't think its ranking strictly "counts" because it didn't follow the category premise and therefore would never have been selected as a finalist anyway, even if it had scored better, vote-wise.

Here's how we all finished:

13th Lynne's The Loom of Time
17th Lacey's Star-Crossed
34th My A Regency Enterprise
36th Darcy's The Lies That Bind
54th Lynne's The Loom of Time (Rewrite)
69th Lacey's The Husband Hunt
101st My Cherchez La Femme
155th Darcy's The Distance Enchanted

(And thanks to Lacey, from whose blog I stole the above--because she's faster than me, LOL--so I wouldn't have to redo the links.)

The really great news here is Lynne, Lacey, and Darcy all had legitimate entries that finished in the top 10%. That is solid, people! And I think it means I'm a pretty darned good judge of writing skill, since I loved all of their entries and thought every one of them was as good as or better than the ones that finaled (the top 10).

My very favorite entry, The Goddess of Small Things, did final but didn't win. The winning entry was The Wayward Wife, which I thought was well-written and a fun read, but which gave me zero ideas on where to go in the next chapter. Of course, part of the contest is that the panel will post a set of guidelines to tell entrants which plot points to hit in the next chapter, so maybe something will come to me once I read that. But if not, I may sit out the next round since I really, really need to get crackin' on Living In Sin.