Okay, I admit it. My pride was wounded. Let's just get that admission right out on the table. And it's at least part of the reason I didn't post the results of the second round of FanLit on my blog when they came out on Friday as I originally promised.
Most of you who read my blog probably also read Lacey's and/or are involved in FanLit one way or another, so you already know that her entry, Sweet Deception, won the second round. That's right, she won!!!! And, honestly, I'm couldn't be more pleased.
Well, okay, I'd be even more pleased if I'd won. And I'd still love to win. First, though, I've got to figure out how to write an entry that's not a parody that people actually like. Alas, thus far, I don't seem to have that skill nailed down. I can apparently write parodies that people find hilarious and heap praise upon, but my straight entries leave something to be desired.
As mentioned below, my entry in Round 2 was a very silly piece of fluff called The Fairy Tale Fractures. But much to my surprise, it got a lot of "buzz" on the forum. The winner of the first round, Sherry (aka Yorkie Lover), even left a comment saying she thought it would be fun to follow. It appeared on quite a few people's favorites lists. And while I knew such a ridiculous entry would never actually be allowed to win, I had momentary dreams of grandeur. I visualized finishing in the top 20, if not the top 10.
So I'm sure you can imagine how dumbfounded I was when the results came out and my much-acclaimed entry came out in 282nd place. Um, people, there were only 299 entries! How in the world did my wonderful if ridiculous little story, which had three pages of mostly complimentary comments, wind up in 282nd place? It was mind-boggling. Unbelievable.
When the site hiccuped shortly after the winner was announced and no one could access the results for entries that finished out of the top 100, I had a brief moment of hope that the results were actually wrong and I'd at least finished in the second 100. But no, the final results came back and showed that The Fairy Tale Fractures had indeed finished 282nd.
(Have I written 282nd enough now for you to realize how catastrophically damaging to my ego this was?)
I was not the only person who was bamboozled by this result. Lynne Simpson did a little bit of digging in the HTML code and discovered that my entry's raw average and page views should have been sufficient to place it easily within the top 20, if not the top 10. Well, that made me feel a tad better. The voters didn't actually hate it; there was some other explanation for its bottom-of-the-barrel finish.
Questions were posted to the forum, asking whether someone could have deliberately sabotaged my entry and several others that seemed to have peculiar final rankings. The FanLit people responded with assurances that averages and page views aren't the only thing that goes into the final rankings and that there are "top secret" weighting factors that also play into the equation.
In the end, I came up with my own theory for why my entry finished so astonishingly low, and it soothes my wounded pride a bit. I've also no intention of sharing it here as it probably stinks of conspiracy theorism and vanity. Not to mention I wouldn't want the powers that be in the FanLit universe accusing me of accusing them of unfair play. Which I'm not! It just might sound that way.
So here are the final finishing positions of the entries (not including Lacey's winner and my loser) submitted by the members of our little posse, to which I'd like to welcome Sarah as our newest member.
15th Place Lynne's The Amateur Adventuress
22nd Place Lacey's The Comedy In Question
27th Place Erica's Once a Hellion, Always a Hellion
32nd Place Sarah's Suffragette City
38th Place Sarah's Very Nearly Picture Perfect
44th Place Darcy's The Morning After
52nd Place Sarah's Cat Scratch Fever
74th Place Lynne's The Wayfaring Wife
102nd Place Erica's Surprises in the Shadows
118th Place Darcy's The Absent Husband
In this latest round, I decided to do only one, completely straight entry. As mentioned, I apparently haven't got the knack of writing successful straight entries, however, and I'm sure it has no chance whatsoever of finaling, let alone winning. Given that, I may go back to parodies in the next round. It seems to be what I'm good at. And I already have an idea...
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10 comments:
OOH, good call adding Sarah in. I'm sooooo late getting back from lunch but I had to comment and say yes, the voting system is definitely screwy and you totally should have been in the top 20, if not the top 10! But what are we peons to do? I suppose we could boycott, and yet...here we are...
:-)
Finish your book, Jac!
Thanks for the kick in the head, Annie. Seriously, I'm working on it!
My Write-O-Meter isn't moving because I'm not writing, but because I'm revising the existing story so I can get out the other side more quickly. Once I get through that, it'll start moving to the right again!
The one good thing about FanLit has been that it gave me a good kick in the head and helped me sort out my plot. And I know now I can write fast when I have to.
I'll say it again, Jacqueline: You wuz ROBBED. There ain't no justice, if an entry with a high average and good page views like yours can rank 282.
Good luck with your revisions!
I really don't like the way they handle scoring stats all the way around. They should show us our running average all the time, how many times we've been skipped etc.
Grumble grumble...
Alice
Hi, Alice. It's nice of you to pop by!
I agree with you that the way they handle the stats is annoying. But the thing is, it turns out your average doesn't mean much, anyway. The average on my 282nd place entry was higher than the 11th place finisher's (and it had one more page view, too). There's no way (IMO) that skips had anything to do with dropping it into the basement.
My beef isn't that they don't show the scores to you during the round, but that the scores are apparently meaningless and they show them to you anyway. Why show each entry's average and page views at the end of a round when they have only a tangential relationship to the entry's rank?
Like I said, I have my theory and I'll feel very validated when something silly from this round (perhaps Teenage Regency Zombie Cheerleader) finishes in the basement with a low average and high page views!
Like I said, I have my theory and I'll feel very validated when something silly from this round (perhaps Teenage Regency Zombie Cheerleader) finishes in the basement with a low average and high page views!
Er, that should read "high average and high page views," LOL!
Hi Lainey!
I had to go and look you up because I knew I recognized your name but I wasn't sure from where. Now I know. Welcome, fellow reader of and poster to Annie Dean's blog!
I love it when people who've been reading my blog delurk and post something. Makes me feel like I'm not just talking to myself and a few of my cronies, LOL!
Actually, there are quite few players who live on the wrong side of various borders. At least one regular poster and submittor lives in China. I don't know what they'd do if a non-US-resident got to the final ten, but I wonder how they'd even know until AFTER it actually won first place. Maybe by the ISP trace? So, I think they can prevent you from winning the PRIZES, but maybe not from your entry being voted the best!
I should NOT be playing FanLit. I should be spending all my free time (read: time not spent on paying work) revising and then writing the rest of my WIP on the off-chance Hilary Sares asks for a full in early November. But there is something about writing these short, silly little chapters that is very engaging and freeing. And I've definitely found a campy, comedic side to my writing I didn't even know I possessed. So it's been good for me in that way. It's just not been very good for my moving forward on my own stuff!
Lainey, you can certainly play, and have all the fun and heart ache everyone else does in trying to get something out there and get some comments on it, etc. You just can't get a jacket from Saks for your efforts. Do you really care?
I for one am in it to catch the eye of an editor. Of course with scores like mine that's a fat chance now, but I'm still delusional enough to think I can get something besides fun out of this.
Just wait. After my egotistical blog today everyone is going to nail me to the cross. Oh well. I'll do it anyway.
The thing about FanLib, though is that the scoring process should be so clear cut that each and every one of us can run the calculations in our head and see that yes indeed, I did deserve to come in at whatever rank I got. All this cloak and dagger cr@p undermines their credibility. I mean, maybe I should have won with my vampire story in the first round. When I first got my scores I just shrugged it off. But without the credability, it's placing is largely meaningless.
That's one of the reasons I stopped playing to win, and started to just have fun. Lump the stupid rankings. I'll take the complements, and maybe, somehow, the editors will discover me some other way. I don't have to get flown in to meet them. I just have to persuade them to actually read one of my books.
Alice
My reasons for playing FanLit are much like yours, Alice. Since I'm writing an early Victorian historical, I'd love to get the attention of Avon's editorial staff so that if my partial ever crosses their desks, they think, "Hey, I remember her; she wrote that really cool FanLit entry. This might be worth reading."
At this point, however, I have my doubts I'll ever crack the top ten, mainly because the only things I write that anyone seems to like are parodies. I must admit, though, I've loved reading the comments from voters who think my entries are both well-written and funny.
Also like you, I'm seriously annoyed by the fact that I can't figure out how the statistics on each entry relate to where it winds up in the rankings.For the life of me, I can't see the value of giving statistics like an entry's star ranking and page views when those numbers seem to bear such a tangential relationship to where it ranks. (The Fairy Tale Fractures had a slightly higher average and one more page view than the entry that finished 11th in that round, and yet it was ranked 282nd without any indication why.
I don't really care that it was ranked so low. Unless you're a finalist, I don't think it makes much difference at all where your entry finishes from a standpoint of getting attention from an Avon editor. But when there are entries with final rankings that seem unjustifiable based on the statistics provided, it throws the objectivity and fairness of the entire process of selecting the finalists into question.
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