Buuuuuump

 

Finally submitted my vote. Great work by all the writers. It was fun going through the list. I read all stories in a random order and rated each one on its own out of ten. Didn't compare.

I did vote for my own stories too. (I guess I'm a bad boy. Spank me.)

This voting system will be really good at preventing draws. But the winner won't win by much.

 

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

For those unfamiliar with it Thanksgiving is my favorite adopted holiday. The idea is you have a day to gather with family and friends and just be thankful for the good things in life. In reality, you have nothing to do but eat too much.

That's a holiday Americans (and me) can really get behind, but event that isn't enough. There's also going to be (American) football matches to watch later and then you can go shopping. Thanksgiving falls on a Thursday (the last in November), so you get a 4 day weekend out of it. The Friday ("Black Friday") is traditionally the busiest shopping day of the year. It used to be able to hold back the commercial tides of Christmas, so the Christmas shopping season only started after Thanksgiving. These days, stores have started their black Friday sales on Thursday evening instead, sullying an otherwise pure holiday.

Black Friday is the absolutely worst days of the year to go shopping, everyone else is as well. I have other plans.

PS: The "Black" in Black Friday signals that this is roughly the day in the year when a retail business will going to the black. A good Christmas season will then be all profit for them.

 

I'm happy to say, I got a couple more votes. We still need a lot more. A couple of stories have now broken away from the pack, but a couple of contrary votes could put a lot of others back in contention.

I'm a little surprised by which the front runners are.

If you are voting, please use the template provided, it makes my life a lot easier. However, votes will be accepted in any format that I can understand.

 

Vote sent.

Not an easy one this time.

Everyone received a vote from me. For effort and story, I believe everyone deserves at least one vote for effort.

Nothing worse when you think your story is good and not one soul votes for it, so I have given everyone a vote. On a scale only known to me.

Happy voting people.

 

We're back to a tie for first place and another only two points behind. Your vote could be decisive.

Vote early, I won't say vote often, everyone only gets one vote.

As the question has come up before, I subscribe to the view of "one brain, one vote". Everyone gets a vote. If you're a couple, each of the couple gets a vote. If you have a laundry basket full of socks, only one of your accounts gets a vote.

 

What about the Man with Two Brains?

 

Just talked to ILovemyjob she's out of the hospital and finally feeling better she said she's starting the catch up on things right now so have patience people

 

That explains why we just got stoked, thanks Pars.

Another plea, if you're going to vote, please use the template provided.

 

Read them all, commented and voted, job done.
My thanks to all the writers for entertaining me these past few days.

 

Today's flurry of votes shook things up a bit. One of the leaderss from yesterday is now 12 points behind in 4th place. This just goes to show, your vote counts.

We need your vote.

 

Less than 20 hours left. I hope enough people have voted.

 

I'm not going to vote, for two reasons. Firstly, I haven't had the chance to read all the stories; secondly, the stories I have read up until now have been far better than anything I had expected and I don't see how I can compare such varied themes. Usually, in any CAW/KAW, there are high and low-level stories (I won't say good or bad) and there are obvious favourites. The quality of stories posted on the forum in recent months has, in many cases, been pretty dire but this KAW has seen good writers crawling out of the woodwork en masse. If these writers can continue in the same vein, then the forum has a great future in front of it. This KAW doesn't deserve to have a named winner; all of the writers and all of the readers are the winners.

Thank you, stex, for a wonderfully imaginative and enjoyable KAW.

 

I'm working my way through all the stories, intending to cast my votes soon. Although it isn't easy going through so many entries I like the idea of the multiple vote system, complicated though it may be. It is difficult to give anything less than good scores for all the stories however, as the quality is so high. As Hec has just said, this compy has brought out a raft of good writers, let's hope that the next CAW also benefits from these excellent authors, some of whom I hadn't noticed before.

 

Just cast my votes, I voted for every story but didn't vote for my own as I thought I would be biased. excited to see who wins!

 

Another flurry of votes, a clear leader has emerged, its going to take something really unusual to knock it off the top. However, the next ten places are all very closely clustered and they're all up for grabs.

13 hours left. Lucky for some.

 

I finally read, in many cases re-read, commented, and voted. I'll get to the non-entries later, but I wanted to get my choices in before the voting deadline. I'll be anxious to see which of these excellent stories won.

Overall impressions:

Writing to a one thousand word limit is a lot harder than it sounds. A number of writers know that now.

Having no theme gave people freedom to do whatever they wanted. That turned out well. There was a lot of variety in subject matter. Some people wrote more than one type of story or submitted something different from their usual work, which made the whole thing more fun.

Some new (to us, anyway) writers did well. Hopefully they'll continue to entertain us.

Many of these stories suffered, to one degree or another, by the length restriction. Some should be expanded and re-posted.

That being said, limiting oneself WAS the challenge here. It was fun to see how people approached it. The discipline required to meet the limitation was good mental exercise. In some ways this competition was as much about organizing one's thoughts as anything else.​

Now that we've warmed up our writing, reading, and critiquing skills, I'm anxious to see what my fellow writers do for CAW #26.

 

And again, if you're voting, please use the template provided, it really does help me out.

 

Votes placed.