THE STORIES ARE FINALLY POSTED! WOO HOO!

We wish to say a hearty “thank you” to all who entered stories in this edition of the Writers' Challenge. Below you will see links to all thirteen entries. The stories are listed by number and title to make it easy to keep them straight in your minds. PLEASE REMEMBER: writers' names are to remain anonymous until the voting has been completed.

You will have through the end of this month to read and compare these fine entries. Beginning on June 1, 2013, you will be able to vote by PM to CAW SOP. The voting period will end at 12:01 am GMT on June 10, 2013. In other words, you will have nine days to vote.

Each live human (not account ) will be asked to place two votes. Your votes will carry equal weight – you are to vote for you two most favorite entries. Anyone who votes will be required to place two votes (one for each of two stories). If only one vote is received from a member, it will not be included in the tally.

Note to entrants: We have attempted to reproduce your stories exactly as they were received. However, some entrants used the formatting codes available through the site to include italics, boldface, underline, and font size changes, while others did not. We did not change the codes that were included in entries, nor did we insert codes in those stories that did not have them in the documents we received. We apologize in advance for any upset this may cause.

Enjoy.

1 - Be Still My Love - CAW 16

2 - Butterflies In Eden - CAW 16

3 - Going Home - CAW 16

4 - Love Story - CAW 16

5 - Mary's Unexpected Journey - CAW 16

6 - Matryoshka - CAW 16

7 - Precious Monster - CAW 16

8 - The Beltane Belle - CAW 16 - REVISED

9 - The Death Of Danny Cairn - CAW 16

10 - The Debt - CAW 16

11 - The Godfather Saga - Quest for Sasha's Perfect Gown - CAW 16

12 - The Other Sister - CAW 16

13 - The Point - CAW 16​

 

To all authors and readers, I wanted to declare my way of commenting up front to avoid any confusion for this CAW.

Each story will get at least two going overs from me, along with an initial commentary about the story, and as the voting phase approaches, a more thorough second commentary once I allow each entry to percolate in my mind for a few days.

Good fortune to everyone.

 

As I have stated elsewhere, this is always the treat for those of us who read.

The fabulous stories that this challenge always produce are great examples of erotic literature.

I am delighted.

I have already read #1, and it is a great (if somewhat chilling) story.

 

I have given each of the stories a once over and posted initial comments on four of them.

The stories are diverse, some may not cut the mustard - so to speak - but they do show the diverse and creative interpretation of the CAW Theme.

Some I will admit, have such subtle interplay that they may require more than one read to get the entire gist and such of the stories.

 

CONFUSION ABOUT THE THEME?

From the original post on the original CAW #16 -- THE WRITING PHASE thread.

It doesn't say writers had to specifically discuss seasons of the year. You could probably have gotten away with writing a story about what happens in the employee locker room of a spice-bottling facility. Who knows? Maybe someone did!

 

CAW Host...

This is just my opinion on the matter:

Many people tend to interpret season and change as being one and the same, or at least among my friends we do.

I understand Season to mean a larger span of time and events in which change - both dynamic, subtle, slow or sudden - occurs within a shorter duration of time within the season.

In my part of the world the concept of season does have an dynamic transition from winter-summer and summer-winter with almost no other season between them; its either roasting hot or freezing cold, with a few times a year or five in which we manage to have rain occur.

So each of us, readers and authors, have our own understanding of change and seasons.

Having gone over the stories at least once, the interpretation of the author(s) is amazing, I can only imagine what the voting phase is going to come down to.

 

You said "we" so that includes you, correct?

How is this possible?

If you look up "season" and "change" in any dictionary, the definitions aren't even close to being the same.

When you make posts, you have a way of trying to include many others in your line of thinking, like this:

You make it sound like "we" (me) agree with your understanding of change and seasons. I don't. I don't agree that they are even remotely close.

I don't like being included like that.

Speak for yourself, please, and let others speak for themselves, if they so desire.

Thank you.

 

I read seven of them tonight. I will hit the rest tomorrow. Some of them are spectacular.

 

Did I miss the memo where the theme was changed from "Changes and Seasons" to "Death"? Because this could even challenge CAW 13 for the title of most morbid collection of CAW entries ever.

Not that I have any cause to complain. My entry has at least one death in it.

Unless I'm lying, of course.:-E

 

I noticed that too, just looking at the titles.

Maybe I'm really BlackRonin.

Or an AZ sock.



Seriously, the thing that struck me most skimming through the documents as I struggled to get them in to a readable form (the problem was on my end, I believe ) was that a lot of the stories didn't seem to be contemporary romances or wank stories in the usual sense. People got very creative.

And you won't believe who wrote what. I will be truly shocked if anyone guesses the identities of ALL our contributors correctly this time.

 

The reason for the delay in posting.

My fault. I was collecting the e-mailed documents as they came in. Some entries came in the newest version of MS Word. My cheapie laptop uses OpenOffice.org Writer freeware -- a Word knock-off.

It opens all Word documents just fine, but something weird happens when you try to post an imported new version document in MS Word 97/XP format, which is what Writer can handle. Stories were coming up only 2/3 of a column wide, and no matter how many different formats I used to save some of the entries, when I re-saved them into 97/XP format, they insisted on posting as though every other line had an extra "enter" keystroke, or they would post with quadruple line spacing, or something equally horrible. What was worse, when I would try to re-type the titles to fit the style I had dictated (number -- title -- CAW 16) and to remove the writer's name, it was like I was typing in Sanskrit. I really wasn't kidding about the Klingon stuff.

Hornypixy and I spent a lot of hours screwing around with it until SHE downloaded the affected stories (she apparently has a nice computer). She then re-saved them in my format and e-mailed them to me so I could open them and post them in numerical order.

Another odd thing -- some text in one of the stories must have been copied and pasted into the entry document from something the writer had saved before in another format. In my word processor, I could see gray rectangles where the spaces were, but I didn't realize they would post as asterisks! So we had to change that too. :wall:

Anyway, better late than never.

Nice group of stories, folks.

 

Think of it this way, seasons are cyclic and expected to recur. A change does not necessarily do so.
At least for most uses of the word (i.e. "fishing season", "holiday season", "in season") but there are of course exceptions (season your food to change its flavor).

 

So YOU"RE the one who wrote the story about what happens in the back room at KFC!

 

You can believe that if you wish, or you can believe the posts I've made in the past stating I'm not an author.
Your choice

 

There's something in the air, sometimes. Which challenge was it where ELJS posted the photo of the woman walking at night? A couple readers complained about the many graphically violent stories that resulted. At the time I found it very intriguing, because you expect that from some writers but certain others really went outside their mode on that occasion, and it was hard to say why.

This time it makes a bit more sense; change and seasons are, in one sense, just synonyms for time, and time inevitably brings up issues of mortality, and that's a theme that's just necessarily never going to go out of style.

 

Exactly! Anonymity!

A theme that will never die?

I think what we're seeing yet again is writers stretching themselves, working outside their comfort zones, experimenting. That's what we wanted. We all tend to have our niches that we retreat to, since they're the places we feel most at home. That's fine. Those places are where many of do our best work, but it's nice to see people try something different.

I still defy anyone to guess the writers of all thirteen entries. I have to keep looking myself.

 

That, too. I chose that response mainly because, to an extent, people believe what they want to believe regardless of evidence that may be placed before them. In many ways, "truth" is very subjective.
There's probably no better example than religion. I can't provide definitive proof that there is a god or gods, nor can I provide definitive proof that there isn't a god or gods. People believe what they want to believe regardless of how illogical that belief may be.

If I have written such a story, and admitted it, there are still some people who would shake their heads and say "I don't believe it".

If I didn't write the story, there are some- perhaps even you- who will think I did even if I were to deny it vehemently. There are some who would even have the strength of their beliefs increase proportionally to the strength of any denials.

So, instead, I opted for an answer that lets people have a little harmless fun indulging their own beliefs.

 

I've read three stories so far- one was well-written, but simply wasn't my cup of tea, and the other two were absolutely excellent... superb... magnificent! (And I'm VERY picky about my reading material!)

I was so taken with one of them that I am certain it will get one of my votes (and I wish I could use BOTH votes on it!). It's probably wrong to say that before reading all of the stories, but, hey... you don't have to kiss every man on the planet to know that the one you're with is freakin' amazing, right? :excited:

And, yes, YOU, I DO recognize your hand in it... thank you!

I think it's also fair to mention here that story #8 (The Beltane Belle) is incomplete due to a formatting error. A good chunk of the story is missing and the CAW SOPs are currently working to correct the matter and post the full story. If you read it now, you will know the ending and won't enjoy it as much when the complete version is posted. I think it will be more enjoyable for the reader, and also more fair to the writer (who apparently did not cause the problem), if you wait until the full story is posted before reading it. Perhaps CAWSOP can use this thread to indicate when the matter is resolved, so readers will know it's "good to go".

Happy reading, all!

 

It might be helpful in future CAWs, if the host(ess) goes with this same format to ask each person submitting a story to provide a word count. Almost all modern writing software can do that, and this way that person can do a quick diagnostics check to make sure that a 14,000 word story doesn't get edited down to an 11,000 word story accidentally, etc. Just food for thought.

 

You don't know me very well, do you? I don't want "food for thought", I want "Food for FOOD"! In fact, I'm about to forgo the usual yogurt/fruit/granola for pancakes, sausage, AND scrambled eggs.

You see, the kids like that kind of stuff... it's all about feeding the kids, you know... you gotta keep the kids happy, right? :razz:

*"PASS THE MAPLE SYRUP!"*