The Winner

To all who dared to craft something and throw it into this competition, I cheer for you. It took a lotta time, energy, and belief in yourselves to do this. In that, you're all winners.  That said, you all want to know who won the right to buy  $50 worth of beer.

Here was how I judged this:

1) Novel use of power (5 pts)

2) Risk to character. I didn't think a person should exceed their abilities to make a magnificent power moment without risking a loss of control. This meant that I stalled out on a few entries were about a magnificent power moment that occurred/ affected the MC (in other words, the villain was the one using the excessive power) . If I couldn't be in the head of the true action, I didn't know what powers were being used or if there was risk to the villain.  (5 pts)

3) Good use of action vs passive verbs. (Ex: rolled/ looked/ rose/ needed/ patting vs sprouted/ flicked/ grazing/ unravelled/spattering) In this case, the second example got a higher score.(5 pts)
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4) Great flow. I wanted to be able to read it through without halting. To give myself perspective, I scored all the entries and then took the weekend off for distance. Then I reread the top four entries and scored them a second time (without looking at the previous scorecard) The gaps in my comprehension really popped the second time. (5 pts)

5) Good visual description. I wanted to 'see' the combat without questioning the effects. This tied into the action verbs. (Didn't expect this, but it did.) If a character teleported, I wanted a bit of wordage about how it looked/ felt. If a blast of energy was fired, I wanted to know the peripheral damage and what the effects were. It didn't have to be a huge amount of description, but the short stories that made the top four had a lot more effects listed with their action verbs.

6) Entertainment. This was purely subjective and gave me a chance to rank the top four pieces in my personal order of preference. Which one did I like the best? Which stories made me want to read on? (5 pts)

(Max possible points were 30)

That is what I learned from this as the judge. (Deep bow to all of you) Thank you for giving me the honor of reading your works and letting me study them.

The winner is Adrien Lankford, who wrote, "Rosebud Lives."

All my best to everyone.

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