Gemini Rising

There's something to be said for contest entries...

You know, I saw this contest that looked to be very promising to enter. It was about mystery so I thought I'd challenge my skills. Now, for the most part, I'd like to think I can write decently, but the ratings on this piece have completely stymied me. The notorious story in questions is:

Bits & Pieces  (13+) A mystery contest entry. #1058898 by StephBee - House Targaryen

It has A LOT of limitations. The rules are VERY specific. You have to touch on all 15 subjects, picking four or five as your main suspects, and it can't be over 15KB!!

Personally, I found those restrictions very limiting. I wrote the entire story. It was 15 pages handwritten and so when I went to re-read the rules I realized I have blown them to hell.

So I sliced and diced and got it down to 15.19 KB - and then FRETTED I'd be disqualified! My intial Intro had the word "killer" in and someone changed it to NON-E and I thought I'd get disqualified for that. I didn't grip or bitch. After all, those were the rules of the contest and I did my ABSOLUTE best to meet them.

My RATINGS:

1 - 5 star, who actually took time to see that I fit the story into the rules of the contest and thought I good job with it.

1 - 3.5 star from someone who said I did a decent job meeting the rules for the contest, but I lacked imagery and there were couple of spelling mistakes. LACKED IMAGERY? Well, if I had room to put imagery in, I would have. I had to slice and dice all my imagery!!

1 - 3 star from someone who said I was too wordy in spots, no miranda in the opening scene and just basically not my usual stuff. Now, I can write a sentence mentioning there was a miranda, but that ups the word content and it's all ready 15.19 KB!!! As for the wordiness in some places, I just don't know. I'll have to go back and look at it and see if I can't pare it down.

1 2.5 RATING. Obviously the person who gave it to me was TOO CHICKEN SHIT to tell me why and I hate that.

Anyway, I am extremely frustrated with ratings like these. I'll go back and try to do a more extensive edit - I could do away with the action sequence at the beginning, but I wanted action to catch the reader's attention... so...

Anyway, thanks for letting me bitch. It's frustrating when you get rating on contest entries like these because I tried hard to fit them into RULES of the contest and the raters have taken little consideration for that.