- I’ve always thought that competitive eating contests were, at best, disgusting and dumb, and, at worst, encouragers of some really awful and unhealthy behavior. Turns out, it’s much worse than I ever imagined. [via]
- Who could have guessed that an H.G. Wells story contest that banned science fiction and required manuscripts be handwritten would get no entries?
- The Searcher has been on something of a zombie kick recently: Zombie Journal: Of Conscience and Appetites and The Tragedy of Zombie Clown.
- Inside the digital preservation process at the Library of Congress. [via]
- And finally, the Real People Behind Famous Fictional Characters. [via]
2 thoughts on “Thursday various”
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I would have entered that contest, were I persnickety kid that actually knew about it. I have a feeling that the lack of entries had more to do with kids not knowing about the festival (and probably not going to festivals like that). If they’d called the contest ‘Dear Aunt Cthulhu’ and allowed steampunk…well, I think they would have seen a few entries then.
I still think the hand-written requirement is a pretty big stumbling block for entrants. It’s the last thing I’d want to see, if I were judging the contest, as I think it invites a lot of semi-legible, unedited, constructed-on-the-fly stories. I’m not sure how much I consider good penmanship “an important
aspect of literacy.”
I think it’s telling that the entry form also says, “It will help if it is accompanied by a computer printout.” Yes, go to the effort of handwriting 1000-5000 words — we won’t accept your entry if you don’t — but we’d like it if you’d retype it so we can actually read the story, okay?
The “No Sci-Fi This Year” requirement doesn’t seem particularly onerous by comparison. It’s in the nature of writing contests to dictate the type of stories they want, and Wells wrote a lot of books — even if he is most famous for his science fiction.
At a glance, I think it’s a good competition and a decent festival, but I’m not surprised the restrictions they’ve placed on entries this year have hurt them.