And the winner is...

We had a lot of fun judging the entries in the 3/20/09 Friday Challenge. It's always much more enjoyable and productive for us when we can get together as a group, have some coffee or tea (Honest! Just coffee or tea!), pass around the entries, trade opinions, and read the good bits at each other.

That's what took out Henry's entry early in the running. "Lightning Fishing" is a wonderful tall-tale in the finest Southern story-telling tradition, but there are only so many times you can read "great, great, many-greats grandpappy" out-loud before you start to get a little, well, cranky. Very close, but not a winner this week.

Next up, in Tom we feel we finally have found a worthy adversary for Vidad's near-legendary overkill. "The Myth of King Ozimand" was awesome. We really wish you'd found the time to finish the artwork and present the story as you so obviously intended to do. As it stands, it's a great storyboard and a great start towards a story, but this week it's up against some fully realized entries, and doesn't make it to the medal round.

Chgowiz is the New Guy this week, and he asked us to be gentle as we evaluated "The Creation Myth." That wasn't necessary. As devoted fans of Big Science and high-energy physics, we thought it was enormously cool to reverse the polarity on all the apocalyptic talk that's been going around the Internet lately and turn the story of the activation of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and the search for the Higgs boson (the so-called "God particle") into a creation myth. The first nine paragraphs really grabbed us and pulled us in. The jarring shift in point-of-view in the tenth paragraph threw us, though, and then the final paragraph broke the spell. This is the start of a good sci-fi story, but only the start, and the "it was all just a dream" ending both comes too soon and doesn't work. Great try, though, and you should consider reworking this one and making it much longer.

Jamsco presented us with a poser this week. "One Little Word" is pretty clearly Christian Fantasy, not myth. It seems like a good story—we really wish Guy Stewart had weighed-in on this one, as he seems to have a better handle on what is acceptable in the current Christian Fantasy market than we do—but we wouldn't touch the theological questions in this one with a ten-foot battle lance. Can even a demon repent and be saved? Sorry, that's above our pay grade. But in any case the assignment here was to create a new myth, and as it was almost written in the Gospel According to Rufus, "God really hates it when people call it Christian 'mythology'," so we're going to have to pass on this one.

KTown's entry, "The Man of the Moon", reopened a long-running discussion. We have seen a lot of very good work go by in the years we've been doing the Friday Challenge, and sadly, most of this work ultimately has been devoured by Otogu. People write great starts of stories but never finish them; people write great first drafts but then never polish them. This isn't precisely tragic: after all, the point here is to get you to write regularly, not to write pieces you can turn directly into commercial sales. That's why this isn't a closed, members-only, must-sign-an-NDA-and-a-waiver-before-you-can-even-take-a-peek workshop.

But all the same, it sometimes sucks, to see a great start like this and know that it will probably never lead to a finished story. We want to see the rest of this story! And so from time to time we get the notion to go back through the years of Friday Challenge winners and solicit contributions for a Best of The Friday Challenge anthology.

It would be hopelessly unsellable, of course. We'd be lucky to move 500 copies. But all the same, it would be fun to do, and it would give us an excuse to badger KTown with the question, "How soon can we see the rest of this one?!"

And thus we were down to WaterBoy's entry, "The Four Sisters", and Torainfor's entry, "How the Bull and the Bear Learnt to Take Turns, and lo, mighty was the struggle to choose between these two! Both were wonderful stories; both were made to be read aloud. I personally was slightly miffed by Torainfor's entry, as I had "write a modern 'Just So' story" on the schedule for an upcoming Friday Challenge and now I have to push it back by a few weeks. "The Four Sisters" gets a slight edge, as it's both a good, fun, perfectly paced story and really nails the assignment right on the nose. But "How the Bull and the Bear Learnt to Take Turns" is just such an utter delight to read aloud!

So in the end, we decided to split the difference and call it a tie. WaterBoy and Torainfor, you're this week's winners! Come on down and claim your prizes!

And with that Herculean task finally completed, we put away the coffee cups and broke out the cognac...