Winter Writing Contest 2015: Winners

This year's annual Winter Writing Contest has reached the end and the winners have been decided by both the judges and community!

Congratulations goes to Yanker for winning the Judge's Choice award with his most favored submission of A White Christmas. It would be difficult to assign a collection of words that would adequately express the quality of this entry, but I shall attempt to do so. Comedy is a difficult genre to tackle, especially to those who normally don't write with humor. After all, there are many kinds of humor, some light, some dark, some dumb, and some intelligent and clever. This entry that you have so wonderfully crafted utilized the concept of random comedy to such a degree that, although unsure what could happen next to make the situation more absurd, the story still came full circle in an epic and complete fashion. In addition to being well-written and well-proofread, it is easy to see just how great it stands on its own. Thank you for causing me to laugh more than a few times, and more than just an easily dismissed chuckle.

We also wanted to honor RavenxSinon as the Runner-up for the unique tale of Mother Knows Best. Your piece was as interesting as last year's. You are, proclaimed by myself and perhaps agreed upon by our community as being this section's resident expert on symbolism. Thank you for your dark tale of revenge, cannibalism, and matricide.

Congratulations also goes to Cinia Pacifica and Sound of Destiny for winning the Reader's Choice awards with your respective submissions The Enigmatic Lady and Like Holding White Elephants as the Writing and Fanfiction community determined them to be the top entries in the final poll. The Enigmatic Lady, a touching tale of the strained and growing relationship between a mother and a daughter, only for that growth to have been cut down as soon as it began. Similar in respects to this, Like Holding White Elephants also approaches the concept of relationships with older family, whether they be strained between a father and son, or creating new relationships like between a man and a half-sister, now adopted-daughter. Dialogue is heavy in these entries, as these relationships show their growth through this literary medium. Together they give us a treat with stories that will be remembered as the partnered victors of the Reader's polls for this year. Thank you for your gifts to us.

Since there was a tie in the poll, and the runner-up to them won the runner-up for the Judge's Choice award regardless, we'll just be ignoring the runner-up to Reader's Choice position this year, as they are technically runner-ups to each other.

With some details about the prizes, the winners of the Judge's Choice and Reader's Choice awards, Yanker, Cinia Pacifica, and Sound of Destiny, will each win $25 of value to the FAKKU store, as a gift certificate to J-List, or similar online retailers within reason. This can include two months of subscription to FAKKU! or a physical FAKKU! publication delivered to you.

The Runner-up RavenxSinon will receive any one (1) current or future digital download of a FAKKU publication, a $10 value towards the FAKKU store. For a list of current and planned releases, check this link to the FAKKU! Store Manga & Doujinshi page. This could also be a full month subscription to FAKKU!

Additionally, Yanker, Cinia Pacifica, and Sound of Destiny have won a 3 stanza poem each dedicated to their honor. RavenxSinon will be regaled with a limerick. You may find these in the next post.

Although, the forum rank title of "FAKKU Writer" was never confirmed for this contest, I will let someone among the higher ups know of the winners just in case it could be granted to them for their most deserving entries. No promises, but I hope they'll grant it.

Lastly, special thanks goes out to all the submissions and authors who participated in this year's contest and I hope it was as rewarding for you as it was for us, on behalf of the judges: leonard267, high_time, and myself. Thank you, it was an honor to arrange and judge this contest for you all. I will now provide my specific corrections and comments on entries to those of you who desire it. Please post here or message me if you would like and I will post it publicly, or privately if you wish.

Honorable mentions for this year:

xninebreaker submitted I’ll Never Give Up

Thank you, xninebreaker, for granting us this sweet, endearing, fourth-wall-breaking entry. They live! They finally live!

Masayoshi submitted Priorities.

Thank you for your unique tale of the suffering of an individual, and the unfortunate ire directed at him by people and life in general, I suppose.

Lastly, thank you again to everyone who participated and read, and may next year hold even greater things for us all.

Yanker:


Cinia Pacifica:


Sound of Destiny:




RavenxSinon:

Hehehe, honorable mention. Acceptable! I wonder how many of you I was able to surprise and entertain.

Congratulations to the winners. I will say that I did laugh at Yanker's entry, so I can see why the judge's chose his entry. Also, I am not surprised Raven placed high on the judge's list as he was on the top of mines as well. I agree, he holds the standard for good symbolism (and also very thoughtful animals).

I'm not sure how much commentary the judges can give on my work, but I would appreciate anything. It may have been a light hearted entry, but I did try. Any room for improvement is good room for improvement.

Congrats, winners!

Also, thank you judges for taking the time out of your schedules to make this happen. I've been in a similar position before, and I know it requires a lot of work. Having said that, I would definitely like any feed back you've got to give. Feel free to drop by my topic when you've got the time and inclination to.

To be honest, I was pretty nervous, especially after reading the other submissions. Thanks to everyone who supported me and commented on my work (it's not too late to comment haha!). Congratulations to the other winners, Cinia, Yanker, and Sound! Also, I would like to request the judges' comments on my work.



I am honored that you thought well of my work. I'd also like you to know that your work ranked high on my list as well.

See you all next contest!

I didn't really expect to win so I'm happy. Happy for the cash anyway. Congrats to other winners too. Good to see Xnine made it to the honorable mentions. Thanks Xenon, Leonard, and High for taking the time to read my entry as judges, and hosting this year's Winter Writing Contest. It was a pleasure to participate instead of judging after a long time. It really has been a long time since I was a participant and god I feel bad for being lazy as a judge back in the Summer Contest because the wait can make people nervous.

I want to thank those who commented on my entry. I think I have returned the favor by posting my thoughts on their threads too. So maybe I can just be lazy for the rest of the entries and sit back and fade... ahem.

Xenon please, I expected something more impressive from an ode by you. Disappointed officially... but thanks.

Judges, I'd love to know your thoughts and opinions on my entry. If there's no constructive criticism to provide, that's also fine. I just want to know what each of you think in-depth.

I wasn't expecting to get judge's choice after seeing the poll results, so I guess that was a surprise for me. This was my very first contest and I enjoyed it, as well as the sense of community with everyone helping each other out with feedback and constructive criticism.

Congratulations all, even if you didn't win anything - I'm sure everyone who entered has taken something away that they can apply for next time they write. As for judge opinions and such, I would be happy to receive some. Posts would be fine, that way everyone can pitch in their thoughts.

Congratulations to everyone who participated! This was a good experience as per usual. I hope we continue to have more of these contests in the future. It's just a shame that the number of participants has dropped so significantly from last time. Oh well, such is life.

Thanks to the judges who organized everything as well as all the other entrees who posted their works and commented on the works of others.

Comments, feedback, and criticism from both judges and other participants would be greatly appreciated!

I may as well list how I judged the entries (even though I listed perhaps in too much detail how I would judging them in the thread announcing that the competition is underway). These are the criteria in descending order of importance:

1. The prose must be readable and the plot understandable for my standards.
2. It must be humorous or fit my taste of humour.
3. If the writing style is similar to mine, I would give bonus points.

So based on these criteria, I told Xenon that my favourite entries are:

1st place : Yanker
2nd place : RavenxSinon
3rd place : Ezlare

Honourable mention : Masayoshi
Dishonourable mention : Dawn of Dark

The winning entries are easy to read but I feel that Yanker's entry was the most humorous though it wasn't really written in my style. (I felt that none of the winning entries are, which isn't so much of a bad thing.)

RavenxSinon's entry wasn't as straightforward with the humour, neither was Ezlare's so I ranked them slightly lower. More points to RavenxSinon for being witty.

This leads to my honourable and 'dishonourable' mentions, Masayoshi and Dawn of Dark's entries. These two entries I feel gave me a taste of how reading what I write must have felt like which is why they are my favourites too. Masayoshi's entry however lacked humour and Dawn of Dark's entry was incomprehensible (therefore funny ironically) which is why they didn't make it to my top 3 entries.

I literally loled at this part and everybody on campus thought I was crazy. Small price to pay for a 'mention' in one of the jugde's opinion.

Congratulations to the winners this year. These were some good pieces of writing, though I may have sounded very distasteful about most of them. They were great nonetheless.

Another year without a prize for me, but oh well, (I hope) there's always next year.

I would also like to have the jugdes' comments on my entry, though some might have said already that it was gibberish. I would say that I definitely did not spend as much time as I would love to, like the previous year's entry, and thus was not of much favor. But there's always much more to learn in failures than in successes. So yeah, bombard away with the bad impressions!

I let Jacob know about the winners and it would appear that the main man himself saw fit to hook the three of you up with a free month's subscription! You can now modify your rank to display whatever you like, though you have earned the right to display the "FAKKU Writer" rank and not receive the stink-eye from this subforum.

Just click on "My Account" at the top, then "Settings," then click on "Subscription Settings" on the sidebar, and type in what you'd like under "Custom Rank." You can choose the "Custom Rank Color" below, which is Gold or Normal (Black). There are a plethora of other site-specific settings if you choose to use them.

If there's any confusion about the prizes, this is in addition to what I've already promised you.

Woot! All praise our lord and savior Jacob!