The writing was hard but I just read the first paragraph and if it grabbed me I voted for it.

I actually totally forgot to even vote (whoops lol), but I can imagine voting in the writing section was a major pain. I know my sister skipped over it.

I'm very sad that some of you couldn't even give me or some of my friends stories the time of day but you know what oh well I'll still get use out of my harvester story where she quests for a bloodred potion by making it a pet story!

I felt pretty great though because like no one else used cats like that. 8D Though after I submitted it I thought .. crap, what if people think the av is putting them back into the cages ?? orz

I think it would be nice if subeta did one writing only contest that way we kind of have to read the entries. Well, I mean, not be forced into voting, but that's all the voting was for. :3 We have had art only contests before. Would be nice to do a writing only one.

I think we really should have been able to have an optional 140 character limit or something, because IK more votes would have been used that way, as many people had no idea what some of the HA's stories were trying to tell. Lol I wasn't sure what was going on but I love that story now that IK what it is. What a bummer.

I feel awful for the writers. Even just find a better way to categorize and I do think def limit the character limit to far less than 5k. Make it a poem, short story, haiku, etc type of thing. I may have even entered it myself if it had been done that way.

I just feel like the next time there's a writing contest (portion), maybe they can be sorted by word length categories too? like up to 1k, between 1K and 4K, etc

Except then people will still only go through the category with the shorter stories.

For those of you who don't write, just an FYI. 5000 characters is ridiculously low. It's roughly around 2 pages. While that might seem pretty long, it's really not long enough to tell an entire story. I had to cut mine down so much, and omit 3/4 of the ideas I had just so it would be somewhat complete and make sense.

I would prefer word count over character count (because those characters also count every space and punctuation), and it's easier to cut a few words out vs cutting a few characters out. IMO, 300 minimum, 1,000 maximum word count would keep them in the readable/not overbearing category, while still giving us a little more room to flesh out the story. FWIW, 5,000 characters (counting punctuation), gave me just over 800 words. I could make a lot more story with a full 1,000 words.

IDK, as someone who has participated in numerous flash fiction contests with characters maxed out at 500, it is completely possible to tell a story under 5,000 characters. I think the idea of segregating based on type (e.g. poem vs. story vs. flash fiction) is a nice idea though.

I think the issue with people reading through the stories is going to come back to how easy it is made to read them. If it's well written, I don't think there will be an issue with people skipping your story because ugh so long, but if written content continues to be presented in such a burdensome way, then short or long, people aren't going to read them.

And you're always going to have people who aren't going to be bothered to read anything. Like clicking on YT videos (other than music) that are longer than 30 seconds always feels like a chore to me, so if Subeta ever does a video contest, I don't care how they do it, I'm not voting. xD

well, if writing was subdivided into categories, then it gives the longer entries a different chance to win prizes than shorter stories (which may get more votes because more people read em, but also gives them a more fair chance to win amongst the same category/length)

I agree with everyone else saying 2 days was WAY too short. I didn't manage to get online during those two days and was surprised and disappointed to hear that voting had come and gone. You'd think a week or 5 days would make more sense