Sunflower Awards 4.0

Short Story Results

After long last, it's time for the Short Story results! Everyone, please thank the amazing judge pixelmum for judging not one, not two, but THREE genres! They deserve some extreme recognition for their hard work in these awards, so please check out their shout-out chapters!

If you did not win, meaning you are not in this chapter, we will PM you ASAP with your results. If you do not receive your results, you were probably disqualified, so please contact us.

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Genre Results

🌻Third Place🌻

Username - sarcasticoffeelover5
Book Title - Lethal Coalitions
Score - 80/100
Review -

The title is fine for me, but the word "lethal" is typically what you get in murder mysteries or thrillers where the main character's life is at stake. I'm guessing that this isn't going to happen in this story!

The cover is good but I can't read "coalitions" since it's split in half and filled with very small text, and that makes it hard to read. Also, this story is about teens/twenty-year-olds and the people on the cover are in their thirties or forties. Maybe switch to younger people? But, since I am not a graphics expert and if these models on the cover are attracting readers, who cares if they look too old?

I think that the blurb is great - maybe get a friend with an eye for editing to help sharpen it by improving the grammar, syntax and punctuation to attract more reads. Also there is a random quote at the end - not sure how that is intended to add to the information to the reader. It may be better to include more information about the hook, obstacles and other character conflicts rather than a quote, since that derails the cool story hook about these appalling twins and how Alexis needs to best them both for ruining her life! Mind games and cheating boyfriends have always been around, but this book is very funny and quite insane things happen in it, so I'd say it's very original.

By "grammar" I'm covering syntax, grammar, punctuation, and other writing mechanics. Your writing is fine but there are a lot of grammar, syntax and punctuation errors everywhere e.g. wrong punctuation marks in dialogue, tense-hopping, run-on sentences, stream-of-consciousness exposition etc. I'm not bothered by it since this is Wattpad, and everyone is publishing first drafts, but it doesn't hurt to polish the technical English to a high standard. This is the easiest fix for you, so I think that addressing the quality of the English would really help your work.

On to characters: despite the revelation that her boyfriend is cheating on her and that his twin broke up with her for him, I am not really sensing any internal plot beats or reading any reactive sentences in the text. This is a shocking set of circumstances for Alexis but she's wandering through the narrative with not much internal struggle. What is Alexis feeling about all of this, and how is it affecting her? Does she reflect on any of it, or is it translated into action, and are her outbursts a clear window into her turmoil? Alexis is going through absolute hell, and I want to go through that hell with her, but I can't infer any of her emotions in the text. A good example of this is the scene where she vomits. Vomiting is such a visceral, guttural, intense experience, and we want to be right there sympathising with Alexis, but it's just a dry list of actions like a medical description. How would she describe vomiting to herself in the most direct terms? I'm also not really sensing the internal plot in Zack either. These are intended to be quite complex characters and I really like how you are setting them up like this through the exposition but I want to see evidence through showing, not telling. There is a lot of exposition through laboured dialogue or just telling e.g. "you're my crazy quirky friend, Bella" and "I loved chocolate", or "she blushed, which told me that I had delivered my chat-up line smoothly." All of this can be shown by the characters' actions and dialogue more efficiently, given that this is the short story category and we are meant to be very tight with prose.