Book of Contests (2024)

THE FROSTY FLAVORS MINI AWARDS

I entered Ancilla in the Mature/LGBTQ category.

I think judging is supposed to end on June 10.

UPDATE (7/13/2024) - I did not lose, win, get disqualified, or get judged. 

Instead, my judge offered me... advice. 

My response:

And now it's time to spell-check my front-end material. 

UPDATE (7/13/2024, later in the day) - My front-end material was fine. 

I do not appreciate being accused of idiotic spelling errors that Grammarly or the spell-checker embedded in my Atticus software would have caught. 

Spelling errors that were not there. 

Hmm.

The conversation got a little irritable after those initial two volleys in the screenshots above. Anyone morbidly curious who wants to see me and LAJoyner throwing shade at each other can go to the contest result page, and read through the judging results and the in-line comments. 

It looks like she took exception to my having the audacity to enter a commercially published indie book - a book about BDSM! Gasp! What about the children? - into the adult material section of her contest. O tempora, o mores, etc. 

And how dare I compete against amateurs? Beginners? Young beginners? I might demoralize them! How unfair of me! (I don't think she's seen what gets self-published through Kindle Direct. It's basically Wattpad, only without the contests, in-line comments, and other social aspects).

She had advised me to avoid other peoples' contests because there might be children not only competing against me, but even reading my work. Um, no. That's never happened. I have been told a couple of times that Ancilla could not be entered because there were no available adults to read it, though. Which was fine by me. I state up front in the content warning that Ancilla is strictly adults only. I also put a massive content warning on every contest entry I type up, because I feel that forcing any judge, regardless of age, to read sexually explicit material, especially of a kind they might find unappealing or triggering, is the literary equivalent of committing sexual assault. 

Also objectionable to LAJoyner: my using contests as a way of getting my work some free advertising, and my using contests as a way to discover the work of other authors and connect with those authors. How dare I. I should be relegating myself to the commercial Wattpad garbage written by official Wattpad "creators," you see, and focusing my efforts on the werewolf romance, mafia romance, billionaire romance, and romantasy "verticals" that official/commercial Wattpad prefers. 

Stick to your own kind, Sera! 

Except I am not an official Wattpad Creator, have no desire to have anything to do with all that, and I can't stand the stuff official Wattpad tries to shove down my throat. It is not unheard of that I will enjoy reading something wildly popular that has been doing well in Wattpad's search algorithms, but it's rare. 

I'm also not eligible to compete in a lot of the official Wattpad contests LAJoyner ordered me to stick to. So there's that. 

I find it odd that she waited until the day of the contest results being announced to inform me that she would not judge my work. Very odd.

It looks an awful lot like she wanted to publicly humiliate me. 

Quelle bizarre.

I will say this: whatever your opinions of my writing, and where it belongs, do not make up false spelling errors that I "committed" that did not exist. That's just petty.

I won't be able to judge this author's work in the future if she ever submits something to a contest category in a contest in which I've volunteered to be a judge - I now have a massive conflict of interest (animosity). Oh, well. I'll cross/burn that bridge if I ever come to it. For now, I'll just make a note to avoid her contests in the future if she ever hosts others. She has made it clear that I am persona non grata.