Want to Know the Inside Secret of How Boosts Get Picked? Yeah, Me Too

Confessions of a clueless noob nommer

Dr Booster will see you now (Photo by Tubagus Andri Maulana on Unsplash)

This is not the article I expected to write. After a full 140 hours¹ flying by the seat of my pants in the nominating cockpit, having been given my wings last Monday evening, I fully expected to have cracked it.

Hubris, meet pratfall.

I had all my theories ready for empirical live testing², had scribbled my hieroglyphic annotations all over the curators’ codex, the boosters’ bible and the nommers’ necronomicon. I released my canaries into the depths of the Pilot Programme coalmines.

Some flew high, others chirruped their last. I felt I was groping towards the philosopher’s stone of boostastic alchemy. But each time I had the secret in my grasp, the final revelation was dashed by a confoundingly contradictory result.

So rather than ensnare readers with false pretences, I felt I should at least offer some tangible nuggets of gold and iron pyrite, and maybe even a dollop of Edmund’s purest green. In the form of the stories that I have received the nod for, and some other that have been rejected.

The latter include both my own submissions, others that turned out already to have been weighed in the scales and found wanting, and other pieces of…