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HERMIT-CRAB FICTION
Blown Away
‘The judges were blown away by the quality of the submissions.’ Yeah, yeah.
‘The judges were blown away by the quality of the submissions.’ Yeah, yeah. I have read quite a few summings-up by judges of short story competitions over the years, and invariably they go on about how they were astounded by the brilliance of the entries, how so many of the stories could have made the shortlist on a different day, how basically everyone deserved to win and coming up with the winner was an exquisite agony, darling.
Well not this time.
Your stories were all sadly very mediocre, and the only vaguely decent one basically picked itself in a matter of minutes.
The bar was embarrassingly low. Within a few minutes I’d managed to get rid of about 95% of your entries with a quick glance.
Not that I was quixotic or rash in my choices. I began, logically enough, by throwing out all the stories formatted in Ariel, Calibri or Garamond, which are all currently on my typeface shitlist (they know why). Next went stories formatted in less than 24 point. Despite the beat carnivalesque experimentalism of my own prose I’m not as young as I was, and forcing your judge to squint is just bad manners.
