Final entries, final chance for readers to vote
For the fourth week in a row, Nicholas Guerreiro has taken top honours in the Times Colonist’s So You Think You Can Write contest.
Guerreiro also topped the Week 3 readers’-choice poll. Readers have one last chance to be heard by voting for their favourite Week 4 submission. The poll closes at noon on Monday.
The last assignment of the fourweek contest offered the finalists a chance to pick their favourite style of writing. They could write 750 to 1,000 words of prose or 80 lines of poetry on any topic in any genre. The only restriction was that each submission had to include these eight words: train, ribbon, age, swan, instant, forth, space, ends.
Judge Yvonne Blomer said Guerreiro’s short story, Rara Avis, “hooked me with beautiful language, it set me in a place and it showed the character in action — leaping out of the boat. In fact, this piece is at the top of my list because as a reader, I am fully located in it, I know what is going on and I’m dazzled by metaphors.” Dave Wilson praised his “beautiful attention to specific nouns and verbs, excellent description.”
You can read the story here, along with the judges’ comments. The work of all four finalists is on our website, with comments.
Selected from more than 100 entrants, the four writers were assigned weekly tasks over four weeks.
Each week, the four submissions were evaluated by our three judges, who chose a weekly winner. The judges also gave feedback to the participants on their work.
Readers could see the submissions and vote online for their favourite each week. The weekly challenge and that week’s winning entry were printed in the Times Colonist. All the challenges and entries are on our website at timescolonist.com/writing.
The overall winner receives a trip for two to the Galiano Literary Festival in February.
The readers’ choice winner receives a prize from Mother Computers.
The finalists were chosen by the judges on the basis of 250-word entries; the names of the writers were removed from the entries before the judges saw them. The entries could be stories, poems, memoirs or just about any other form of writing. Each had to include the words bay, waves, rock, dock, flat and spit.
The top 25 entries receive a Bolen Books gift certificate.
The contest was open to anyone as long as they have not published a book-length manuscript or a significant body of work and are not under contract with a book publisher.
The winners will be announced in the Times Colonist on Tuesday.
Today, you can read the finalists’ submissions for the fourth assignment, along with the judges’ comments.
You can also vote for your favourite, by clicking on the poll on the right-hand side of the main contest page, timescolonist.com/ writing. The poll is open only until noon on Monday.