{"id":637,"date":"2009-06-03T10:17:00","date_gmt":"2009-06-03T10:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/2009\/06\/question-from-a-blog-reader.html"},"modified":"2009-06-03T10:17:00","modified_gmt":"2009-06-03T10:17:00","slug":"question-from-blog-reader","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/2009\/06\/question-from-blog-reader\/","title":{"rendered":"Question From A Blog Reader"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/4.bp.blogspot.com\/_l0Jv-SLk81k\/SiZORS-CxVI\/AAAAAAAAClo\/5qX7-r6X19U\/s1600-h\/4460882_thumbnail.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 400px;\" src=\"http:\/\/4.bp.blogspot.com\/_l0Jv-SLk81k\/SiZORS-CxVI\/AAAAAAAAClo\/5qX7-r6X19U\/s400\/4460882_thumbnail.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"id=\"BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5343044066978481490\" \/><\/a><br \/>Anonymous left the following question on <a href=\"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.blogspot.com\/2009\/04\/no-blogging-for-next-few-days.html\">this post<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><em><strong>You said that you were judging a contest? What criteria do you use to decide to give a person a high score?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m about to judge another contest, and I recalled that I never answered this question. I usually give a person a high score when I&#8217;m mesmerized by the entry so much, that I feel like I&#8217;m reading a book instead of a contest entry. When I judge contests, I notice that a great majority of the entries read as if it&#8217;s somebody &#8220;trying&#8221; to write a book. When I lose myself in the reading of the words, wanting the story to go on past the pages provided by the entrant, that&#8217;s when I know they&#8217;ve done a good job. Usually, when I give somebody a high score, I feel as if the entry belongs on a bookshelf, so that others can enjoy it.<\/p>\n<p>I rarely give high scores on contest entries &#8211; usually the stories need a lot of work before they&#8217;re up to publication standards&#8230;at least they do in my opinion!<\/p>\n<p>Hope my explanation helps!<\/p>\n<p><strong>Do you have any questions about contests or how to commercially publish your novel? Feel free to email me or leave a comment with your question and I&#8217;ll answer it sometime in the future!<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><em><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\">~Cecelia Dowdy~<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Anonymous left the following question on this post. You said that you were judging a contest? What criteria do you use to decide to give a person a high score? I&#8217;m about to judge another contest, and I recalled that I never answered this question. I usually give a person a high score when I&#8217;m [&hellip;]<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing-related-posts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paovYP-ah","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=637"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}