The first phase of Smut Marathon 2019 ended on Sunday, with the field cut from 44 to 30 and all scores reset ahead of the knockout rounds. By the slimmest of margins, I topped the cumulative standings from Rounds 1-6, which is extremely gratifying but also no guarantee whatsoever of further success in the challenges to come.
More interesting to me is my score progression over the last couple of assignments. I picked up 17.0 total points over the first three rounds, but virtually doubled that tally in R4-6 (33.6), with my highest score of the competition coming in R6 (13.0). That’s no coincidence: if there’s one thing last year’s Smut Marathon taught me about my own writing, it’s that I’m a lot more comfortable/confident with flash fiction (500-1500 words, broadly speaking) than I am with micro-fiction. As the word count’s risen, so have my scores.
Anyway, that’s not really the point of this post. I wanted to share my R6 story – not just because I’m pretty proud of it (though I am), but because it generated rather more confusion than I was expecting. I won’t say more than that now – don’t want to shape anyone else’s response to it more than I have done already – but after some initial grumbling and eye-rolling, I think it’s going to prove a good lesson in not taking your audience for granted and not assuming they’re going to read something in the way you want/expect them to.