August Results

The Labyrinth Writing Contest for August has come to a close.  I think that I got my kicks from crafting a story to the theme and getting to write about some side characters - I really like to write.

Winning was just icing on the cake.

I've been thinking a lot abut popular writing vs good writing.  There were a few decent works in the competition this month.  I mean decent in terms of writing, plot, characters.  I wonder if my piece was just popular because it was a feel good romance story.  To be honest, Birthday Presents isn't really a romance story, but it is marketed as such.  Romance is prolifically popular - you only need to compare the reviews in the Romance section of fictionpress to any other section; or for people who leave their homes, go into a bookshop to confirm this.

If I'm to continue with writing competitions that don't have August in the title, I'll need a project to occupy myself.

So I'm going to do an experiment.  It's doomed to be meaningless from the beginning because there's no way I can control the variables that I need to blah blah blah reliability and validity blah blah.  But whatever.  Let's do this pseudoscience.

Hypothesis: Romance fiction is more popular than other fiction.

To test this, I'll alternate between romance and non romance stories for the competition.  So if I do participate in September, it will be non romance.  The markers will be votes in the competition and favorable reviews received.