"Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit...""There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain..." - Cicero

"The thrill of victory, and the agony of defeat" - Age test! If you remember that phrase, you're officially old, just like me.

As with my 2024 book of contests,  each contest I enter will get its own page. The page will provide a screenshot of the contest and list the books I've entered. If I remember to do so I'll also list judges assigned and payments made. 

Results will be logged as well: whether or not I win anything, what I won if I did win something. 

One reason I'm logging all these contests is to keep the contests and payments straight. I can be a bit of an airhead. 

The other reason I'm logging them is that it helps me keep track of how many contests stay active from start to finish. It's amazing to me how many indie contests on Wattpad collapse midway through judging or never even get past the "let's fill out entry forms!" phase. Some of the contests get unpublished and disappear, some don't. I just created a new stack for canceled/incomplete/undead contests. It has 36 contests in it, not counting the contests that got unpublished after they folded. My guess would be that roughly a fourth of the indie contests on Wattpad never follow through. In my opinion, they are still worth entering, because they're an easy way for authors to do some self-promotion (I can't be the only Wattpadian who goes through contest entry forms looking for interesting books to read - especially if the books are written by people I'm competing against) but that's still an alarmingly high rate of contest collapse. 

Due to burnout, I decided to eschew contest judging until spring of 2025. I am officially on vacation from judging until after ONC and Ramadan. Nobody needs an anxious, hangry judge. Ramadan ends on the evening of March 26. ONC... well, if I manage to make it past the first cut, that might last until the summer, but I don't see myself getting that far. What I publish is good enough, but I don't exactly write crowd-pleasers. Therefore, I expect to be getting back into contest-judging starting around April or so. I'll keep track of what I judge here just like I did in the 2024 Book of Contests.