After long last, it's time for the Short Story results! Everyone, please thank the amazing judge pixelmum for judging not one, not two, but THREE genres! They deserve some extreme recognition for their hard work in these awards, so please check out their shout-out chapters!

If you did not win, meaning you are not in this chapter, we will PM you ASAP with your results. If you do not receive your results, you were probably disqualified, so please contact us.

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Genre Results

🌻Third Place🌻

Username - sarcasticoffeelover5
Book Title - Lethal Coalitions
Score - 80/100
Review -

The title is fine for me, but the word "lethal" is typically what you get in murder mysteries or thrillers where the main character's life is at stake. I'm guessing that this isn't going to happen in this story!

The cover is good but I can't read "coalitions" since it's split in half and filled with very small text, and that makes it hard to read. Also, this story is about teens/twenty-year-olds and the people on the cover are in their thirties or forties. Maybe switch to younger people? But, since I am not a graphics expert and if these models on the cover are attracting readers, who cares if they look too old?

I think that the blurb is great - maybe get a friend with an eye for editing to help sharpen it by improving the grammar, syntax and punctuation to attract more reads. Also there is a random quote at the end - not sure how that is intended to add to the information to the reader. It may be better to include more information about the hook, obstacles and other character conflicts rather than a quote, since that derails the cool story hook about these appalling twins and how Alexis needs to best them both for ruining her life! Mind games and cheating boyfriends have always been around, but this book is very funny and quite insane things happen in it, so I'd say it's very original.

By "grammar" I'm covering syntax, grammar, punctuation, and other writing mechanics. Your writing is fine but there are a lot of grammar, syntax and punctuation errors everywhere e.g. wrong punctuation marks in dialogue, tense-hopping, run-on sentences, stream-of-consciousness exposition etc. I'm not bothered by it since this is Wattpad, and everyone is publishing first drafts, but it doesn't hurt to polish the technical English to a high standard. This is the easiest fix for you, so I think that addressing the quality of the English would really help your work.

On to characters: despite the revelation that her boyfriend is cheating on her and that his twin broke up with her for him, I am not really sensing any internal plot beats or reading any reactive sentences in the text. This is a shocking set of circumstances for Alexis but she's wandering through the narrative with not much internal struggle. What is Alexis feeling about all of this, and how is it affecting her? Does she reflect on any of it, or is it translated into action, and are her outbursts a clear window into her turmoil? Alexis is going through absolute hell, and I want to go through that hell with her, but I can't infer any of her emotions in the text. A good example of this is the scene where she vomits. Vomiting is such a visceral, guttural, intense experience, and we want to be right there sympathising with Alexis, but it's just a dry list of actions like a medical description. How would she describe vomiting to herself in the most direct terms? I'm also not really sensing the internal plot in Zack either. These are intended to be quite complex characters and I really like how you are setting them up like this through the exposition but I want to see evidence through showing, not telling. There is a lot of exposition through laboured dialogue or just telling e.g. "you're my crazy quirky friend, Bella" and "I loved chocolate", or "she blushed, which told me that I had delivered my chat-up line smoothly." All of this can be shown by the characters' actions and dialogue more efficiently, given that this is the short story category and we are meant to be very tight with prose.

Alexis clearly has a problem with unhealthy obsessions with her boyfriends, possibly applying the stalkerish nature of her Instagram life to her actual life, and it shocks her that her new boyfriend is horrified at it, suggesting that she was totally unaware of how much of a problem it has become to her. I'd have expected some fallout and reflection on that. Also, Zack is using sex as a means of escape from his problems, which sounds superficially badboy-ish, but given his family problems it feels like quite a harrowing mental health episode, but it doesn't really come out in the text. I can suggest that you try to emphasise character internal plot beats by developing dialogue, and carefully choosing action beats, for both characters. This would add a little reactive action to the characters, and would break up the dialogue and make it sound more realistic. Bear in mind that this is meant to be a short story, so characters can be complex based on their internal wants and their external problems, but it has to be done early on in the story - you have set these two up with both of those, but have to execute it!

Just a quick note about pacing - the random quotes at the chapter start don't seem to be connected to the chapters we're reading, so it's difficult to get into the chapter since the quotes trip up the reader by placing them at a different time at the start of each chapter. I think that the plotting is OK otherwise, apart from the fact that the characters spend a lot of chapter time doing stuff that doesn't add to their character or move the plot forward, like descriptions of them eating chocolate or watching Netflix or checking their phones. Unless these are foreshadowing or Chekhov's Guns, they are just obstacles to the reader.

I think that developing each character's unique voice more would be a really good addition to this story. Alexis is an instagram star - does she have a private and public persona? Do her friends get to see both? Does she have mannerisms and internal debates that are very characteristic of her personality traits? Does her caring about social media affect how she lives her actual life? Is is hard for her to disconnect from it? Since we are in short story territory, the characters' personalities need to scream loud, and in chapter one.

You use dialogue tags with no dialogue beats, which doesn't give us a chance to really hear the character, and makes the prose sound monotonous (a good tip is listening to it using text-to-speech, and seeing if it sounds dry and rigid, then adding little action beats to break up the dialogue and then see if it flows easily and immerses you). When Zack and his brother were arguing, if you hadn't added the tags, I wouldn't have been able to tell who was talking since their voices are identical on the page and we have no dialogue beats to give a look into their personalities. A good trick is to attempt an entire chapter with no dialogue tags - you have no choice but to use action beats to show which character is doing what, and it makes the prose automatically really tight, often shaving 15 % word count off a chapter. You could make this short story even shorter!

To summarise, I really like this story's juicy and shocking hook, but it needs a technical polish to make it shine. 

🌻Second Place🌻

Username - NiaDninja
Book Title - The 7 Sacred Sins
Score - 85/100
Review -

Nice title - how can sins be sacred? A holy person is sinning - juicy! Makes me interested. I'm not sure if you should use the Arabic numeral 7 here unless you're trying to be wacky. Don't know what that stuff is on the praying person's hands, but it's freaking me out and not making me want to look at the book cover. Is it a net or blood or what?

The blurb is good but I'd like to see more information about what is going to happen in the book. Is Father Jones going to experience something? Will it be good or bad? How will that reflect on his life? Does his past catch up with him?

You have an awesome writing style, but there are a lot of syntax, spelling, punctuation, grammar and other errors that are a quick fix, and you just need to put the work in to correct these - no big deal because this is Wattpad but it's not that hard to get this done, or ask someone with an eye for copy editing to help.

I like what you have done here with Jones's characters, and I think that it works but could be harder-hitting to make the reader feel more clear that he is a villain protagonist. He seems to be amoral rather than knowing that he did wrong, and will do wrong again, and occasionally feeling bad about it. The thing about amorality is that those people think that there is no problem at all, and that society needs to be manipulated to get his way. I'd love to see more of his thoughts on the page - there are hints of a deeper look into his mind so that his personality shines out a little e.g. "Inmate 666. Figures." I'm not sure if you've read Lolita, but Humbert's mind twists and turns to justify himself, and he obsesses about a "real evil" that totally makes him "not evil", and in fact a saviour of sorts, and of course everyone still loves me, and of course that kid loved every second of it, whatever his name is. The reader needs to know that he is bad, but feel safe that they were hoodwinked by him at first, but aren't sympathising with him, and then feel compelled to keep reading because they want justice/revenge, and think that his predicament is morbidly fascinating.

Brilliant chapter titles and quotes from the Bible - I'm not familiar with Christianity but this deadly sins stuff is satisfyingly ironic when it happens to him. 

🌻First Place🌻

Username - SuVida777
Book Title - Vomon Paradox
Score - 100/100
Review -

I know that I have given this a perfect score, which is not generally a thing in these peer review contests, but please read it and see for yourself! This is what I would consider an exemplar of a short story, or indeed any story. It's astounding how this was done in 6k with razor-sharp prose throughout, full (exceptionally complex yet brilliantly-explained) hard Sci-fi world-build, ultra-high-definition charming characters, clear and natural plot beats that crossed interplanetary space and time, and critical development in three main characters, all at a blistering pace, yet leaving time to breathe through beautiful descriptions. I know that this is a short review but I just want to use the Sunflower Community space to say JUST READ THIS!

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Congratulations to all of the winners! You will receive your prizes once the awards are over. :)