I'm not a judge, but if I may, I'd like to say a few words about competing from back when I used to judge.
1.
If you sign up here to compete, write your stories. All of them. Two days into your three day writing time, you're going to panic and try to find some way out of the contest. In doing so, you'll consider finding an excuse or not showing up on time to post it.
Please don't do this. By joining the challenge, you're making a commitment to your competitors, who are also sweating bullets trying to write. If you default for ANY reason, you do them a huge disservice and cheapen their win.
2.
It's okay if you aren't happy with it, post your stories. I'd much rather see a partially finished or unedited story posted (with that note) than nothing at all if a competitor runs out of time. Never post nothing, always post something -- and when you hit the point when you realize that you really have to write, often the ideas start coming fast and furious.
3.
Editing takes time. I've found that it really helps to run a spellchecker over the story, and I always read mine out loud to myself before posting. Hearing the cadence helps me find awkward sentences. When you're done, put it down and come back to it later. Leave a couple of hours to edit.
4.
Add manual paragraph breaks. MS Word adds paragraph breaks for you, usually, but they don't copy over to here. You need to add hard paragraph breaks and lines between paragraphs yourself. You aren't allowed to edit your story once you post it, but a useful trick is to find an old post of yours in another thread and edit that post, pasting in your story and seeing how it looks. If it looks great, remove it from that old post and paste it in to this correct thread.
5.
If you sign up here to compete, write your stories. All of them. I said this before, but holy cow is it worth repeating.
I'm out for blood this time. Consider yourself slapped with the gauntlet of slapping.
