Just a quick post to give a link to Tania Hershman's Blog where she talks about her judging process (or How I read 849 Stories in Two Months) for the Sean O Faolain short Story Competition.
There are no authors or stories mentioned - it gives a really interesting inside view to what it is like to have to select winners from so many stories. In some competitions the submissions are read and filtered by a panel of other judges before the named judge reads them, but not in this case. Her advice to short story writers after her experience is -
"write only what you want to write. Write only what you have to write. If you get longlisted, well that means you caught the judge's eye. If you don't that means that the judge liked other kinds of stories. Don't be disheartened. Send it out again. I'm happy to be back to doing that myself. I just sent 6 stories in to 2 flash fiction competitions. Will my experience as a judge help when they fail to get anywhere? I'm not sure, it will still sting. But I'll just send them out again."
Tanias Blog
Tania has also compiled a list of UK and Irish publications for the short story, which is incredibly generous, you can read them here
