Sour grapes

[devi]

The shortlist of winners for a story competition I entered has just come out. It is probably Bad and Wrong of me to be looking over the list of titles and thinking an awful lot of them are trite-sounding rubbish. I mean, "Somebody's Mother"! "The Summer's Day"! "Saturday's Kiss"! What is it with the 's thing? And "The Great Plains of Africa", ew. I really hope that's meant ironically. Though "The Happiest Mosquitoes in Breson" does sound quite interesting.

Fear Me, competition judges! Pass me over and I'll... I'll... mock your shortlist on my blog! Oh noes!

(Mine was called "We Wait In Joyful Hope". I like nicking chunks of prayers.)

Oh well. Insert standard grey-weather/stuckness/eye-strain grump here, then it'll be out of the way.

Comments

[millionreasons.livejournal.com]

'THE WORLD OF TIDES' - ick! Though it was written by Bill Murray, so maybe they had to take celebrity into account.

What about entering this one instead?

http://www.ashamaward.com/news.asp

I wonder if someone's set up an LJ community for lists of literary competitions?

[hoshuteki.livejournal.com]

You should have called yours "Wait's in Joyful Hope" and perhaps it would have been selected, as clearly the judges have little discernment.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Oh my! Is that A S Byatt on the list of judges? *starstruck*

There's writerly, but it's mostly American...

[ravenblack.livejournal.com]

Not knowing in advance that it's a chunk of prayer, your title sounded terribly akin to the others, to me.

[immoline2.livejournal.com]

lol, when I hear "we wait in joyful hope" my little brainwashed catholic mind chants the rest of the mass in my head.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Hmm. It'd be interesting to hear what others who don't know the context think of it. I find it very hard to separate it from the context in my head.

Does it really lead you to think that the story will be straightforwardly about some people waiting joyfully and hopefully for something nice?

[wimble.livejournal.com]

Pascal's Wager

I'm sure Asimov wrote a version of that. Probably about 40 years ago!

[ratmmjess.livejournal.com]

Nothing wrong with complaining about sour grapes, I sez, when they really are sour.

(Not that I know anything about that recently or anything, oh no)

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Hurrah for Catholic brainwashing!

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Actually, yeah, I think I've read it...

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Thanks, but why so? Because it's mainstream, or something else?

[several-bees.livejournal.com]

I wasn't familiar with the context. It didn't sound "straightforwardly about some people waiting joyfully and hopefully for something nice", though that might be because it was in a livejournal entry about other people's annoying titles, I suppose. It did sound slightly vapid, though. I think most longer-than-a-couple-of-words quotation-y titles do, when free of context.

[mr-snips.livejournal.com]

Certainly the title of the #1 story, "Night and Fog", doesn't reach out and grab me before dragging me into a dark alley and raising my consciousness in a manner not convenient to describe...

On the other hand, I've spent most of the morning compiling a list of influential survival horror games. While their titles don't have the limp wristed swooning aesthete vibe of some of the ones on your list, it seems to me that they're developing a few problems of their own...

Alone in the Dark
Fatal Frame
Resident Evil
Splatterhouse
FEAR: First Encounter Assault Recon
Condemned: Criminal Origins
Hungry Ghosts
Parasite Eve

and, of course, the evocatively named "The Suffering: Ties that Bind".

Though I think I would award the Best Title Of All Time Prize to Nintendo's classic "Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem". You really know what you're getting with a title like that...

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Of course not!

The funny thing is that before entering I listened to recordings of some past winners on their website and thought they seemed unbrilliant and unintimidating enough that I might actually be in with a chance ;)

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Oh man, the colons! I fear the colons!

[ravenblack.livejournal.com]

The same amount so as Grandma's Bloomers or whatever that one was called, mm. Not knowing that you wrote it, of course, but if you'd put that title amongst the horrible ones, it would have looked horrible too.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Mwahaha! Well, you get an Excellent Comment Prize. I don't know what it is yet, though.

[ravenblack.livejournal.com]

Oh god, colons are becoming epidemic in game titles these days, and I'm afraid I'm not going to help any, given that my next project's title is "(something): Project Umbra". I haven't decided what the something is yet.

The thing about colons in game titles is that they make it so you can make spinoffs and 'sequels'. What a 'sequel' entails in gaming is making some new levels, and selling them as a whole new game, for new game price, even though ten man-years went into making the original game and about ten man-weeks went into making the 'sequel'. I believe this is why the colon is out to get us. Certainly it's *my* motivation for having it in my title.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Which reminds me that I shouldn't be assuming the stories suck on the basis of their titles, of course :)

[ratmmjess.livejournal.com]

The only comfort I've found is that, given how inferior some of the nominees are, I have the moral certainty that I was better.

It's not much comfort, though. :-)

[mr-snips.livejournal.com]

Oh man, the colons! I fear the colons!

Me too:-)

I think it might have something to do with committees - when marketing say that "Eternal Darkness" maximises your profit potential by including the largest possible number of key survival horror words per phrase, and your lead designer screams that his girlfriend the goth poet created the title "Sanity's Requiem" especially for his game and he's leaving if you don't use it, what else can you do, after all?

[kauket.livejournal.com]

'Pirates'

I wonder if that is just a couple of thousand words of 'ahhhhhhhhhhh ahhhhhh ahhh me laddies'

[evilrobotshane.livejournal.com]

I didn't know the context and concur that it seems pretty catchy and meaningless.

Now I do and think you should be in the Saw Doctors, you big post-Catholic you.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

I haven't decided what the something is yet

How about "Colon: Project Umbra" ?

[verlaine.livejournal.com]

Surely colons are a natural symptom of rampant postmodernism. Once everything's been done once, the only way to come up with something "new" is to yoke two old things together with a convenient punctuation mark?