Val Plays Fast and Loose With Mathematical Analysis

As you may recall, Val went on a wild contest-entering spree a month or two ago. She has reaped an honorable mention and two first places so far for her nine entries. Not too shabby. The jury is still out on two of them, but Tuesday, Val was learned the fate of numbers six and seven.

Here’s the deal. Monday, I got an email after school explaining that my entry in a certain contest had not made it to the final round. No big deal. At least the sixth of the nine shoes had dropped. No more waiting for that one.

Monday evening, I realized that I had sent TWO entries to that contest. And that this email had specifically mentioned ONE of those titles. Hm. Perhaps my other entry was still in the running? Or maybe that organization only sent out one rejection per author. Hm. Was I a complete loser? Or just a half loser?

Tuesday afternoon, the mystery was solved. After the final bell, I turned on my phone, and was plugging away doing what I do best, keeping caught up with grading assignments before leaving work for the day. I heard my phone bleep the signal that it had received an email. I knew it. I felt it in my bones. It was that contest. I made myself wait until scores were recorded and entered in the computer. Then I checked.

Oh. Sorry. My piece did not pass through to the final round of the contest. However…they were happy to tell me that my piece had been a semi-finalist. It had clawed its way to the top 20% of all submissions. Good to know. Not quite as uplifting as winning 89^th place in the 80^th annual Writers Digest contest. But a tally in the plus column for Val.

Top 20%. Val is good with math. She knows that 20% is the same as 1/5. And that left over from that 20% is 80%. Which is the same as 4/5. Val was hoisted above 80% of the other entries. For every group of five entries, Val beat out four of them. She and the other 20-percenters breathed the rarefied air on the top of the heap while the rest choked on the smog below. 

So, applying her twisted version of a mathematical formula to that result…Val proclaims that four out of five writing contest judges surveyed think Val is hilarious. The other one, though, says, “Meh.” That other one? Probably laughs uncontrollably at Benny Hill, The Three Stooges, and those Ernest P. Worrell movies from the '80s. Enjoys a different style of comedy than Val's nuanced highbrow prose. That judge would never pick his seat by Val (heh, heh, I said pick his seat) in a two-person audience at a 5000-seat auditorium after the apopadopalyspe. That's okay. Val is pleased just to have been hoisted.

Writing is such a subjective endeavor.