You Contest - June - Winner: Claire

[PaperDummy]

Congratulations @Claire!

[Claire]

Thank you everyone! I was surprised by how well the story did. I didn't expect for it to get more than 3 or 4 votes. Admittedly, there weren't that many stories to compete against, so that might have helped. I'm glad so many liked it.

I would also like to say that one of the votes for my story came from myself. I usually don't vote for my own stories in contests and told @RapeU that the vote can be removed again after the contest is over. I did it this time to see whether we could bait @LaLia into creating another sockpuppet after we noticed the first one, which she then promptly did. Given the 11 to 4 vote count between the two legitimate stories at the time, I doubted that that one additional vote would matter.

Given the sad circumstances of how this contest ended, I can't say I feel particularly happy about the victory. But I would like to make a suggestion for the next second person contest if there ever is one:

Make it a short story contest. Second person is really hard to write, especially if you want to write something that feels truly like second person and not just like normal third person with a different pronoun. The immediacy and brute force identification of the reader with the protagonist is hard to maintain over time. The longer the story goes on, the more likely it becomes that the reader feels the disconnect between themselves and the addressed "You". Pulling that off for a short story is much easier than for a longer story. So I'm not surprised that we got so few entries for this contest. I'd hope that for a short story version of this contest, we'd get more entries.