Tag Archives: results

Vanessa Voth Anniversary Photoshoot Contest

I posted about the contest Larissa and I were taking part in to win a photoshoot from Vanessa Voth, the fantastic photographer who did our wedding.

Here’s the update: we won!

The final day of the contest was crazy. We were in the lead to start, and then our competitors put on a big push and took the lead by as many as 15 votes. We went into desperation mode, calling on our friends and family, our Twitter followers, and anyone we could think of to spread the word. We overtook them in the last couple of hours of the contest, and never slowed down after that, eventually winning by over 40 votes.

Thank you so much to everyone who Liked the post, shared the link on Twitter or Facebook, joined the Facebook event, and cheered us on. We couldn’t have done it without all of your help!

I especially want to thank my friends Kathleen DeVere, James Turner, Tally Heilke, and Mike Vardy, all of whom leveraged their own sizable online followings to help us out. I also want to give a shout-out to the LoadingReadyRun forums: the community there was very supportive.

I’m probably missing some other people who I ought to be thanking directly, but we received so much help that it was hard to keep track of it all! Thank you so much to everybody. We can’t wait to do this shoot and share all the beautiful pictures with everyone.

Thank you again to Vanessa for giving us this opportunity. I hope everyone takes a few minutes to look through Vanessa’s blog and appreciate her great work. If you’re in the Vancouver area, we highly recommend using her for your professional photography needs!

50WS Valentine’s Day Contest Overview

Shortly before the release of Fifty-Word Stories: Volume One, I announced that FiftyWordStories.com would be holding a Valentine’s Day contest, where the winner would receive a free copy of my ebook. Today is Valentine’s Day, which means that the contest results have been posted.

Rammy’s winning entry, Sisters, earned the prize by being cute, sweet, and clever. I really like the twist on the “always and forever” phrase, and I’m a sucker for stories that create expectations for the reader and then undermine them, which is something Sisters does very well.

Daniel’s Robot Romance is just really funny, and that’s why I picked it as the first runner up. It’s especially good, I find, when you read the story out loud with a robot voice and a “sassy” voice. The story has earned some legitimate laugh-out-loud moments from people I’ve read it to!

I like the poeticism and originality of Derek Mullanari’s story, Binary Love, which earned the second runner up. I know how tough it is to evoke real emotion in 50 words, and I think Derek did a really good job of it, while using a unique setting and characters.

Beyond these three stories, there were a lot of great entires. In total, 22 different people sent in 29 different stories, which, to me, means the contest was a big success. Thank you so much to everyone who entered! I hope to see more stories from all of you in the future.