Whatever Happened To Baby BMSE?

Did you read that last post? I can't let Big be the only one painting his face with shame. Not when it's my fault the Broken Mirror Story Event still has no winner or announcement.

You see, a couple of months back, when we promoted Suddendeath Nicole to Submissions Editor, she wondered what to do about the Broken Mirror stories (which, you may recall, are a pseudocontest we do on the show every year where people can submit stories with the same fixed premise). Big told her to take care of those herself, but that he and I wanted to read the submissions too. So, she took all the entries, cut the name of the author off, and sent them out to a number of readers. Each reader went through and gave them a number grade between 1 and 10, and if they're like me, wrote a few words about what they enjoyed or didn't like. When all the reviews came in, Nicole would average out the scores, and viola, we'd have our winner.

But the days turned into weeks, the weeks turned into months, and the months turned into . . . hours, for some reason. And it just so happens that everybody–even lazy old Big Anklevich–had submitted their scores, and the only one who hadn't . . . was Richie Doody Outfield.

I don't know why it was so hard for me to get through them. It should have been fun. After all, this was my premise, and even if I wasn't personally able to come up with a good take on the idea (I wrote up a whole list of possibilities; I might even share it on the show), I could enjoy what other talented, hard-working people managed to pull off.

But one of the first submissions on my desk was my own. And I thought, "Last year, I recused myself from rating my own story high, since I didn't want to seem like a cheater, only to find that Big gave himself an 11. That can't happen again."

But instead of moving on, I moped around the house feeling sorry for myself for, well, a decade, more or less, and got no work done.

This is why we had such a long response time before we brought Nicole onboard.* It's difficult to be an editor, to read someone else's work, decide whether to accept it or reject it, and worse, decide the whys and the hows. I always struggled with coming up with things I liked about particularly bad stories, and conversely, with reasons I didn't want to take the pretty good ones. Not to mention the time(s) I sent my thoughts about a story to the author, thinking I was saying it to Big Anklevich. Whoops.

I vowed to Big last week that I would finish up all the submissions and get my scores to Nicole, so we could move on and let people know where they stand. But having said that, I found myself seriously unwilling to read them (even though there were only three left). I'm stubborn that way, and it's got to be one of the main reasons I'm as unsuccessful in life as I am.

But as of yesterday, I finally finished them (and the last one I read was particularly enjoyable), and sent off my thoughts. I imagine that means she's already got the scores all calculated, and we can start the lengthy process of doing them on the show.

I've met a couple of new voice actors recently who will probably do good things when we start handing them out. It would be fun to have different people produce each of the Broken Mirror finalists, just to make them all the more different from one another.

But those are decisions for another day. Right now, I must decide if I will get up and do something productive this afternoon.

It doesn't look good.

That was only a joke about the eleven, by the way. He gave himself a fourteen.

Rish "More-Broken-Than-Usual Mirror" Outfield

*Oh, and let me say that she has been tireless, and (mostly) cheerful, taking over a sweaty, thankless job for absolutely no pay and only the most minor appreciation from people like me. Without Nicole, our final episode would have probably already aired . . . even if we hadn't recorded it yet.