Rising Stars of Manga

[telophase]

The winners of the Rising Stars of Manga competition have been announced. (And maiteoida, who's on my friendslist, got second place! Congratulations!)

They also have announced RSOM 7, which is structured differently, according to genre now.

Comments

[wyrdness.livejournal.com]

I thought Girl/ Boy was a really nice little story, it was so sweet! :)

[telophase.livejournal.com]

It was! And I thought the series-of-vignettes was a cool way to tell it. :)

[maiteoida.livejournal.com]

Thanks! :D (and I don't know if it's just me, but I'm happy that the female-to-male ratio has gone up since last time...XD;; Ahaha)

I'm totally unsure what to make of RSOM 7 though- I wonder what effect that'll have on the entries?

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I think we may be seeing a bit more adherence to traditional genre types from the majority of the entries, but that the top entries will ignore that when creating their stories, pick one that sort-of fits to mark off on the entry form, and then the editors will take their favorites and shove 'em into whatever slots seem to more-or-less fit. XD (See my answer to larsony below for a bit more expanation)

[maiteoida.livejournal.com]

I was actually thinking things would probably turn out like that too, but I don't know...it seems to make work a bit harder for the judges this time around. *lol* Not only do they have to justify why they picked the one they picked, they also have to justify why they thought it fit into whatever genre they placed it in.

[larsony.livejournal.com]

Yes! I lost!

The new thing setup looks... odd. In fact I'd say that I don't like it since I typically don't like genre.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I'd already decided a year ago from looking at the previous winning books that they tried to pick a variety of genres to go into the winning pool, so that entries weren't necessarily competing against everyone else in the competition, but against the other, similar works.

I think that they're just trying to make that explicit now. Mind you, the Entry Form says that the Tpop judges will make the final decision as to genre, and I expect that's precisely so if they have, say, two outstanding Fantasy entrants they can shuffle one over to Action or Drama or whatever fits. I doubt they'd allow a sub-par entry to win just because it happened to be the only halfway-decent Mystery entry if they could somehow shove a better one into that slot. Which fits with all the advice that writers and editors give - that it's really the author's job to write a book and the editor's job to decide the gerne, because it's more a marketing tool than anything else.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I don't think I've seen a single entry that could really be classified as a mystery.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I think it'd be hard to properly set up and solve a mystery in 15-20 pages. You'd have to do some other type of story with the trappings of classic mystery, like a noir or a cozy feel.