A word about JSR Judging...

The Judges' Selection Round (JSR) judging was done anonymously.  Our four judges were provided with the text of a story, as well as story rating and primary pairing (when applicable), but they did not have title or author.

They went through two rounds of judging.  In the first round, they validated the entries; each judge read about sixty fics.  At the end of that round, each judge recommended eight entries to move on to the second round.  From their nominations, we chose their top sixteen stories - there was enough overlap in their nominations that we were able to take each judge's top five selections.

For judging the sixteen stories, they had twenty-four criteria, broken into five categories, by which they judged each story.  The criteria ranged from Writing - Technical Grammar to Emotional Response to Character Depth & Development to a handful of less-weighted criteria such as Quality of Heartfail (if applicable) and Use of Secondary Twilight Characters (if applicable).

The judges wrote their winner blurbs before they knew either story title or author identity, and did not receive a list of titles / authors until all voting, judging, and writing was complete.

For a bit about our personal opinions on Open Voting versus Anonymous Judging, stay tuned for posts from LaViePastiche and Elle.