First Annual Blog Awards (Q1)

I'm proud to have maintained this blog, analyzing the stories and offering my opinions and advice, for thirteen years. That's a good chunk of time! And the format and contents of the blog have remained mostly the same.

This year, however, I decided to change it up by giving out quarterly awards of merit. I thought it would be fun to recognize and celebrate stories that excelled in the following categories: 

Best Hero

Best Heroine

Cutest Meet

Most Original Premise

Wittiest

Couple Most Likely to Wed

Best Overall

It is now my pleasure to bestow the awards.

Our Best Hero this quarter is a man who isn't afraid to try new things. Admirable, right? He's also able to admit when he's made a mistake--another great quality. In fact, he does it in the story twice. He tends to look on the bright side, even after his girlfriend broke up with him on the night he was going to propose. And when he meets the heroine of the story, he doesn't hesitate to ask her out for coffee.

The Best Hero for Q1 of 2022 is 

The Best Heroine this quarter is a woman who serves her community as a policewoman, so she's strong and brave. But she's had to build some walls to protect herself because many of the men she's dated have been intimidated because she carries a gun. She also deals with her mother's matchmaking machinations with wit and patience.

The Best Heroine for Q1 of 2022 is

The Cutest Meet occurred in a beauty salon, traditionally a female-dominated venue. So it's not surprising that the hero entered with trepidation, especially considering he was hiding an "at-home haircut gone terribly wrong." Lucky for him, his stylist is just his type.

The Cutest Meet for Q1 of 2022 is

The winner of the next category was actually the inspiration for these awards. After I read it, it was so good I thought it and all the other outstanding stories deserved some recognition. I think, however, next year, I'll do them bi-annually so there are more stories from which to choose.

It's challenging to come up with a holiday-themed plot we haven't seen before, but the author of this quarter's Most Original Premise winner succeeded in a big way. The story is built around a town tradition--at the stroke of midnight instead of a disco ball, they drop an old boot from a crane to honor the farmers in the area. They also hold an Ugly Boot Contest which was a hoot. I'd never seen anything resembling either of these events before in Woman's World.

The winner of the Most Original Premise for Q1 of 2022 is 

The winner of Wittiest Story had me laughing throughout. In fact, I wrote LOL three times in the margins of the story as I read it. The first LOL came from the heroine's inner thoughts. She's a cop about to suffer through a matchmaking dinner her mom set up.

[My mother] eyed me with disapproval. "Why are you in uniform?"

"I'm on call." And if I got lucky, I'd be called to a crime scene any second now.

LOL number two came about because the hero and heroine played Prince Phillip and Princess Aurora in their third grade school play. Their performance had been hilariously memorable because "instead of pretending to kiss me, like we had rehearsed, he planted a smack on my mouth on opening night." The princess yelled "Yuck!" much to the audience's amusement.

Fast forward to the present. Dinner is over and Matchmaking Mom has insisted they enjoy the fresh air...

We settled onto the front porch swing. 

"So," Max said, breaking the silence, "act in any plays lately?"

I grimaced. "So you do remember."

His chuckle made my pulse beat erratically.

"Are you referring to what my family calls 'The Yuck Heard Round the World?"

That last line had me literally laughing out loud.

The winner of Wittiest Story for Q1 of 2022 is

It's difficult to predict whether or not our fictional couples will end up married, especially since all I have to work with is 800 words of interaction. But one couple stood out to me as having the best chance for wedded bliss, if only because they'd both suffered through relationships with people who clearly weren't right for them. I have to assume that, having had this experience, they ended up with a better understanding of what they were looking for.

Therefore, the Couple Most Likely to Marry for Q1 of 2022 is

That brings us to our last award this quarter--The Best Overall Story. To determine the winner in this category, I didn't add up any scores, and I didn't automatically go with the story that won in a majority of categories. I chose the story that provided me with the best overall reading experience, the one that had me laughing and smiling after I read it, my mood happily boosted! It was written by someone who has skillfully penned so many romances for Woman's World, she's practically a household name. (I'm serious. Check the sidebar for Author: Cooper and you'll see what I mean.) 

And the story she wrote had it all--great, three-dimensional characters, a hilarious backstory, humor by the truckload and an ending that not only was an epilogue (which I love in novels and in short stories) it brought the story full circle by calling back to the yucky kiss joke. As you've probably guessed by now...

The Best Overall story for Q1 of 2022 is

I hope you enjoyed these inaugural awards as much as I did giving them out.

I want to thank all the authors, my blog visitors, and especially Woman's World who publishes short romantic fiction that entertains us and lifts our spirits every week. 

Look for the Q2 awards in June. I'll be adding a category--Best Secondary Characters!