Definitions: F, SF, SHM, HM

Hard work and intense determination. Cultivating the ability to reach the point where your surroundings fade completely away.

It's called, THE ZONE! When you enter, you will have many distractions that try to disturb your intimate connection. These you must ignore. 

Only then can you create the ultimate masterpiece.  

Well, essentially, what gets you into the other categories is taking the lessons from why you only got an honourable mention, and then applying them. Beyond that point, it's a graduated pile of highly competitive stories--some will be silver, some semi-finalists, some finalists, and that small handful at the end will be actual prize-winners. But they'll all be competitive entries by that point. In at least some ways, you can think of Silver through to Finalist as the same conceptual heap.

As a note to help clarify why I say this, it's been mentioned before that David Farland has been known to give a story a Silver, rather than a Semi Finalist, not because he thinks it isn't up to the standard of a SF story, but because he hopes to see it revised and resubmitted, and believes the story has finalist potential. So there will be some silvers that may be potentially better stories than the semi-finalists that apparently scored higher than them--which makes deciding the boundary between those layers extremely tricky. And sometimes, what takes a story from Silver to Finalist or a winner's berth may not be as much as you think.

(Note: there are also stories that may fall into Silver because, despite their quality or craftsmanship, they have content that David feels is unsuitable for the anthology. Those stories, it's also been noted, will never score higher than silver--which is a point worth bearing in mind.)

I would say, though, that you should always bear in mind that your story will be in a pile with a lot of other excellent, finely written stories--so you owe it to your entry to ensure that it's in the best shape it can be, and give any judge no trivial reason to cast your story aside in favour of another. When you think it's ready to submit, give it one more read-through, and look for typing errors, punctuation errors, anything at all that might throw a reader out. Make sure that you don't have any weird punctuation resulting from file conversions, anything like that--make sure that you're submitting a story that's both well written and professionally formatted. Those are basic benchmarks that you should assume all the finalists are reaching.

Posted by: @doctorjest

Well, essentially, what gets you into the other categories is taking the lessons from why you only got an honourable mention, and then applying them. Beyond that point, it's a graduated pile of highly competitive stories--some will be silver, some semi-finalists, some finalists, and that small handful at the end will be actual prize-winners. But they'll all be competitive entries by that point. In at least some ways, you can think of Silver through to Finalist as the same conceptual heap.

As a note to help clarify why I say this, it's been mentioned before that David Farland has been known to give a story a Silver, rather than a Semi Finalist, not because he thinks it isn't up to the standard of a SF story, but because he hopes to see it revised and resubmitted, and believes the story has finalist potential. So there will be some silvers that may be potentially better stories than the semi-finalists that apparently scored higher than them--which makes deciding the boundary between those layers extremely tricky. And sometimes, what takes a story from Silver to Finalist or a winner's berth may not be as much as you think.

(Note: there are also stories that may fall into Silver because, despite their quality or craftsmanship, they have content that David feels is unsuitable for the anthology. Those stories, it's also been noted, will never score higher than silver--which is a point worth bearing in mind.)

I would say, though, that you should always bear in mind that your story will be in a pile with a lot of other excellent, finely written stories--so you owe it to your entry to ensure that it's in the best shape it can be, and give any judge no trivial reason to cast your story aside in favour of another. When you think it's ready to submit, give it one more read-through, and look for typing errors, punctuation errors, anything at all that might throw a reader out. Make sure that you don't have any weird punctuation resulting from file conversions, anything like that--make sure that you're submitting a story that's both well written and professionally formatted. Those are basic benchmarks that you should assume all the finalists are reaching.

THIS! **points up** Just all of this, yass!!! **points up emphatically**    

Lol.

~A.

The only thing I’d add to @doctorjest ‘s fantastic summary, is on the point of submitting the most clean story you can. Dave has commented that he lets the first couple of errors through, but after that he sees grammatical or formatting errors as a pattern, which will affect its final standing.