[Chris O'Carroll]

Good news and bad news. I'm sorry about the latter.

Vicky understands now that we’re not running a bootleg version of her magazine’s weekly competition. It was important to me to clear up that misperception, so I’m happy that she now sees us as nothing more sinister than, in her words, “an online forum or chatroom where compers talk to each other about the NS comp and give advice to each other about the entries they’re working on.”

But.

She’s not happy about “a number of entries appearing which can be read in advance of the magazine’s publication and the obvious possible overlap with those published in the NS.” So anything posted here ahead of time is going to remain ineligible to appear in the magazine.

Without wanting to get all Pollyanna about the situation, I’m choosing to view this as a victims-of-our-own-success story. If we were posting a bunch of dud entries that didn’t stand a chance, this issue might never have arisen. But there’s the likelihood every week of people being able to read winning entries here before the NS judges have even selected them as winners. And Vicky’s not OK with that.

As baseball fans know, there’s never any point in arguing with the umpire about a called strike, no matter how the pitch looks to us. In short, the prohibition stands. If we want to be in contention at the NS, we can’t showcase or workshop our entries here. That takes the fun out of it for some of you, I know. My apologies for not having been able to negotiate a happier arrangement.