After 869,890 characters worth of reading (that's about 500 book pages!), reflecting, rechecking, scoring, comparing and finally calculating results, I have places for all the 62 who have taken part in the "Investigations" fiction event (and actually stayed within the 7 days I set myself as a limit for grading GJW6 stuff, too).

Congratulate Dark Jedi Knight Raken on a well deserved win - if any place was clear after the first read (2nd to 16th were far more troublesome to decide). If this story and the GNs from the Clan Feud are any indication, this member will get very far in terms of winning DB writing contests.

As usual, all results including Clan placings, Novae and grades down to the very last place can be found on the GJW6 results page.

A few things I have found that you should remember for future events:

• A half page doesn't get longer for double-spacing lines. Really.

• Spellchecking is good, but please let a human do it. I'm relatively lenient on spelling errors (in fact, I docked a maximum of 0.2 marks for spelling problems), but in a field as tight as this, 0.2 marks can mean 5 places. And while spellcheckers do give you correct words, they quite often don't give you the word you really wanted. I had a few really funny cases of "that's not what you meant to write".

• A story needs a beginning, a middle and an ending. Many ended in the middle (Hint: start your earnest writing efforts a day or two earlier - then you actually get there, too).

• The most frequent problem: in an investigation / mystery story like this, you should not only write about the discoveries that actually get you somewhere. Suspense is created by plot twists, red herrings and things that are not what they seem. This is really what separated the top 16 from the rest.

• And if you are good at humor, don't be afraid to use it. While there weren't any humor stories in the top 3, quite a few of the further places used humor to great effect.

That said - I was once again impressed with the average standard of writing. The things I got to read are far superior to what I got to see in prior GJWs and the vast majority of stories were actually an entertaining read, not a chore. Congratulations to all for having my judging task such a difficult one - I'd have loved to give more Novae and placings than I had available for sure. And thanks again to Muz for helping in the initial process of separating the top 25 (with a chance at placing) from the rest :)

PS: If you wonder about the Clan scores changing - there have been updates to the XvT and XWA events. A few players have submitted files that, upon analysis with a different viewer, showed a higher score (my viewer missed some data. And yes, Xanos analyzed these files to verify they were accurate). That was fixed with this score release. No Novae changed because of this.