Update!
Those wonderful, delightful, considerate, and fragrant smelling people at The Times have corrected their mistake. All is well with the world. This blog post is staying merely for #NaBloPoMo.

@edent @nsmale Huge apologies - we misattributed one of our runners-up. The brilliant Disney story is by @edent. Completely our fault! #TCTC

Rupert Murdoch and John Humphrys ⁠owe me £20! In protest, I’m going to quit listening to the Today programme until they pay up and apologise.

The Times has been running a literary competition:

Calling all miniatuarists! Write a short and sweet one-tweet story to enter the Times Cheltenham Twitter Competition. Must end with #TCTC.

Well, I like books, I like twitter, so I thought I’d enter with this little effort.

Once upon a time there was a beautiful Princess. Something morally relevant happened. Then Disney fucked it up to sell toys. The End #TCTC

Pretty good, huh?
Ten minutes later, Nathan Smale re-posted (not retweeted) my story.
Once upon a time there was a beautiful Princess. Something morally relevant happened. Then Disney fucked it up to sell toys. The End #TCTC

To his credit, my story was a full 140 characters and he quickly followed it up with
Last post was a RT of @edent

No big deal, right? The Times published my story as one of their “Best Entries So Far“.

They Got It Right The First Time

They Got It Right The First Time


I was pretty happy and quietly confident that the £140 was mine.
Well, my tweet won a runner-up prize! But The Times credited it to @nsmale – despite earlier crediting it to me!
Miscredited

Miscredited

Nathan Smale is, of course, blameless in all this. To his good credit he hasn’t tried to snaffle my prize and has alerted The Times to their egregious mistake.

I guess it goes to show that the new Retweet Functionality is much needed.

I’ve tweeted and called The Times and I’ll post any follow-up here.

  One Response to “Times Cheltnam Twitter Competition”

  1. [...] I won a £20 Waterstones voucher in the Times’ Cheltnam Microfiction Competition – so the cost for me was £110. You can also sign up to Waterstones’ loyalty card – which will net you 389 points. That’s £3.89 off any subsequent purchase.  At a shade over £100 it’s certainly the cheapest eReader I’ve found.  It lacks some of the features of its high-priced cousins – no wireless, no touch screen, smaller screen.  But, to my mind, that’s not a problem. [...]

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