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  TITLE: Wynths' Complete Blurbcon 2026 Review!
  Author: Wynths
  Word Count: 9140 words
  I am normally a fiction writer; this is not what I normally write. If you would like to read some of my stuff, consider checking out my author page! I have another article on the Backrooms Wiki — Selenophilia — if you would like to keep on-site. It won Critic's Choice and all :)
  Hey! One more thing, before you go…
  Thanks for reading!

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  rating: +21+–x

My name is Wynths, and for today's lesson in Backrooming 101, we're going to go over every single entry into the latest contest by our awesome Backrooms Wiki staff¹…

Blurbcon2026!^ⓘBlurbcon2026The /x/ post that started everything is, unfortunately, not CC. So, out with the old, in with the new! But how do we decide what to replace our motto with… How about a contest!-

But first, let's establish the criteria by which we'll grade everyone's work.

Language: Everything related to what's literally on the page will go here! I'm thinking about the structure of your piece — why do you need 3 short paragraphs when one long one suffices? I'm thinking about the prose of your piece — why is it that I forget what you said 5 seconds after I read the next Blurb? I'm thinking about the prosody of your piece — how does it feel to say it out loud; do you have a good grasp of plosives and pauses? And, of course, I'm thinking about SPaG a little, though I won't dock any points unless it's clear you didn't even try, y'all li'l knuckleheads :)

Theming: As I'm reading, I want to think about what the piece is saying. This is separate from being a good website hook: I think a good Blurb also works as a good piece of microfiction², and as a piece of microfiction, I think that you should have some sort of overarching image or message that goes beyond the mere text on the page and actually makes an impression on the reader. A great example of this is the piece Afterhours Ending^ⓘLevel 81 - "Afterhours Ending"The bustle of the office ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎peters out ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎into soft old blankets,‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎
and the scent of lemon balm.- by my good author-friend centurys lute. Long after I read it, I remembered the semi-professional anthology aesthetic, yes, and the coziness of the language, but I also recalled the overall theme of Rest, of Benevolence offered in the Boundless Void of Space that is the Backrooms. You don't need to summon up the spirit of a 160 word poem in 80 or so words, but something like that being present will absolutely net you some points.

Blurbiness^TM: In addition to being good fiction, a Blurb should serve to hook in readers. I can't believe I have to say that, but since even I forgot about the intended audience while writing my Blurb, it's clear that we need to keep Blurbiness^TM in mind as we sort through the results. How would I feel if I was a kid on Reddit or Discord who stumbled across an article from the Backrooms Wikidot, and after being confused for a moment, went to the front page of the site for some insight. Would a poem or a concise explanation be better for me to read? This aspect of rating is inherently going to be biased, as someone who does know what the Backrooms is, but I will do my best to keep it in mind as we trawl along.

Novelty: Lastly, I have to award bonus points to entries that I feel do a good job of separating themselves from the pack, whether it be in Blurbiness^TM, theming, or even just having more skilled prose than I'd expect.

Now, without any further ado — there are 40 of these, it's long enough as it is :-) — let's begin!

So, right off the bat, we're already able to establish a common theme throughout these blurbs: they're very poetic. Of course, this is to be expected on a website filled with nerds that love creative writing, but for a technical and precise job such as blurb-building, creativity is something of a detriment. Remember: our job is to hook in someone who's never heard of this "Backrooms" thing before.

If our job was to advertise it on Instagram, well, I'm sure this poem here, with its competent use of prosody and repeated-to-the-point-of-being-detrimental use of the theme of "nobody", would do well! But this thing is going to be on our site, and we need them to click on it to get them reading the rules, and then joining a Discord, and then reading rules and regulations! You can't expect people to want to do about ten minutes' worth of effort and key-clacking when you haven't given them a concrete hook, and so despite the good use of nobility and imagery³, I cannot give this one higher than C.

This is a good piece of poetry, but it is very clearly not written for or intended to possess any Blurbiness^TM whatsoever, which I have to dock a couple points for. Additionally, the poem itself could be improved. Consider the lines: "And while I got out of my bed / There was a torrent of snow". Are we meant to take this literally? Well, the poem is framed as a literal recounting of events, but this obviously makes no sense, the speaker doesn't have a bed out in a snowy field. This mismatch — with some events being starkly literal and others feeling like they're bent in order to force the AAB-ABC rhyme scheme — makes the poetry feel a little amateurish to me, as though the author was more concerned about making lines work at times than evoking a particularly interesting scene or turn of phrase.

This is also why I — as someone who isn't that versed in poetry, so don't take my word as gospel — usually advocate for people to master regular prose before tackling poetry. There is a world of difference between writing good prose and making poetry, as the added effect of prosody and meter and the endless complications of dealing with spoken-word work (which I believe all poetry should be able to double as) make poetry a different, and in my opinion tougher beast. Still, I can't knock the effort put into this one, so I'd put this at the top of C tier.

This Blurb doesn't do much of anything. It has a couple little hooks with "place of despair" and "damned prison", but it portraying the Backrooms as a totally negative place negates any interesting things you can do with it. It's a one-dimensional portrait of this setting that fails to get me interested in what the Backrooms Wiki has to offer. D tier.

This has some potential, but in its current state, this doesn't really compel me. While it sets up an Earth-Backrooms dynamic, with personification of the two settings that is unique to this piece, it doesn't pay it off with any real depth, and the piece does suffer from SPaG issues that might otherwise make it appear more professional. Additionally, the piece is incredibly vague as to the actual nature of the Backrooms, with "a fight for resources" making it appear more like some wild, untamed wilderness than a set of liminal areas. It doesn't really have the Backrooms in mind, just a subsection, which to me justifies a D ranking.

This piece doesn't do anything novel, nor does it have particularly strong language, but it is a good summary of the Backrooms, and the vague allusion to things and to other characters is a step up from some other Blurbs. In my view, it's enough to carve out a decent C tier.

This is where I exercise my right to be subjective. On the one hand, the prose isn't too good — wanting for word/sentence variety and strong images — but on the other hand, I think the idea of this one is just really cool. I love the idea of introducing the Backrooms not with a spooky setting or a spooky monster, but a spooky life. The idea of people gone, people who are physically alive but nominally eradicated through their no-clipping adventures, is the one that originally got me into Backrooms sloptube as a kid. If I were a child encountering this, I would be curious about the site and I probably would click through, which despite its mediocre execution, is a virtue that takes this into B tier.

It would have worked on me, so I can't justify putting it any lower.

This is a good passage of prose, but it fails on the Blurbiness^TM front. For one, it needlessly introduces the reader into the short passage, when it could have been revealed or used as some sort of stinger for more subconscious oomph. Also, it references Level 0 and monsters and such without even granting the possibility of further expansion on the Backrooms as a concept — a flaw that many Blurbs suffer from. Combined with its formulaic nature, the half-decent prose just doesn't save this from being, in my opinion, a D tier.

Yeah, in case it wasn't clear, I love this. I don't think it works as a Blurb, but this might be one of the strongest pieces of fiction in general to come out of this contest. It feels so goddamned real, you can't help but wonder who it was that wrote it, it makes amazing use of word economy, it's fantastic writing overall. It is effervescently, effortlessly great.

This one is curious: it has a good plan, and a bit of a plot, but I feel that it is bogged down by both a lack of authorial experience and lived experience. Let me elaborate:

I appreciate the way that this piece wants to set up a defined speaker with a backstory, and I think that subverting the audience's expectations of horror by pointing out the nostalgia and protostalgia that the Backrooms' a e s t h e t i c is predicated on is actually good. It's nice to have a break from horrorslop, you could say. On the other hand, I just think this piece doesn't have the writing necessary to back up its lofty goals. Its short length means that we don't really get a good emotional grasp on the speaker, despite them directly telling us about themselves, and the references to how horrific the creatures are make the idea of "nostalgia" as a dominant emotion unfounded in the text, even if it might be more of an established theme on-site. Remember: we're writing a blurb, not merely microfiction! On that front, I think the piece is just too short to be able to narratively support itself, and it comes off sounding like an overeager movie introduction instead of a stand-alone piece of fiction.

For that reason, despite its ambitions, I've placed it in D.

There isn't a lot of development with this Blurb, and while the emphasis on the inhabitants of the Backrooms being, first and foremost, victims is something that might be the seed for a longer-form work, I think that in this shortform form it doesn't do that much to explore the victim-angle — nor can it — and so it ends up just taking space away from the Blurb being able to do its primary job: sell people on the Backrooms. Nothing else in the piece is really interesting, and so this one gets a D from me.

Despite being incredibly slow with the listing of its descriptions, something which I think is directly anti-Blurb⁴, I think the specificity of the prose combined with the final two lines being incredibly honest in their depiction of the speakers' miserable situation makes this piece warrant a C.

How many more Blurbs will I have to chastise for using the same imagery and the same formatting as the Primordial /x/ Blurb?⁵

Besides that, there isn't anything that's going on in the piece. It was very clearly scribbled down for fun⁶, and I can't suggest much more than to start over and keep writing. That's going to be a recurring theme with some of these Blurbs.

D tier.

This piece feels like it was written primarily to be spoken aloud — it has a curious verbal legend feel about it that I can't quite nail down, but which probably has something to do with the specific choice of adjectives. I don't personally like it, nor do I think that it does a good job of actually introducing readers to the hundreds of millions of square miles⁷, but I think it undoubtedly avoids D tier and is instead a C.

This one feels like it's the intro to a game or something, that's the extent to which it abuses the second-person! The thing that I feel is critical to remember when addressing the audience in your work is that you can't get too specific.

Writing, as Stephen King once said, is magic: it relies on the audience knowing less about the subject than you, so that you can pull tricks like good sentence construction and good phraseology and creative imagery, and have them be maximally effective.⁸ With this piece, I feel like the "you" is treated like any other character, and it works to the detriment of the Blurb. I do appreciate the sneaky introduction of Backrooms as a keyword — it's the classiest intro out of the entire contest base, in my opinion — but classiness doesn't overcome a broken trick.

By being too specific about the speakers' actions while addressing the audience directly, combined with generic language that doesn't offer any real stand-out spots, this piece finds its way into a D.

This Blurb doesn't have a lot going on. It's just kind of there. D tier, I would advise the author to write more so that I can have something to chew on instead of just saying "That's it?"

Yeah, an S tier for the GPD Blurb. What can I say? Sometimes the boilerplate is exactly what you need. It's boring, it doesn't play any narrative tricks, but it also doesn't fuck around. It delivers the information it needs to and it does it well. Realistically, this is the one that should be on the site.

But we won't stop our Blurbs here!

Without the catchiness of the other super-short entry, and due to it just spamming keywords related to the Backrooms, this piece is a D. It's so short I can't even really crit it, it's just. Like. There.

This piece does not feel like its short 86-word length. This is not a good thing for it.

Now, I do think that it does the best job out of the Level 0 Blurbs in summoning an image, and I do think that it's pretty strong as a piece of fiction… but this isn't a Blurb^TM. Blurbs are more than just a literary hook — they should work to sell the entire site, they should work to show what makes this site great beyond a couple of well-worn scenes that everyone in the Backroom Wiki's intended audience has seen or read many times before. It's competently written, but without anything to give an added twist, I feel like this is solidly B tier.

This is another Blurb that is better when absorbed through sound than through text. I can tell the author thought a lot about how their punctuation would help people sound it out — the ellipsis is the most clear example, with it presenting a cliché "X is… [something with a neutral connotation that is made to feel bad because of the pause]. I like the effort put into the meter of the piece.

However, I don't like the rest of this Blurb. It's overlong, it's generic in its mechanical description of the Backrooms, and its stinger doesn't really get me because the text and prose aren't polished enough to support the Spooky Angle that the stinger tries to take with the implication of death. This might be good in a longer format, but this specific Blurb just doesn't really hit me where it matters. C tier.

Alright, listen. I'm in the business of giving people crit, and this article is meant to highlight the flaws in people's Blurbs while also being fun and interesting and a light read… but this is probably a kid's work. You and I both know that. You and I also know that everyone needs to write a First Thing, and so even if it might have some grammar issues and has a bad tone and is weirdly written or whatever… let's let this one slide, on the house :)

It can just sit in D tier.

This avoids a lot of the pitfalls that batter other Blurbs that try to summon the image of the Primordial /x/ Blurb. Its language is direct and blunt, maximizing on Blurbiness^TM and minimizing prose to the benefit of this piece. Its pacing is extremely quick, and although I have to dock points for being derivative in its details and conception, I think that if you want a variation on the Primordial /x/ Blurb, you could do a hell of a lot worse.

B tier.

This Blurb is fundamentally arrogant, introducing lore and leaning on the video-game terminology present in the original Blurb for literally no reason. Who asked this kid to reinvent Backrooms lore on the front page of the Backrooms website, for people who won't get any sense of what this site is actually like from these bland 4 lines? The pathos whose introduction is attempted is weak because we don't get a sense of who these "developers" are — are they angels? Are they object spirits? It doesn't matter, they're sorry, and they introduce only the vaguest sense of "Oh, there's forces for good and forces for evil in this wide story!" before they fuck off to the spirit realm whence they came. The tricks with prosody are unnecessary and serve only as a smokescreen to hide a lack of substantive prose and information. You can't do this, this text will gate keep the entire site!

Millions of people will turn to you for guidance, and you yap about bullshit. Below D-tier for you.

I was strongly split between A-tier and B-tier for this piece, but I do think the language of the piece carries it into A. There are some cheeky points to be gained from sneaking in details from the original Blurb without evoking the feel of the original — something many blurbs struggled with in the context — but, by laser-focusing on Level 0 and the emotional reaction one had to liminality, it excludes other settings and other feelings, something which I feel works to the piece's detriment. I also don't think the contrasts provided are that good, and stinger isn't as effective as it could be.

But! Keep in mind, this list is something that is very subjective, and when I read this, I see a good author's appreciation for the piece that got them interested in creative writing. It plays with the original Blurb in a unique way, making it much more about the reader and keeping the physical nature of the Backrooms to something like an afterthought. I feel like whoever wrote this has a good understanding of the pathos behind the Backrooms, and frankly, I think this Blurb excels at being a love letter to the Backrooms as a concept. I appreciate that enough about it to give it an A.

If this were 2020 I would say that this was an excellent Blurb to sum up the writing philosophy of the site. This site being rooted in a board legendary for creepypasta makes this Blurb, which is pretty explicitly designed to make the Backrooms appear like a horror anthology of some sort rather than a general writing platform, seem… quaint. Like, yes, we have got Scary Sights^TM here, but you can sit for tea as well! You can have tragedy and comedy and action and really weird shit on this site.

The blurb is competently written, if a little cliche, but it is for an entirely different website. C tier.

I'll be honest, I thought this one was unfinished when I first read it, and I can't shake the feeling that something foul is a foot regarding this entry. Regardless, I'll judge it as it is, and in this hyper-short state, I think… it's fine. I rate this C tier — it's inoffensive, and I do like that it doesn't make any mention to Level 0, but there's nothing that buoys this Blurb above the noise. It is boring and inoffensive to a fault — you want to challenge your readers, and this does not do that.

the striking stylization of this thing belies a strong image and construction. in under a hundred words, it feels like a whole story is told: we get met by this laid-back, seasoned voyager; we travel throughout the land, realizing how badly we've been fucked; we realize how excellent death sounds as we see the elusive, monstrous figures in the deep.

it fucks insanely hard, and though it might not be the best blurb, i think that if you quizzed people on what movie intro would best represent the backrooms, some a-list actor reading out this a-tiered blurb would come to mind. you go, whoever wrote this!

This is just generic. I wish I could say anything more, anything specific that is definitely wrong with it, but this just comes off incredibly generic. I will say that by constantly implementing prosodic tricks, to my ear, it comes off as being… over-engineered? Like it passed through a dozen authors, each of them making "helpful" suggestions until it lost its authorial voice all-together and became a marketable melting pot, worthy more of being in the opening credits of a Slopwood movie than a blurb for a writing website whose only credential is sincerity.

Tyrants? What tyrants do we have in the Backrooms — when did this site become a place for history and character arcs rather than a place for flash fiction and setting-building? Ceaseless disorder? There are many peaceful levels in this outlandish complex, many simple tales and characters; you cannot speak on it being endless nothingness, you are lying to the kid who would have found this Blurb in another universe and thought of it as a sandbox for nonsense.

This piece isn't bad language-wise, but I find it bereft of any real theming or character. D tier.

This Blurb might be B- or even A- tier if it weren't for one issue: there's no stakes!

It does a good job describing the backstory to the Blurb, it does a good job telling the reader upfront that shit is fucked up woahhh, but there isn't any real emotional oomph behind that realization. Part of the appeal of the Backrooms is that it is an inherently hostile environment — whether it's your own mind playing tricks on you through the bastardizing effects of Liminality, or monsters who would like to Eat You — and (pretty much) any good Blurb will make some sort of reference towards danger. To me, this thing just… doesn't have anything. Without that grounding effect, these words just roll off of me: they're competent, yeah, but they're ultimately just empty calories, no emotional-nutritional core to them.

Thus, C tier.

+1 for using the phrase "light work" in this contest. A W for confidence!

Anyways, I think the piece does try something a little neat — a two-act structure, with the stinger being a bridge rather than an evocative ending line — but it, and I don't know how this is possible, comes off extremely Hollywood, in the sloppiest way. The mentions of probability and the vague, non-exciting references to the reader don't serve to invigorate me in any way, and frankly, the "Welcome to the Backrooms" feels like an afterthought. It has the same energy to me as a bumper sticker featuring a Plato quote — D tier. For everyone reading: improve your general grasp of prose and general story structures before trying to get into abstract ideas, before trying to *wow* the audience. No one wants to hear someone wax philosophical when they can't even wax slice-of-life.

Hey, this isn't TagCon2026! This is a Blurb competition, get back here!

On a more serious note, I do have to complain about the shocking minimalism of this Blurb. I think it's novel, and I think that it does do a great job of summing up the Backrooms in 6 words, but that's the thing: In 6 words, you can hardly do anything¹⁰ and the rules are much more relaxed. Here, where we at least have the benefit of a few seconds of attention, we should be aiming to be a bit more lush, a bit more convincing than "Fractal realities."

Still, I really like this 6-word tagline, and it's going to reflect in my ranking. It rolls off the tongue super easily, with a nice distribution of plosives, and it plays with alliteration well, juxtapositioning the two contradictory concepts of "finite" and "fractal" together. It's the kind of thing I would expect to see at the top of the back of a book, or maybe thrown into an article as a Crom description, and I think it should get some credit for that. As a result, I'll give it B.

I have mixed feelings on this piece.

I personally think that the YA-like feel of it actually plays, in a really subtle and interesting way, to the general feel of a lot of literature on this website. It is clear with many high-concept pages such as ReyDay's INFINITY^ⓘINFINITYORIGINALITY IS DEAD. ALL IS HOPELESS. ALL IS FUTILE. that the authors are learning and experimenting as much as the readers are (at least, intended to be) while reading the piece. This is not the place for polished and artisanal work, the kind that would be at home in an S&S or HarperCollins agent's inbox¹¹ — this is for the people in high school and the early days of college who are passing their days loving English, and viewed through that lens, I can't knock pieces that press on this dynamic, as much as they might be a bit rough around the edges.

Do I think this could use a bit more specificity? Well, yeah, it only really references Level 0, even though it does make sure to point out that 0 is not the only level the Backrooms Wiki has to offer. Could it have a stronger ending? Of course, but I think that this ending is enough, especially keeping in mind the context: a quick glance, a quick thought, a quick procrastinator's impulse. And it does play around with words quite a bit, being satisfying to read out loud.

I don't think it's the best thing here, but I do think you could sure as hell do a lot worse, and something about the way it is written makes me think that it hits on a nebulous, but very present, aspect of the amateur writing part of the "amateur writing community" label the Backrooms Wiki has. For that reason, I give it a B.

I… think this piece is trying for something. I'll give it that. However, I have some issues with the way the 3 rules are executed:

• There is tons of slice-of-life fiction and things that aren't necessarily pushing the bounds of literature or genre or sensitivity on this site, and this doesn't really give credence to those with its "Expect nothing!" and "Fear nothing!"
• The pretty yellow walls aren't the only thing on this site, and if you're someone who is only a little familiar with the Backrooms, the idea that Level 0 is all the concept has to offer… I'm not sure about you, but that wouldn't get me to click and see what's up.
• It's not really a Blurb: it's in the word range for one, but its framing sets it up as though it has a lot more content to offer, and it serves as a bit of an amateur story hook rather than an amateur writing site hook, the way that it attempts to cohesively explain the Backrooms to the reader, not giving any credence to the myriad directions the concept can go.

With these issues elucidated, I think I can comfortably rate this D tier.

It's another piece that goes back to Level 0 and the original Blurb. This one does involve you a bit, which is nice — get those immersion muscles working! — but outside of that, this is quite standard, almost to the point of boilerplate. There's little attempt to give memorable prose, it doesn't seem like prosody is given consideration, and the stinger at the end is neither evocative or new. Another D tier.

This is yet another piece that harkens back to the classic Level 0, and does so without putting any sort of new spin or thought on it… tisk, I'm sorry, but this isn't really novel, I'ma have to not give any points on that front. Still, it isn't the worst. In using the word "noclip", it — likely unintentionally — gives a little mystery to the reader: "What was noclipped? What does that even mean for the real world?"

It's a bit unmemorable, with its descriptions going over, again and again, the fact that the place Feels Like It Should Have People And Doesn't, toying with the idea of Liminality without really dipping its toes in it. It's inoffensive, yes, but it's so inoffensive that I don't think I'll remember it even before I post this article onto the site.

As a result, I have to put this solidly in D.

For starters: The language which this manages to pack in a mere 85 words is insane! "dead mall razed to the ground" elicits a striking image of American development which doubtless rests in the memories of many who will come across this particular passage, and which has probably been culturally osmosisised¹² by our fellow authors and readers who aren't in the US. Evoking the afterlife really serves to heighten the theme of this piece: that there are places that are dead, places you've likely been to before, and they present a danger beyond the occasional natural hazard or sickly animal. No, they are alive, and they might just subsume you, ""the unlucky wanderer". It does all of this while being insanely Blurbable^TM, with the whole thing being a paragraph and a stinger sentence that's over before you even realized you were reading a carefully constructed fishhook of a piece.

Great job, whoever wrote this one. It goes in S.

Alright, this is perhaps the definition of "I see the vision, but…". On the one hand, the contradictions that are presented by this "It isn't-" root spam serves as a bit of hook, and spoken aloud, it does sound pretty interesting.

However, this won't be spoken aloud, this will be read. In literary form, this comes off as being entirely Too Much^TM in my opinion: A Blurb should be easily digestible, and this Blurb invites you to come and think about it for a minute, which isn't conducive to hooking people. It also takes up entirely too much real estate on the screen, with the line breaks making this thing stretch out and feel longer than 85 words¹³. For this bloat, and for the vagueness of what it presents in its poetic statements, I cannot give this higher than C tier.

Finally, the final one! I thought I'd never see the day…

This reminds a lot of Blurb 38 in how it tackles the idea of existence leading into the Backrooms through error, but this doesn't give reality the same agency or use the same evocative liminal imagery that 38 has. Also, "There are so many ways to be lost" just isn't as good as a stinger: it doesn't directly involve the reader. Remember: if you want the reader to directly feel something, and you're working with a hard word count, the best thing to do is to literally address the reader directly. When done tastefully, the reader won't be privy to the perspective shift, and it will instead wedge itself instantly as a Final Line, something to really chew on.

38's allusion to animate, hostile, intelligent danger is a good example of what to wedge into the reader, but this stinger only alludes to… being lost? In a weird place?? And there's only "forsaken things"??? Man, get the fuck outta here, I can take whatever this place throws at me!

Outside of that, I think the actual construction of the Blurb is… fine. It's perfectly serviceable for what it does and sets the tone, if in a predictable way. It goes firmly in B.

…Alright, that was a lot of content. If you skipped down here from the Table of Contents, if your eyes glazed over at the impenetrable wall of text, hopefully…

can provide a little respite :-)

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CONGRATULATIONS TO EVERYONE WHO PARTICIPATED IN BLURBCON2026! THIS PIECE IS MEANT TO BRING SOME ATTENTION TO EVERYONE'S ENTRIES; SOME FUN MAY HAVE BEEN HAD, BUT I HOPE IT'S CLEAR THAT IT'S IN GOOD SPIRITS! GOOD CONTEST AND GOOD GAME :D

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Footnotes

1. Please free me from the #sandbox-forum basement Praetor.

2. Fiction below 500 words

3. Bonus points for "duchies", I had to look that one up-

4. To shame, I tell you, no one wants to be anti-blurb >:(

5. I think I might be taking this terminology a bit too far.

6. directly antithetical to the site, no big author ever has fun BTW trust 🥺

7. Miles of what??

8. I know that's not really the point that King is trying to make in On Writing — it's more of a point about the permanence of the written word — but shhhh I can do what I want fuck off

9. Yes, CamaradeAlbabar does actually Regret writing this.

10. Unless you're Hemingway, I guess :T

11. Although, to be clear, I sure as hell cannot make anything worthy of that privilege… yet.

12. Is that a word? I hope it is, osmosis-ised is rad.

13. Yes, it's the same as the last one. Feel the difference in pacing now?