>>66246920Agreed on the hard word limit; it's an overly blunt and simplistic tool to limit scope creep (which was, to be fair, a reason for missed deadlines in the last contest), i.e. it stifles creativity too much for the benefits it has. Maybe categories for longer fics could be worth trying, though.
I feel like the "genre" categories shouldn't be something the fics are sorted into based on tags, because that encourages writing for the categories instead of just doing what you want. It also ends up producing uneven and artificial divides. Instead of making a category for all fics with the "Comedy" tag it might be better to just ask "Out of all the submitted stories, which was the funniest?" in the end.