A note about anonymity

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 165

As is the practice with most writing contests, we judge entries anonymously. Since ours is a fee-free online contest, we have the luxury of requiring that very little identifying information be attached to each entry.

But what if that one piece of information—your email address—compromises your anonymity? If your real name is embedded in your email address, should you open up a new Hotmail account and go incognito?

Of course you can, but you really needn’t bother. That is, unless you’re someone we know—a friend, relative, or former student, say. That’s the point of anonymity, to keep us from being biased in case anyone we know should ever enter.

Rest assured, if your name appears in your email address, we don’t Google you, or keep track of whether you’ve emailed us a question, or keep up with whether you’ve entered before, or really pay much attention to the address at all.

Like I’ve said before, I record the addresses when the entries come in, but when our reading period begins, we honestly don’t pay attention to the address on the entry. So don’t worry about going to a lot of trouble to establish a secret identity. At least not for our sakes.