20 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY december 26, 2024-january 1, 2025 www.montereycountynow.com Free Range The breadth of the human mind never ceases to amaze, even when it’s given limited room to work with. Pictures may be worth 1,000 words, but how inefficient is that? As the following stories prove, you can say much more for a tenth of those words plus one. Our panel of (typically you’ll see the word “esteemed” here, but we deal in facts) judges read through more than 250 submissions, narrowing them down to the three dozen or so you see here, and using a scoring system to determine the top three. Beyond the 101-word limit, authors also had to use the word “free” or its derivatives somewhere in the story. And they did, whether once or 31 times. -Erik Chalhoub Judges: Erik Chalhoub, Erik Cushman, Alexis Estrada, Dave Faries, Karen Loutzenheiser, Linda Maceira, Keely Richter 101-Word Short Story Contest Illustration by Chiara Xie
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