Winner- and Top Commenters

September Contest Winner

Thanks for bringing back the contest with a bang, my friends! Six people actually entered. I know that represents a larger number who were thinking about it but got sidetracked. Having that critical mass is important.

Entries came from (in order received):
John- English Wilderness
kwattro- anong lasa?
Chuck- Secondary Roads
Emma/ Ratty- Nature Center Magazine
Ann- Ann's Snap & Edit
Ivy- Spinning Lovely Days

Everyone found all the clues and got the correct objects. Of the six entries, two people didn't include the location of the praying mantis in the picture. Here it is!



The remaining four entries then went to the tiebreaker essay. To decide the winner, I called in some help from my friends on the Accentuate Writers Forum. Don't panic... they know that this was just a fun game. No one was judged on a professional writing scale. I just asked them to pick the essay they enjoyed the most. Unanimously, the winner is...

Chuck! of Secondary Roads. Here is his winning entry.

The sign on the outer office door read, Luna Moth Detective Agency, Martin Green Proprietor. Martin sat in the inner office. He was wearing purple slacks and a rumpled white shirt with no tie. The detective’s current case involved a missing child.

That morning George and Pamela Zinder had come into his office. The couple was frantic over their missing son, Robert. Robby, as they called him, had gone missing a few hours earlier. The police would not get involved until the child had been missing for at least twelve hours. The Zinders were not used to waiting and so they had come to the Luna Moth Agency. They reasoned that anyone at a detective agency with that name would have to be interested in children. They were right. Martin loved children.

The Zinders had brought a picture taken only a week earlier. It was a shot of Robby’s preschool class as they examined a preying mantis. As Green looked at the students’ faces, Zinder pointed out his red-haired son, Robby. Martin Green looked into Pamela Zinder’s blue eyes and promised her to do his best to find her missing son.

Green interviewed the parents. He visited the preschool and talked with Robby’s teacher and the staff. He even found Robby’s baby sitter and talked with her. He spent the rest of the day visiting places that Robby liked and to which he enjoyed going. At the end of that day, the only clue was a yellow rubber duckie found on the bank of Tidewater Creek. It was just like Robby’s favorite toy. Green had also found an orange juice box close by, and when the police dusted it for evidence, they found Robby’s prints.

As the sun was setting, detective Martin Green was going over a map of the Tidewater Creek basin. He noticed that upstream from the place where he had found the duckie and the juice box there was and abandoned mill. It was the only building that was that close to the creek.

The next day the headline in the newspaper and the lead story on the local newscast was about the rescue of a pre-school boy from kidnappers. Martin cut the story from the newspaper to add to his growing file of solved cases.

September Top Commenters

There were 47 people who left comments, and a total of 225 separate comments (not counting my own responses to them).

I like to give the top commenters of the past month a free link with a small icon in the sidebar. I really appreciate every one, and try to respond. The top 10 are:
Ann's Snap & Edit (Ann- 30 comments)
Spinning Lovely Days (Ivy- 24 comments)
My Journey (rainfield61- 23 comments)
Carmen's Chronicles (Carmen- 20 comments)
The Joy of Bird Watching and Living a Simple Life (Jean- 19 comments)
Duck and Wheel with String (Lin- 12 comments)
Secondary Roads (Chuck - 11 comments) tied with
Dennis the Vizsla Dog (Dennis' dada, James- 11 comments)
English Wilderness (John- 7 comments)
Duxbury Ramblers (Carol- 6 comments)