Forsaken Fandom Awards: Last Week for Nominations

[brightknightie]

At the end of July, I posted about the forsaken_fandom community, and their project to recognize and encourage fanfiction in fandoms (including FK) that no longer have multiple regular award projects of their own.  This week (through Friday 08/15) is the last week they're accepting nominations for this round.  Looking at their FK nominations list, I currently

Comments

[greerwatson]

Interesting. I see that one is permitted to nominate one's own work. That's not usually the case in my experience, admittedly not with fanfic awards.

I don't know whether I should nominate any of my FK4 things or not. They were written over a period from fall 1996 to about 2002, but they were never posted until 2004/5 (and all were revised before posting), so they would seem to be eligible.

On the other hand, they're in a sort of script format-which appears nowhere in the categories, though I suppose the series as a whole would qualify.

Trouble is, no one ever nominates my stuff for anything. Either they don't like it, or they don't read it. I don't know which. Such feedback as I've had has been good; but I have had people say that they never read scripts. So probably mostly people just haven't read it.

Truth is, though, it does seem a bit off nominating one's own material.

What do you think?

[brightknightie]

>"I see that one is permitted to nominate one's own work. That's not usually the case in my experience ... Truth is, though, it does seem a bit off nominating one's own material. What do you think?It is unusual, and doesn't feel entirely comfortable, I agree. I have thought of two possible reasons why this is allowed there: it's easier to allow than to police, and better self-nominations than no-nominations in a too-quiet fandom. But on the side of the more usual practice: besides the fair consideration the challenges of objectively evaluating our own work, of course a writer wants a reader to recognize her work

[greerwatson]

"Um, posted where? Not to fkfic-l? I don't think I ever saw them...?"

No, it would have been too much of a nuisance to reformat everything. It went on my own website, http://ca.geocities.com/gwatson2@rogers.com/index.html. However, I did make an announcement on FORKNI-L. In fact, it was posted right through the regular TV season. I linked in an episode each week (Sunday night, usually), and posted the notice on FORKNI-L so those people who were reading it could "tune in". It started in the fall and ended in May, just like a real TV series

[greerwatson]

Well, I did it. I still feel a bit weird about it; but, as you say, if no one else does it....

[brightknightie]

I'm sorry it didn't get nominated for you. I do honestly think it will be positive for us to have a look at something of yours, something we may have missed, and something a little different. So I'll look forward to learning what you submitted when they work through the rest of the nominations!

[greerwatson]

Well, after all that, it appears that my virtual season will not be considered eligible for consideration for an award, nor any of the individual episodes I nominated be considered for any of the awards either.

The joke is that I thought the dicey bit would be the rule about their having to be written no earlier than 2003. All the episodes were written long before that (starting in 1996, though revised later). After all, I had to write 22 of them, and they aren't exactly drabbles! But nothing was published/posted until 2004. And they were all revised before posting.

However, the community has rejected FK4 on a completely different ground altogether. This is their reply:I'm very sorry, but we have to reject your nominations on the grounds that fics that people have do download onto their computer in order to read, is putting an unreasonable burden on the judges and voters. I've discussed this with the other mods and the judges and the consensus was, no one is going to download more than a dozen fics to their computer for voting

[greerwatson]

As you were. My reply to them prompted this:No, we do not say in our rules that stories may not be zipped because we never imagined encountering the situation. I've consulted the mods of four other awards, one of which has been going on for ten years and they've never heard of such a thing.
HOWEVER, I can understand your frustration. So here is what I will offer you. We will allow the nominations to stand - with the understanding that should you wish to participate in any future rounds you'll need to arrange for a plain text version for people to access that doesn't involve downloading- I'd suggest one of the Forever Knight comms on LJ - there are probably people who haven't read your work that would be excited to read it there.
So all's well that ends well. Much relief.

[brightknightie]

I'm glad it all worked out! I must admit that I didn't realize they were zip files; I hadn't looked, and had guessed they were PDFs. I'm afraid I probably wouldn't download a zip file from a stranger for exactly that fear-of-viruses reason, so I can see why they will add that rule for future events.

I know it would take quite a while to reformat, but you might indeed reach a new and wider audience if you did post them to LJ, perhaps one every other month for two years...? Just a thought. ~shrug~

I see that the moderators have had a family tragedy, so everything will be delayed for a little while.

[greerwatson]

I can see the attraction to the reader (or potential reader) of my reformatting. But, until you actually unzip one and take a look, you don't know what this would entail.

Just for a start, each episode is about 115 to 120 pages long. The number of LJ posts this would take is seriously daunting. I have no idea how much I could get in any single post; but, from experience, I know that I'm often having to cut a post in two or three sections. So whatever I think I've chunked off to post will probably need to be re-chunked. If we assume that I can get a couple of pages per post (since it is an expansive format), then I would have to make upwards of 50 posts per episode

[greerwatson]

Zipping was actually NAT's idea. I had to find out how to do it. (I was very new to Windows at that point. My old computer only had DOS.) It was she who turned my WordPerfect files into Word, too. All in the interests of accessibility!

Someone did later suggest doing PDF files; but, when I checked, I realized that 22 of them would also exceed my ISP webspace limits.

The joke is that zipping sufficiently compressed the episode files that I found that I had ample space to put graphics on my webpages. Even plenty of screen captures-well thumbnailed down in size, of course.

I'm ridiculously proud of my little website. But it's primary function is to display its 22 jewels. The joke, of course, is that if I'd lacked the stick-to-it-iveness to finish the whole season (and how many virtual seasons get done?), then I could have easily put up half a dozen or so episodes without zipping them. It's the very fact that I completed the project that's causing problems!