Fanfic Challenge the First: Brave New Ship

[runningondreams]

Your mission, should you choose to accept it-
We have two orders of business in this post:

One: To issue the Official First Challenge
Two: To take a vote on whether we want to hold and actual contest

Comments

[airspaniel]

My answer to both orders of business is yes!

I think a contest is a neat idea, and might provide a little more motivation for people to actually get up and do it. And the way it seems you've set the vote up seems really fair and fun, so why the heck not!

[fantasticpants]

Yay!

Yeah, competition would be a nice way to lure more people in, methinks. It can never be completely fair, since it's a very subjective sorta thing, but I suppose it's as close as it gets.

[cerebel]

Hey, I'd definitely join in. I'd love to write a Heroes fic with a pairing I haven't tried yet :P And the voting seems like a good way to get everyone participating.

[fantasticpants]

Awesome! Looking forward to your entry.

[green_wing]

My brain don't work today but it all looked shiny and pretty so I'm gonna go with "yes"?

I wonder if anyone will write Mohinder/Matt (that's my secret extra rare pairing *LOL* normally I'm a Ted/Matt fangirl :)

Who makes the pretty shiny pictures? They're very lovely :D

[fantasticpants]

Hey, brains are for fun, not work! And they make such fine snacks.

You could always try and do it yourself - that'd be the safest approach (Matt/Ted is quite awesome, and I blame the radioactive orange of the layout on them).

Um, I made that one. Thank you! :D

[green_wing]

Hey, brains are for fun, not work! And they make such fine snacks.

They sure do *mmmmmm brains* :P

You could always try and do it yourself - that'd be the safest approach

*RAOTFLMAO* oops, sorry, seriously, I can't write to save myself...even from zombies ;)

I prefer to beg and whore myself out so that others will write for me :D

[g_shadowslayer]

Okay... by "you've never written before", does a vague hinting at it count as written before? (If you've read the Bennet/various ficlet I linked to earlier, that's the kind of thing I'm wondering about. I honestly don't know whether that would DQ the three ships for me or not.)

Anyway, I'm up for a challenge :D

The main problem however with making it a reader-voted challenge/contest is that I don't have time to read lots of fics, and really don't enjoy reading hetfic, so I know I would fail at being an impartial judge. I don't know how busy everyone else is, but I'm so behind on reading stuff I'll never catch up...

[artemis_rain]

That's a good point about voting. I was watching the SPN Angst vs. Schmoop Olympics, and they used a system where votes were cast for each individual story as it was posted, and then the AVERAGE of the votes for each story determined the story's final score. This way, not everyone had to vote for every single story, and if people were biased against something in the story, they just didn't vote for it.

I think it would be a good way to do things, if a bit more work than just a single poll at the end.

[fantasticpants]

That sounds interesting - never seen anything like that. How exactly does that work? Every story comes with a 1-to-10 poll?

I really don't mind the extra work, as long as it actually... works. xD

[artemis_rain]

Well, the way they did it at the comm (spn_heraea), was that when a story was posted, people voted in the comments, so it wasn't anonymous and people had to be willing to stand beside their votes. Like, in the comments, you might say something like, "Great characterization, loved the ending, a few spelling mistakes, though. I give it an 8." And then the votes would be counted up by the mod at the end. It seems like a lot of work, though. I think an anonymous poll with or after every story would work just as well. Also, with a poll, there could be voting in other categories, so that things like character, plot and grammar could each be rated individually, if we wanted to do that.

I haven't had a lot of experience with things like this, so I don't know how it's usually done. Anyway, it's just something to consider.

[greatwhitesnark]

I say yes to both! Challenges are fun, but contests? Extra fun. I have one question though. Do threesomes count as a pairing?

[fantasticpants]

Awesomegood! And they do indeed - we're also planning on having a threesome(+)-exclusive challenge at some point. :D

[greatwhitesnark]

Ooh exciting! So, can I do a threesome for this challenge if I've written two of the participants by themselves before? For example, let's say I've written a whole bunch of Matt/Ted fics, is Matt/Ted/Janice acceptable for this challenge? Or should I just save it for the threesome one?

[fantasticpants]

Yeah, you can definitely do that. And the threesome challenge will probably be a few months from now (since it's a monthly-based challenge), so you should probably do it now - you can always do another one later.