Challenged with Challenges
So I've brought this old LJ back because I want to use it to record the process of trying to launch a fic challenge. Maybe there are other resources out there that help walk people through it, but if so, I haven't found any. There are FAQs on different sites where they can be run, of course, but no real "how to, here are problems people run into, here are things that work/don't work well" etc. At least not that I've stumbled across.
My idea is to run a Bring Them Back Fic challenge, where people write stories where the various 155+ dead lesbian and bisexual characters from the Autostraddle list stay alive. It wouldn't wind up as an exact match to the AS list, as I think I'd like to include transwomen from their deeper dive trans list, and I'd also strike anyone who was resurrected on their actual show. And probably the women from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. who were queer in the comics but not on the show itself.
I'm hoping to run it over on AO3, and I've been testing how the forms and challenges work, but am feeling kind of disheartened over the fact that it doesn't seem like there's any easy way to set it up the way that I want it.
The choices are prompt meme challenge and gift exchange challenge. I was hoping I could set up a prompt meme one and manually input all 157 prompts by fandom/character/prompt. They would look like this:
Fandom: Executive Suite
Character: Julie
Cause of Death: Chased love interest into traffic, hit by a car.
Deathisode: What Are Patterns For (1x11)
Prompt: Write a story where Julie lives.
I've seen challenges where more than one person can claim a prompt, so I was thinking I would set it so that like, up to five people could sign up for each one. Poor Julie from Executive Suite probably wouldn't have five people lining up to write about her, but like Lexa or Tara or Root probably would.
BUT! I have hit a stumbling block in that prompt memes apparently are set up to require a person signing up to fill out a prompt before signing up to take a prompt. Also the max amount of prompts you can put in is 50, so I would have to use like 4 different pseuds to put them all in myself.
I'm really coming from a place of virtually no knowledge of how challenges usually work. I signed up for a Sadie Hawkins one a long, long time ago and wrote a Gilmore Girls fic for it. Someone else wrote a Big Love fic for me. But it was so long ago that I don't have a super clear recollection of how it all worked. It was one of those where you list three ship preferences in different fandoms, and a prompt for each one, and then someone got assigned to write based on the fandoms they said they could write in. I just looked back through my email to see if I could find the assignment on it or anything, but no such luck. (I did, however, discover that my parents have sent me like sixty emails wherein one of us made a Gilmore Girls reference. Oy with the poodles already!)
I guess my next steps are going to be testing to see how the Gift Exchange thing works to see if I could manipulate that to do what I want it to do. And if that doesn't work (I'm not super hopeful about it), I can contact AO3 Support to see if there's anything they can do / might recommend. Maybe they can help me out. And if not, I can look at other sites where I might be able to host it. Fanfiction.net might have something, even though it's so freaking hard to find stuff over there these days. (And AO3 just looks so much cleaner.) I could even do it on LJ if I had to, I guess.
To be continued, once I get it all figured out.
My idea is to run a Bring Them Back Fic challenge, where people write stories where the various 155+ dead lesbian and bisexual characters from the Autostraddle list stay alive. It wouldn't wind up as an exact match to the AS list, as I think I'd like to include transwomen from their deeper dive trans list, and I'd also strike anyone who was resurrected on their actual show. And probably the women from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. who were queer in the comics but not on the show itself.
I'm hoping to run it over on AO3, and I've been testing how the forms and challenges work, but am feeling kind of disheartened over the fact that it doesn't seem like there's any easy way to set it up the way that I want it.
The choices are prompt meme challenge and gift exchange challenge. I was hoping I could set up a prompt meme one and manually input all 157 prompts by fandom/character/prompt. They would look like this:
Fandom: Executive Suite
Character: Julie
Cause of Death: Chased love interest into traffic, hit by a car.
Deathisode: What Are Patterns For (1x11)
Prompt: Write a story where Julie lives.
I've seen challenges where more than one person can claim a prompt, so I was thinking I would set it so that like, up to five people could sign up for each one. Poor Julie from Executive Suite probably wouldn't have five people lining up to write about her, but like Lexa or Tara or Root probably would.
BUT! I have hit a stumbling block in that prompt memes apparently are set up to require a person signing up to fill out a prompt before signing up to take a prompt. Also the max amount of prompts you can put in is 50, so I would have to use like 4 different pseuds to put them all in myself.
I'm really coming from a place of virtually no knowledge of how challenges usually work. I signed up for a Sadie Hawkins one a long, long time ago and wrote a Gilmore Girls fic for it. Someone else wrote a Big Love fic for me. But it was so long ago that I don't have a super clear recollection of how it all worked. It was one of those where you list three ship preferences in different fandoms, and a prompt for each one, and then someone got assigned to write based on the fandoms they said they could write in. I just looked back through my email to see if I could find the assignment on it or anything, but no such luck. (I did, however, discover that my parents have sent me like sixty emails wherein one of us made a Gilmore Girls reference. Oy with the poodles already!)
I guess my next steps are going to be testing to see how the Gift Exchange thing works to see if I could manipulate that to do what I want it to do. And if that doesn't work (I'm not super hopeful about it), I can contact AO3 Support to see if there's anything they can do / might recommend. Maybe they can help me out. And if not, I can look at other sites where I might be able to host it. Fanfiction.net might have something, even though it's so freaking hard to find stuff over there these days. (And AO3 just looks so much cleaner.) I could even do it on LJ if I had to, I guess.
To be continued, once I get it all figured out.