Welcome!
This is an open-participation, multi-writer version of the five-things meme that (as far as we know) started making the rounds in August 2006. (We'd love to credit whoever started it, if anybody knows.)
The original meme went something like this:
Post a topic, list, category, whatever, in my comments section. (Examples: "Five Jobs Walter Harriman Had Before He Joined the Air Force," "Five Things General Landry Will Never, Ever Tell Anyone.") Then, in a separate post, I'll post the answers to your Top 5 ideas, according to me. Serious or fun!
Some of the results are listed here and here.
We thought it would be fun if more than one writer tackled the same set of prompts. So ...
We're soliciting prompt requests here. Anybody can post prompts there whenever they come to mind. We'll draw from that pool throughout the year.
Prompts go up in batches of five as separate journal entries -- if you have this comm friended, you'll see them as brief entries on your friends page. Any writers who want to play, post your five-things lists as comments to those entries. The comments are screened for two weeks, because a big part of the fun is finding out what different people come up with independently. (Comm maintainers who are also participating as writers promise not to peek.)
The deadline for posting independent, screened responses will be ten days after the prompts go up (Monday 9/25 in this first cycle) was ten days for the first round, a week for the second, and we're trying two weeks with the third (based on a tie in the poll here). ETA Dec 31, 2006: We've been working with two-week screening periods for the past few prompt sets, and it seems to be going well, so we'll be sticking with that. But we might do a couple of speed rounds -- there'll be an extra big alert on those posts if we do. The deadline for unscreening always appears in the 'boilerplate' for each individual prompt. ETA Summer 2007: We started out posting prompts in batches of ten, but five-at-a-time has been working well and seems more in line with the conceit, so we'll be sticking with that too.
On the deadline, we mass-unscreen the response comments to unveil all the five-thingses for everyone to read. Then we post a new batch of prompts. You can still respond to the earlier prompts after the unscreening.
Responses can be in the form of brief lists, extended analyses of each list item, drabbles or ficlets, or however else the responder feels like doing it. Stargate: SG-1 and Stargate: Atlantis are the base fandoms -- we went back and forth about the '1' in the comm name, but SGA prompts are more than welcome. Crossovers into other fandoms are perfectly fine, as are AUs and Peg-B and pretty much anything else you can come up with.
You can respond to any number of prompts. Doing one doesn't obligate you to do all the others.
There are no ratings restrictions and we're not requiring warnings for potentially disturbing content (though writers are encouraged to include warnings as a courtesy). We recognize that Stargate's a diverse fandom and the comment-response format doesn't allow for sorting by categories (ratings, humor/serious, pairings, het/slash), so readers do risk exposure to stuff that's not to their taste; we hope everybody will be understanding about that, and move quickly along to the next list in the comments if they run across something that looks squicky.
A spoiler warning is required for recent Stargate: Universe eps, including casting spoilers. (If it is a casting spoiler, don't specify that, since 'casting spoiler' is a spoiler in itself!) The safest thing is to put SPOILER FOR SGU [EPISODE NAME] in caps in the subject line, and/or a boldface note at the top of the comment. (These tags will make boldface text: This is bold.) We also request consideration in feedback to all responses: Don't assume the writer has seen the most recent episodes (for example, asking how they feel about their response being jossed by last night's ep -- sometimes they don't know yet that it has been). Thanks!
Thoughts or questions, feel free to comment here ... or in one of these places:
The Suggestion Box
How-to and technical support
Open, continuing call for new prompts
The original meme went something like this:
Post a topic, list, category, whatever, in my comments section. (Examples: "Five Jobs Walter Harriman Had Before He Joined the Air Force," "Five Things General Landry Will Never, Ever Tell Anyone.") Then, in a separate post, I'll post the answers to your Top 5 ideas, according to me. Serious or fun!
Some of the results are listed here and here.
We thought it would be fun if more than one writer tackled the same set of prompts. So ...
We're soliciting prompt requests here. Anybody can post prompts there whenever they come to mind. We'll draw from that pool throughout the year.
Prompts go up in batches of five as separate journal entries -- if you have this comm friended, you'll see them as brief entries on your friends page. Any writers who want to play, post your five-things lists as comments to those entries. The comments are screened for two weeks, because a big part of the fun is finding out what different people come up with independently. (Comm maintainers who are also participating as writers promise not to peek.)
The deadline for posting independent, screened responses will be ten days after the prompts go up (Monday 9/25 in this first cycle) was ten days for the first round, a week for the second, and we're trying two weeks with the third (based on a tie in the poll here). ETA Dec 31, 2006: We've been working with two-week screening periods for the past few prompt sets, and it seems to be going well, so we'll be sticking with that. But we might do a couple of speed rounds -- there'll be an extra big alert on those posts if we do. The deadline for unscreening always appears in the 'boilerplate' for each individual prompt. ETA Summer 2007: We started out posting prompts in batches of ten, but five-at-a-time has been working well and seems more in line with the conceit, so we'll be sticking with that too.
On the deadline, we mass-unscreen the response comments to unveil all the five-thingses for everyone to read. Then we post a new batch of prompts. You can still respond to the earlier prompts after the unscreening.
Responses can be in the form of brief lists, extended analyses of each list item, drabbles or ficlets, or however else the responder feels like doing it. Stargate: SG-1 and Stargate: Atlantis are the base fandoms -- we went back and forth about the '1' in the comm name, but SGA prompts are more than welcome. Crossovers into other fandoms are perfectly fine, as are AUs and Peg-B and pretty much anything else you can come up with.
You can respond to any number of prompts. Doing one doesn't obligate you to do all the others.
There are no ratings restrictions and we're not requiring warnings for potentially disturbing content (though writers are encouraged to include warnings as a courtesy). We recognize that Stargate's a diverse fandom and the comment-response format doesn't allow for sorting by categories (ratings, humor/serious, pairings, het/slash), so readers do risk exposure to stuff that's not to their taste; we hope everybody will be understanding about that, and move quickly along to the next list in the comments if they run across something that looks squicky.
A spoiler warning is required for recent Stargate: Universe eps, including casting spoilers. (If it is a casting spoiler, don't specify that, since 'casting spoiler' is a spoiler in itself!) The safest thing is to put SPOILER FOR SGU [EPISODE NAME] in caps in the subject line, and/or a boldface note at the top of the comment. (These tags will make boldface text: This is bold.) We also request consideration in feedback to all responses: Don't assume the writer has seen the most recent episodes (for example, asking how they feel about their response being jossed by last night's ep -- sometimes they don't know yet that it has been). Thanks!
Thoughts or questions, feel free to comment here ... or in one of these places:
The Suggestion Box
How-to and technical support
Open, continuing call for new prompts