SGA genficathon 2009

[sholio]

A few people have asked if I'll be running a genficathon again in 2009.

The answer is yes. :) The response last year was thrilling and awesome, the quality of the stories fantastic, and I was very happy with it (once I got done being stressed out about it *g*).

I'm thinking that it might be a good idea to wait a month or two later than I held the signups last year, though. The last episode of SGA (*snivel*) will air on Jan. 9, and I suspect January will be a bit of a gloomy time in the fandom, not a good time to be inviting people to commit themselves to writing a story.

So right now I'm thinking about holding signups in March. I know this will end up overlapping with Big Bang more than I'd like, but I'm pretty sure the number of people last year who wrote for both Big Bang and the genficathon was relatively small.

I'm also considering various different ways of doing prompts/posting this year. The genre/prompt combo last year was fun (and pretty easy for me to administrate as far as giving people their assignments, not nearly as complicated as a fic exchange) but it was complicated, difficult to explain to people, and led to a few problems with pinch hitting.

This year I'm thinking about doing it as a more straightforward fic exchange, with each person being assigned someone to write for, or else giving each person a unique prompt rather than having a number of people writing for the same prompt. Posting would still be anonymous, and there will be a few minor rule changes to make it easier for me to post the stories that are sent to me (I liked how Big Bang had a style guide for formatting stories, making it much simpler for people to submit their already-formatted stories even if they're not familiar with HTML).

What do you guys think? Possible pros and cons of doing a fic exchange rather than a prompt fest? Or what about letting people choose prompts, like some of the other fests do?

Comments

[wildcat88.livejournal.com]

I really liked the way the ficathon worked last year. I enjoy fic exchanges, but I spend a lot of time hoping that I'm close to what my recipient wanted. The ficathon let me write my own story.

I adore the idea of each person getting a unique prompt. That would be great.

Would it be possible to have people sign up for a genre and pick a prompt? As each prompt is picked, it goes off the list and after a certain genre is filled, it goes off the list. Too complicated? Too stupid?

[sholio]

I like the idea of unique prompts, too. For one thing, there were so many awesome prompts last year that it seemed like a terrible shame to only use eight of them!

Hmm... the only problem is that the number of people writing for each genre depended on the total number of people signing up. I ended up with, I think, seven or eight people in each genre, but it would have been less than that if I'd only had ten or fifteen writers. So you *couldn't* fill categories without knowing how many people were writing.

I could always let people pick prompts and request first and second choices for categories. Or let them request categories and then assign them a prompt. Hmm... *thinks some more*

[leesa_perrie]

I like the idea of being able to pick a category, with a 2nd and/or 3rd choice - in case you end up with 20 angst and 1 humour (!) - and then being assigned a mod-given prompt. Fic exchanges are fun too, but there are quite a few of them and it's nice to be able to do a different kind of ficathon.

Of course, ideally, I'd love it to be the same as this year's ficathon, but I fully understand you wanting to go for something simpler!

[wildcat88.livejournal.com]

Requesting first and second choices for categories would be fun especially if the prompt is assigned later. Lots of challenge in that.