Arctic Light

The master fic list is posted at sga_genficathon, so you can check your guesses and see if you were right!

Mine was this one:

Title: Refugees in Rivertown
Genre: Action/Adventure
Prompt: "It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done." (Dickens)
Word Count: 5400 wds
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: non-graphic mention of various horrors (childhood prostitution, slavery, poverty)
Summary: Young Lona and her sisters are orphans and charnel pickers, making their living by stripping dead bodies. But one day they find a woman who is not yet dead ... a woman from another world.

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?

The master list of stories and authors is up! (And thank you to naye for the help with editing the posts, and to everyone else for support and hand-holding and offers of help. If I do this again next year, I have a much more realistic idea of my own capabilities, that's for sure!)

I wrote four stories for the ficathon, my original story plus three pinch hits. (Which means I have oodles of feedback, which I'll be responding to over the next few days! Please don't feel neglected if it takes me awhile to get to you!)

The Pegasus Galaxy Darwin Awards - another picture-fic, a retrospective of canon and non-canon near-death experiences.

The Great Pegasus Train Robbery - I saw the Illegal/AU prompt combination and I had to do a "team SGA as outlaws" AU. It was marvelous fun.

Even Bonnie and Clyde Had Off Days - because it's about dang time that Teyla and Ronon had their own Sheppard-and-McKay-esque comedy of errors road trip. Also written because I thought (inaccurately, as it turned out) that the Friendship category would be dominated by Sheppard-McKay stories and I thought it would be nice if there was something else for variety.

Luck of the Draw - a very last-minute pinch hit that puts the team plus Ford in a college AU setting. Hey, everybody's got to write one at some point in their fanfic career. *g*

Edit: And I forgot to mention that the sga_genficathon is now open for all to post stories for this year's genres and prompts, until the end of April.

Signups are now open at sga_genficathon:

Go here to sign up.

And here to suggest prompts for the authors.

Whee! I've never run a ficathon before. This is exciting and a little bit scary.

Also ... I need a little LJ help. Does anyone know how you can configure a community to accept anonymous and OpenID comments? I didn't realize that it defaults to registered LJ users only, and I'd like to change that so that non-LJ people can sign up too. But I can't find anywhere in the settings to change it.

EDIT: Found it! Really, why isn't this in the same section as all of the other customizable journal settings? That's so strange! Anyway, if anyone else has the same problem, comment options are located here: http://www.livejournal.com/manage/comments/ (I'd assumed that this section would be for batch-managing individual comments -- understandably enough, I think -- but it's general settings instead. Hmm.)

(And I did watch "Spoils of War", and liked it -- don't really feel up to doing a meta post this week, though. Between working on the novel and spending a lot of time on LJ, I'm kinda meta'd out; it would feel more like obligation than fun, so I think I'll just mosey around to other people's LJs and squee with them this week!)

Remember the SGA gen-ficathon that was discussed a few weeks back? (Here are some links back for a reminder.)

I've created a new community, sga_genficathon, and would like to open sign-ups in January 2008. Right now, I've posted proposed versions of the rules and timeline for the ficathon, based on the previous discussions. Please go take a look! And thank you again to everyone who participated in the previous discussions -- the rules are basically a distilled version of what was discussed back in September. Please pimp this around if you have an opportunity; the more people who comment, the more comprehensive the final rules will be!

Okay ... walking the dogs tonight, I was thinking about the various ideas that have been batted around lately for setting up a gen ficathon, as well as some of the stuff that I like to play with (e.g. different writers working off the same prompt). See if this sounds completely nuts to you. Obviously this is not How Things Have To Be(TM), but just one possible way of setting up the "rules".

( One possible way of formatting a gen ficathon )

Thoughts? Is this too complicated? Too ambitious? Not ambitious enough? Help!

The response to the gen ficathon poll was fantastic -- it looks like there is *definitely* interest in having such a thing.

The big, multi-part question now is how to set it up.

( Suggestions and questions )

Thoughts? Opinions? Snark? I'm totally open to all input -- mainly, I want this to be *fun*, and as inclusive as possible to the diverse body of gen fic writers (and for that matter, I'd *love* to get some slash/het writers who would like to try their hand at writing gen, too). The absolute last thing I want is for this ficathon to be seen as a slam against the pairing-based ficathons, or to write the rules so narrowly that a lot of fans feel excluded.

I've been dinking around for awhile with the idea of running some kind of gen or team ficathon. I realize that NOW is not a good time because everyone is thoroughly ficathoned out, but there have been so many wonderful, long, meaty stories coming out of the recent ficathons that my to-read list is booked up for quite some time. Not that this is a bad thing. *grin*

But, as many ficathons as this fandom has to offer, there are very few that are not pairing-focused, either towards a specific pairing like mcshep_match or the various rare-pairing ones, or offering several pairing options like sgabigbang did. Again, not necessarily a bad thing, but my own proclivities lie in the gen direction and I know I'm not the only one. It was mcshep_match that really got me thinking about this, because I really liked some of the stories but I'm not generally familiar enough with specific slash writers' styles to participate in the author-guessing polls, whereas for gen I'd love to get to do something like that. So that got me wondering, hmm, why not test the waters and see if there'd be enough interest to make a gen ficathon worthwhile?

So, I have created a poll:

( Cut for poll )

Feel free to pimp this around -- I'd like to get as many responses as possible.