Four years, and now a special edition with this one.
This is a thread for a Secret Santa contest, a sort of fic exchange, in which members may anonymously submit ideas or premises, and later receive another's premise in turn to write in exchange. Rather than be scored by a set of judges, instead, all the fics will be posted and the community gets to vote for which of their fics were their favorite. Most of the details remain the same as last time, except this will use pools like the previous two contests.
The bulk of this OP will be copy-pasted from last time, but there are new rules for this version, to be outlined below.
As usual, any genre may be submitted.
There are a few additions that make this edition a bit different from the others:A General Summary:
- Participants will submit their prompts, three per participant. PM them to me.
- Once the deadline's up, participants are then given another user’s prompts to write for. Of the three, you may choose one to write in exchange. You can write more than one, but the idea here is to give more freedom of choice to the receiver, in the case where if they don’t like one prompt, they won’t be stuck with that
- Up until the writing deadline is up, participants send their fics to me. Once the deadline's up, all the fics will be posted anonymously into one megathread.
- The community (so, not only limited to participants, even non-fic writers may participate) may then vote on their most favorite fics out of all the submissions, rather than use formal judging. At the end, points are tallied and a winner is declared.
Rules and Guidelines:
- Participants that submit ideas must write an idea in turn. This can't quite be enforced, but don't try to mooch a free fic off this contest and not even bother try write anything in turn. If you find yourself unable to finish in time, a half-done fic is better than no fic at all.
- Don't be pressured to make your fics like 20k word epics. Shorter drabbles, like only 1-2k words, will be just fine.
- Similarly, try keep your submitted fic pitches flexible. Please don't try request super long fics, or prompts so specific you pretty much wrote the fic yourself already, and try to keep one-shot or drabble ideas in mind. We don't have much time to write, so please be considerate of others.
- TYPE-MOON fics/premises only. Don't request crossovers, even if one side is TYPE-MOON. This is mostly for fairness, so that people won't find themselves writing, say, a Blazblue crossover when they can't be expected to have any Blazblue knowledge. Writers are free to cross over with whatever they wish
- Not a rule, but it may help to note what parts of the Nasuverse one is familiar with, and what works they've consumed enough to be comfortable writing. It'd be bad for everyone if people got pitches that they know nothing about. Similarly, if there are prompts that people don't feel comfortable writing, you can request to avoid them.
NEW LEGACY EDITION RULES:
- In previous contests, those who failed to turn in any material were barred from future contests until they turn in that material. In this edition, participants who didn't show up in previous contests will be allowed to submit their owed fics in this contest, putting them in contention for judging and prizes. The idea here is to hopefully get previous participants to turn in fics they owed.
- For other participants, if you submitted any prompts in a previous contest that didn't get written, you can resubmit them again for this one. If you do submit old prompts, try to submit one or two old ones, and at least one new one.
- If you have not participated in previous contests, you will have to submit three prompts as usual.
The reasoning behind these new rules was because we felt that the contest ban was ineffective in its intended purpose. It was originally supposed to serve as an incentive to get authors to turn in, and to incentivize no-shows to eventually turn in their fics. However as contests went by, the only this seemed to accomplish was to cause the pool of active authors to dwindle, and no-shows very rarely turned in the fics they owed. As the purpose of these contests is to foster activity, this was counterproductive. The ban may be lifted in the future, but going forward, my ears are open to anyone who has suggestions regarding incentivizing participants to show in the future.
Pitched ideas will be displayed publicly here, so you have time to think before pitches are distributed.
Submitted Prompts
The prize, as usual will go to the author of the winning fic, and may be either an illustration of their fic, or of another fic of their choice. An addendum to this will be that prize illustrations may only be of a single scene, and up to three characters (any more at my discretion).
Entries can be found here. Voting will begin on January 1, 2020.
Originally Posted by Dullahan
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