The Rules post
Jun. 2nd, 2009 09:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yvi posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
firefly_bigbangWe hereby proudly present the Firefly Big Bang challenge.
I amyvi, your friendly neighborhood maintainer and to my right you can see crazymule, who was kind enough to agree to help me with this project.
This is the general FAQ + rules post. Rules will also be repeated in the sign-up posts and the time schedule will follow soon.
FAQ
So, what is this 'big bang' thing?
The first big bang was the![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
big_bang_hd Harry/Draco Big Bang, a challenge to for writers to write a story of a minimum of 50,000 words in a given time frame and for artists to create art based on these stories. Since then, a lot of big bangs have been started, with all kinds of requirement, but always with the goal of creating more fanfiction and fanart for a given fandom/pairing/theme.
And in this challenge, we want to do the same for our beloved series Firefly + the Serenity movie.
50,000 words? That's a lot!
We realize that, and we also realize that there unfortunately isn't a lot of source canon for Firefly. So for this challenge, the minimum amount of words for the writers will be 20,000 words, for which you will have at least 3 months of time. For artists and vidders, it will be at least 1 month for two pieces of artwork or a 2:00 minute video.
Okay, so now that that is cleared up... Where am I? *looks around nervously*
The challenge will be hosted on Dreamwidth. There are several reasons for that, one of them being that it's the fannish home of the crazy person wh came up with the idea of running this (that would beyvi). The others are that Dreamwidth is very welcoming of fandom in general and that the entry limit on Dreamwidth is a lot better suited to a challenge such as this, as a story of around 20-25,000 words should fit into one post instead of two or three as on Livejournal.
Oh my God, does that mean I have to sign up here?
Preferably, yes. If you don't already have an account, you can create ony by using an invite code. If you don't know anyone who will give you one, drop me a note in the comments and I will get you one. If you are religiously opposed to creating an account here, you can sign in with your Livejournal OpenID account, which will allow you to subscribe to this community and post comments, but not to join or to post entries. We would highly prefer if all writers and artists signed up, though, as there is going to be a locked community for all participants to communicate with each other. Betas and cheerleaders are also encouraged to get accounts, but it's not that urgent for them.
So, I want to participate in some way. What do I do next?
There will be four ways to participate. Writers are obviously going to be the ones writing the 20,000+ words of fanfic. Artists/Vidders will create fanart and fanvideos based on these stories. We also need betas, who will help the authors get their stories ready for posting, and cheerleaders, who will help the authors during the story-writing process. This is all outlined more detailed in the rules below.
Then, when you have read the rules and decided you want to participate after all, you will need to wait for the sign-up posts to go live. Just go to the community info page and click on subscribe and check your Reading page here regularly.
Rules for Writers
* Writer sign-ups will start on June 15 and will not be closed until posting dates for authors are set on September 20. So you can also sign up three weeks before the first drafts are due, if you feel inclined to.
* When you sign up, you agree that you will at least try to write a Firefly story of at least 20,000 words length in the allocated time span.
* What you write is completely up to you. While we will have a prompts-post where people can post about ideas they have and would like to see written, you are under absolutely no obligation to use one of these prompts. When we say 'completely up to you', we mean it except for very few rules. Your story needs to be focused on Firefly. Crossover are fine, but please don't just insert the Firefly characters as minor characters into a... say, Star Trek fanfic. The focus should be on Firefly. The next thing we ask you to do is that you do not include sexual relationship with minors (under 18 years of age) in your story. And that's pretty much it. You can write AUs, gen, het, femslash, slash, threesomes, moresomes, deathfic, post-apocalypic fic, and yes, even River/Simon.
* You can write something you have already started, provided that you write an additional 20,000 words over the duration of this challenge.
* Yes, you may co-write with someone else.
* All stories need to be beta-read before they are posted. Please calculate at least one month for beta-reading and edits.
* You can ask to have a beta assigned to you, as long as you sign up within the first two weeks of sign-ups.
* If you know someone who will beta for you or want to search for someone yourself, you can of course do that. That person does not need to sign up (but can, if they are interested in reading locked posts). We just want confirmation that your story will be beta-read by someone.
* You can ask to have a cheerleader assigned to you, as long as you sign up within the first two weeks of sign-ups.
* On September 20, you will be able to claim a posting date and be asked to submit a summary to the challenge moderators based on which the artists can claim your story. One months before that date, a rough draft of your story is due which your artist will use to base their art on.
* Posting will start on November 1. We are not yet sure how many stories will be posted a week, probably 2 or 3 and we will do that until we run out of stories.
* Your rough draft is also due to be with your beta reader one month before the posting date unless you two have a different agreement.
* Stories are due to be posted to this community on the claimed posting date.
* All authors need to join this community after they sign up to read members-locked announcements after the challenge has started. For this, you will need a Dreamwidth account, which you can get by commenting asking for one. There will be a community for more informal communication with weekly progress posts and such that you may join on top of that.
Rules for Artists/Vidders
* Artist/Vidder sign-ups will start after writer sign-ups on July 1 and will not be closed until September 30 when artists/vidders claim a story they want to create art/video for.
* You'll be signing up to produce at least two pieces of art or one video
* A video has to be at least 2:00 minutes in length to count.
* Art can be done in any way you like: drawn by hand, made on the computer, a combination,... For the purpose of this challenge, the two pieces will need to be substantial, with which we mean that you can't deliver 5 icons and call it a day. Icons are fine as an extra, but they don't reflect a story in the way we would like. We don't have strict guidelines on what size etc. something has to be, but let common sense be your guide: the writers worked weeks on those stories, if you are done in 30 minutes, it probably won't count.
* You will be able to claim the story you want to create art for yourself. The writers will provide us with a summary of their stories and from September 28 onwards, you can claim stories based on these summaries.
* You will have at least one month to read your assigned story in at least a rough draft form and create the art/video.
* Artists/Vidders need to be a bit more flexible with posting dates, as these are claimed by writers. However, if you post a day or two late no-one will mind.
* Feel free to volunteer to create for more than one story. Or to pair up with another artist.
* All artists/vidders need to join this community after they sign up to read members-locked announcements after the challenge has started. For this, you will need a Dreamwidth account, which you can get by commenting asking for one. There will be a community for more informal communication with weekly progress posts and such that you may join on top of that.
Rules for Beta Readers
* Beta sign-ups will start when writer sign-ups start on June 15. If you sign up within the first two weeks, we will try to assign you to a writer who needs a beta reader. If not, you agree to be contacted by writers who sign up later or find they need a beta reader later in the challenge.
* When signing up you can tell us what things you absolutely cannot beta for. We will take that into consideration.
* If you know who you want to beta-read for and have discussed that with that person, you can say so in your sign-up post. We will allow you into the communities then, but will not assign you to an author.
* Your author will send you a rough draft / first version of their story one month before their posting date - unless you agreed on something else. Therefore, you need to be prepared to edit a long fic in the space of one to two weeks. Remember that maybe several rounds of edits are needed.
* Editing includes grammar/spelling/punctuation as well as anything you and your assigned writer wants.
* We encourage you to be in regular contact with your writer throughout the writing process because it cuts down on editing time later. Of course, this isn't required.
* As a beta reader, you need to have at least an OpenID account and subscribe to this community to read the public announcements. You are encouraged to join this community, but not required. For this, you will need a Dreamwidth account, which you can get by commenting asking for one. There will be a community for more informal communication with weekly progress posts and such that you may join on top of that.
Rules for Cheerleaders
* A cheerleader is someone who encourages a writer over the course of this challenge. From brainstorming for the plot to reading scenes or helping when the writer is having problems, everything is possible. Ashelens78 put it: "You will not be expected to beta-edit the story, unless you and your author work out a mutual agreement -- your role is to grab the pompoms and cheer along to help keep your author's spirits and enthusiasm high."
* Cheerleader sign-ups will start when writer sign-ups start on June 15. If you sign up within the first two weeks, we will try to assign you to a writer who needs a cheerleader. If not, you agree to be contacted by writers who sign up later or find they need a cheerleader later in the challenge.
* When signing up you can tell us what things you absolutely do not want to cheerlead for. We will take that into consideration. You will also be able to list the best methods of contact for your writer.
*As a cheerleader, you need to have at least an OpenID account and subscribe to this community to read the public announcements. You are encouraged to join this community, but not required. For this, you will need a Dreamwidth account, which you can get by commenting asking for one. There will be a community for more informal communication with weekly progress posts and such that you may join on top of that.
Any questions or request for DW invite codes can go here.
I am
yvi, your friendly neighborhood maintainer and to my right you can see crazymule, who was kind enough to agree to help me with this project.This is the general FAQ + rules post. Rules will also be repeated in the sign-up posts and the time schedule will follow soon.
So, what is this 'big bang' thing?
The first big bang was the
big_bang_hd Harry/Draco Big Bang, a challenge to for writers to write a story of a minimum of 50,000 words in a given time frame and for artists to create art based on these stories. Since then, a lot of big bangs have been started, with all kinds of requirement, but always with the goal of creating more fanfiction and fanart for a given fandom/pairing/theme.And in this challenge, we want to do the same for our beloved series Firefly + the Serenity movie.
50,000 words? That's a lot!
We realize that, and we also realize that there unfortunately isn't a lot of source canon for Firefly. So for this challenge, the minimum amount of words for the writers will be 20,000 words, for which you will have at least 3 months of time. For artists and vidders, it will be at least 1 month for two pieces of artwork or a 2:00 minute video.
Okay, so now that that is cleared up... Where am I? *looks around nervously*
The challenge will be hosted on Dreamwidth. There are several reasons for that, one of them being that it's the fannish home of the crazy person wh came up with the idea of running this (that would be
yvi). The others are that Dreamwidth is very welcoming of fandom in general and that the entry limit on Dreamwidth is a lot better suited to a challenge such as this, as a story of around 20-25,000 words should fit into one post instead of two or three as on Livejournal.Oh my God, does that mean I have to sign up here?
Preferably, yes. If you don't already have an account, you can create ony by using an invite code. If you don't know anyone who will give you one, drop me a note in the comments and I will get you one. If you are religiously opposed to creating an account here, you can sign in with your Livejournal OpenID account, which will allow you to subscribe to this community and post comments, but not to join or to post entries. We would highly prefer if all writers and artists signed up, though, as there is going to be a locked community for all participants to communicate with each other. Betas and cheerleaders are also encouraged to get accounts, but it's not that urgent for them.
So, I want to participate in some way. What do I do next?
There will be four ways to participate. Writers are obviously going to be the ones writing the 20,000+ words of fanfic. Artists/Vidders will create fanart and fanvideos based on these stories. We also need betas, who will help the authors get their stories ready for posting, and cheerleaders, who will help the authors during the story-writing process. This is all outlined more detailed in the rules below.
Then, when you have read the rules and decided you want to participate after all, you will need to wait for the sign-up posts to go live. Just go to the community info page and click on subscribe and check your Reading page here regularly.
* Writer sign-ups will start on June 15 and will not be closed until posting dates for authors are set on September 20. So you can also sign up three weeks before the first drafts are due, if you feel inclined to.
* When you sign up, you agree that you will at least try to write a Firefly story of at least 20,000 words length in the allocated time span.
* What you write is completely up to you. While we will have a prompts-post where people can post about ideas they have and would like to see written, you are under absolutely no obligation to use one of these prompts. When we say 'completely up to you', we mean it except for very few rules. Your story needs to be focused on Firefly. Crossover are fine, but please don't just insert the Firefly characters as minor characters into a... say, Star Trek fanfic. The focus should be on Firefly. The next thing we ask you to do is that you do not include sexual relationship with minors (under 18 years of age) in your story. And that's pretty much it. You can write AUs, gen, het, femslash, slash, threesomes, moresomes, deathfic, post-apocalypic fic, and yes, even River/Simon.
* You can write something you have already started, provided that you write an additional 20,000 words over the duration of this challenge.
* Yes, you may co-write with someone else.
* All stories need to be beta-read before they are posted. Please calculate at least one month for beta-reading and edits.
* You can ask to have a beta assigned to you, as long as you sign up within the first two weeks of sign-ups.
* If you know someone who will beta for you or want to search for someone yourself, you can of course do that. That person does not need to sign up (but can, if they are interested in reading locked posts). We just want confirmation that your story will be beta-read by someone.
* You can ask to have a cheerleader assigned to you, as long as you sign up within the first two weeks of sign-ups.
* On September 20, you will be able to claim a posting date and be asked to submit a summary to the challenge moderators based on which the artists can claim your story. One months before that date, a rough draft of your story is due which your artist will use to base their art on.
* Posting will start on November 1. We are not yet sure how many stories will be posted a week, probably 2 or 3 and we will do that until we run out of stories.
* Your rough draft is also due to be with your beta reader one month before the posting date unless you two have a different agreement.
* Stories are due to be posted to this community on the claimed posting date.
* All authors need to join this community after they sign up to read members-locked announcements after the challenge has started. For this, you will need a Dreamwidth account, which you can get by commenting asking for one. There will be a community for more informal communication with weekly progress posts and such that you may join on top of that.
* Artist/Vidder sign-ups will start after writer sign-ups on July 1 and will not be closed until September 30 when artists/vidders claim a story they want to create art/video for.
* You'll be signing up to produce at least two pieces of art or one video
* A video has to be at least 2:00 minutes in length to count.
* Art can be done in any way you like: drawn by hand, made on the computer, a combination,... For the purpose of this challenge, the two pieces will need to be substantial, with which we mean that you can't deliver 5 icons and call it a day. Icons are fine as an extra, but they don't reflect a story in the way we would like. We don't have strict guidelines on what size etc. something has to be, but let common sense be your guide: the writers worked weeks on those stories, if you are done in 30 minutes, it probably won't count.
* You will be able to claim the story you want to create art for yourself. The writers will provide us with a summary of their stories and from September 28 onwards, you can claim stories based on these summaries.
* You will have at least one month to read your assigned story in at least a rough draft form and create the art/video.
* Artists/Vidders need to be a bit more flexible with posting dates, as these are claimed by writers. However, if you post a day or two late no-one will mind.
* Feel free to volunteer to create for more than one story. Or to pair up with another artist.
* All artists/vidders need to join this community after they sign up to read members-locked announcements after the challenge has started. For this, you will need a Dreamwidth account, which you can get by commenting asking for one. There will be a community for more informal communication with weekly progress posts and such that you may join on top of that.
* Beta sign-ups will start when writer sign-ups start on June 15. If you sign up within the first two weeks, we will try to assign you to a writer who needs a beta reader. If not, you agree to be contacted by writers who sign up later or find they need a beta reader later in the challenge.
* When signing up you can tell us what things you absolutely cannot beta for. We will take that into consideration.
* If you know who you want to beta-read for and have discussed that with that person, you can say so in your sign-up post. We will allow you into the communities then, but will not assign you to an author.
* Your author will send you a rough draft / first version of their story one month before their posting date - unless you agreed on something else. Therefore, you need to be prepared to edit a long fic in the space of one to two weeks. Remember that maybe several rounds of edits are needed.
* Editing includes grammar/spelling/punctuation as well as anything you and your assigned writer wants.
* We encourage you to be in regular contact with your writer throughout the writing process because it cuts down on editing time later. Of course, this isn't required.
* As a beta reader, you need to have at least an OpenID account and subscribe to this community to read the public announcements. You are encouraged to join this community, but not required. For this, you will need a Dreamwidth account, which you can get by commenting asking for one. There will be a community for more informal communication with weekly progress posts and such that you may join on top of that.
* A cheerleader is someone who encourages a writer over the course of this challenge. From brainstorming for the plot to reading scenes or helping when the writer is having problems, everything is possible. As
helens78 put it: "You will not be expected to beta-edit the story, unless you and your author work out a mutual agreement -- your role is to grab the pompoms and cheer along to help keep your author's spirits and enthusiasm high."* Cheerleader sign-ups will start when writer sign-ups start on June 15. If you sign up within the first two weeks, we will try to assign you to a writer who needs a cheerleader. If not, you agree to be contacted by writers who sign up later or find they need a cheerleader later in the challenge.
* When signing up you can tell us what things you absolutely do not want to cheerlead for. We will take that into consideration. You will also be able to list the best methods of contact for your writer.
*As a cheerleader, you need to have at least an OpenID account and subscribe to this community to read the public announcements. You are encouraged to join this community, but not required. For this, you will need a Dreamwidth account, which you can get by commenting asking for one. There will be a community for more informal communication with weekly progress posts and such that you may join on top of that.
Any questions or request for DW invite codes can go here.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-08 08:41 pm (UTC)Isn't River 17 in canon?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-09 06:01 am (UTC)rule clarification please - Beta readers
Date: 2009-06-24 09:04 pm (UTC)I'd like to be part of this, but have no prior experience !
Re: rule clarification please - Beta readers
Date: 2009-06-25 06:03 am (UTC)If you don't know whether you can do that, you can always sign up as a cheerleader and decide whether to sign up as a beta later. I'd be glad to have you part of this challenge!
Re: rule clarification please - Beta readers
Date: 2009-06-29 08:56 am (UTC)Thank you!