Author Reveals & Next Time

[morbane]

Authors are now visible for all stories. Here's the collection again: http://archiveofourown.org/collections/Jukebox2013

Thank you again for participating. I had a great time. I'm still reading through the collection.


I plan to run this challenge again, so I'd appreciate feedback, on what worked for you and didn't. (Anonymous comments are still enabled.)

Here are a couple of things I think I might change:

• The dates. This has run up closer to Yuletide than I was anticipating. I was also participating in hhertzof's Exchange at Fic Corner challenge, which hhertzof says she will run again next year in July-August-September. Because of this, I'm thinking of shifting Jukebox 2014 to February-March-April (ensuring the writing time doesn't overlap too much with Purimgifts) or April-May-June (though that overlaps a bit with Not Prime Time).


• The beta reading mailing list. I'm not sure that quite worked (thoughts, anyone?). Especially, it seems a bit silly for me to be playing relay like that when I'm in such a different time zone to most other people - I suspect it decreased, rather than increasing, efficiency. (I don't think this was a problem for pinch hitting, though, since I could decide when to send emails out.)


• What fanworks are included. Currently, I don't have a strong idea about how to include podcasts or fanvids - or whether these make sense to include. But I am interested in fanart. So, question: would other people be interested in either offering or requesting art fills for song prompts?


• The definition of a song. There are many discrete pieces of music without lyrics where the creators, performers, and audience can agree on the shape of the story being told. (Programmatic music being one branch of this.) Would you be interested in offering or requesting music of this type? And if you are, could you help me come up with an appropriate definition?



Other things I'd love to get discussion on: was writing for a song outside your comfort zone, or not? Did the song you wrote for remind you of other particular songs? (I ended up buying three songs in iTunes based on other people's nominations.) Are there un-filled prompts that you especially wish had been written as well?

Comments

[morbane]

Thank you!

I'm abashed I forgot shipswap, since after all I did participate. And Rarewomen seems pretty popular too.

And then ineedmyfics, and smallfandomsfest, and... I am pretty excited there are so many options. Two years ago the only thing I knew about was Yuletide.

Yeah, I think fanvids were a bit of a red herring. Podcasts were on my mind because someone contacted me to encourage me to include them, but honestly, I think that works better in communities and exchanges that are about specific fandoms, rather than ones like this one in which the fic has no shared characters or themes.

I think it just works best for someone to post what they can beta and their AO3 name so they don't accidentally end up betaing their own gift - Yes, I think I'll do it that way next time. I was just so impressed with the Rarewoman system... But they had more participants and they also had two mods manning the email, if I recall correctly. Oh well.

Hm. Those are some interesting ideas about nominations. My instinct would be to stick with the system of having people nominate, request, and submit for individual song fandoms, rather than bringing characters into the mix. That's partly because I'm not very confident in using AO3's matching interface - I know you have more experience there - and having people match on fandom alone made things very easy. I also think there's less work on the wranglers' side if the metadata is consistent throughout the process.

On the other hand, I see what you mean that it would be nice to be able to see what else was nominated out of a particular artist's work, or by genre. I might try to improve that on the journal side of things.

I can easily arrange spreadsheets next time to show "by artist".

How do you think I could incorporate more information about genre? I don't trust either my googling or, say, iTunes to tell me whether a song is folk or rock, for example. (Though I could always make a best guess, and take in people's corrections.) I can - and probably will - ask people to submit that information in brainstorming posts, but there won't be a 100% response. Hm. To think about.