Dead Dog Post

[zvi]

There is a tradition in conventions to have a "Dead Dog" panel at the end of a con, where you let the con moderators know what went right and what went wrong with the convention. I'm going to try that with this challenge, so it can run better next year.

I don't have many specific questions, just in general I'd like to know:

-- did I do something that made it easier for you to participate?
-- did I do something that made it harder for you to participate?
-- what really cool thing did I not do that you wish I had?

Specifically, I did wonder if people would like

a) to open the stories up to relationships with greater than three people? Please think about this not just from the perspective of how great it would be that you can now request your OT4 as part of 3 Ships, but also how you're going to react when you get that OT9 assignment in the fandom you offered just so you had three offers.

b) to collect, as a challenge community, recommendations for threesome stories that have been posted outside of 3 Ships?

c) to make available a list of unassigned prompts that people could pick up and write, and, if they finished by the deadline, include as part of 3 Ships?

If you don't feel like commenting publicly, feel free to pm me or e-mail me.

Comments

[coneyislandbaby]

One of the other holiday exchanges I take part in, xmas_rocks, allows participants to choose a pairing and then nominate additional peopleso if the author is comfortable writing a threesome or moresome and they're familiar with the characters, they can, but they're only required to write the pairing requested. Reading your first suggestion, I wondered if something along those lines could possibly work? So the author volunteers to write any threesome in, say, Doctor Who, and the recipent requests Amy/Rory/Eleventh Doctor, and then says that if the author is comfortable including River Song, that would be great. That way there is a chance for the OTplus, but no one is obligated to write something they can't do. Just an idea for a more flexible way to handle that.

[james]

My thoughts are along these lines - having more than one single line for a prompt would be awesome. I know there are 'Dear Sailor' letters, but from a technological-coding perspective it seems easy enough to add more fields to the sign-up, even to constrain it to two or three words indicating genres you really really don't want, or something.

Also, I'd like to see word counts on the posted stories, because it makes it easier to read/avoid starting long stories when I'm supposed to be getting ready for work. ;-)

[zvi]

It's never been a tech question on keeping the prompts short, it's been an affordance thing. I want to discourage people from writing, well, full and specific prompts, or to spend a lot of time concentrating on the things they hate. I really dislike the way that works out (from both a mod and a participant perspective) on those comms that do signups by commenting on a journal entry.

I'll think about adding something, but I'm probably never going to encourage people to add the sorts of full-bodied, long form discussion that's appropriate for a Dear Sailor letter.

The word counts, though, those I can do.

[james]

How about simply indicating how many characters the current field for the prompt will allow? I know that when I looked at it during sign-ups, I felt like I could only write five or six words for a prompt. If I know that it's X number of characters then I can compose my prompt in another document and be sure that it says what I want it to say. I think that would give me, as a writer, more flexibility to know I'm writing what the person wants *and* as a reader, I would feel more comfortable being able to give a sufficient prompt that conveys what kind of story I'm hoping for.

[zvi]

Because I did it on Google, I'm not actually sure how long that field is. I'll look into it.