Spanking Fiction Oscars?

I foresee one problems with the authors nominating - most of us don't read every story that's uploaded.

Maybe authors could nominate X stories and send them around "For your consideration" the way the studios do for the Oscars. Even then.... In theory every member of that academy sees every film labeled "for your consideration", but that's only in theory.

Goodgulf

Yes, that's a fair point. I think the whole thing is a lot more problematic than is first apparent. I guess authors could nominate their own stories for the various categories but then we'd need a mechanism for arriving at a shortlist.

Februs I LOVE your suggestion of the Rosscas since that commemorates Ross Kilahara as well as punning on the original Osars

Seriously, which I am not very often, I am not entirely sure I like the sound of the Oscars or Rosscas. As well as the winners you have the losers! How are they going to feel? Will some of us become slightly demoralised? What I like about the competitions we do have is, threats from Miss Thrashbottom aside, competitors can chose whether they enter and you are judged on just one story not a whole year of stories!

The other thing I would say is if you go ahead with it, I shouldn't confine the judging to authors. What about people like Sebastian who is probably more able to voice an opinion than most authors having read and commented on a huge number of stories. If you do something in the library I think it would be nice to involve everyone!

There is absolutely no reason that an author or other member would need to have read other stories in order to nominate a story. Either they would have had to read ALL the stories form the year, or there would have to be some sort of pre-nomination process, which begs the question of who get sto pre-nominate and how. Just have people nominate his/her own personal favorites.

And a nominator wouldn't have to nominate stories in every announced category. For example, a reader of F/M stories may choose only to nominate one or more stories of that type.

Even when you get to voting, a voter wouldn't have to vote in every category, if , say, he/she had never read stories of a particular type (M/M, F/M). We SHOULD ask, however, even if it's not enforceable, that a voter in a particular category take the time to read every nominated story in that category before voting.

All good points. Also, this would inevitably translate into hours of new work for the staff. As I have said before, one of my main concerns for the future of the LSF is that the effort is so massive as to be unsustainable in the long run. I appreciate the hours of work our staff puts in, but who will be around to do it ten years from now?

Shouldn't we err more towards the KISS principle?

Further, our other contests are really designed to encourage output from our authors. The library gains lots of fresh stories and lots of good comments from each contest. What would the library gain from this "Oscar" award project? After all, it's supposed to be a library, not some huge contest.


If you went ahead with this project (and I'm not sure it's worth the effort) wouldn't it be possible to include all authors plus anyone who has contributed (say) 100 comments?

Just food for thought...
Guy

Well, at this stage it's merely a subject raised for enquiry, if it's not something that people think is a good idea then it's not likely to happen. It also doesn't have to be part of the library but could just as easily exist on its own standalone website. I didn't see it as a contest myself, merely a way of acknowledging and celebrating the contribution of authors each year and I hadn't considered that not winning would be perceived negatively. If that's likely to be the case though then it's not something I'd want to proceed with.

Well, if this does prove to be something viable I'd venture that an author should have the right to either accept or decline a nomination of any of his/her work. If an author doesn't like the competitive aspect then he/she can simply decline to participate.

OTOH, agreeing to accept his/her story's nomination in a particular category would be accepting the possibility that it wouldn't win. (I've entered stories in the SSS newsgroup's summer Short Story Contest every year for over a decade but I don't take the competition/awards all that seriously--basically, if your story wins a category and you have $1.25 to go along with that award, you can get yourself a cup of coffee.)

It might actually be better to do something like the SSC here, create categories (but KISS) and accept new stories within them to be voted upon--that would have the effect of generating new material for the Library... --C.K.

The Rosses na Ross are in the West of Ireland.

I have to admit I'm really not a big fan of the SSC, at least not the way it's organised or structured, I much prefer the Library Challenges as a way of generating new material and stimulating authors to write and have been impressed with the overall quality of the writing in the 4 challenges to date. The objective behind the 'Oscar' idea was more about celebrating authors' contributions and providing some acknowledgement retrospectively rather than encouraging new writing. It seems, however, to be somewhat controversial and while I don't mind investing time in coding etc I do like a quiet life (no, really, lol) so I think it's probably best laid to rest at this time. Now then, the other thing I wanted to talk about was starting a spanking e-zine ..