TWoP Veronica Mars Fanfic Challenges

So, I was thinking to myself. "Self?" I said to myself (because I feel weird thinking my own name) , "What would shake you out of this funk?" And I pondered it, and then I knew! This is why I always go to myself for answers, because I have many good ideas. Annnnnnyway.

If I'm remembering right, we're on a break for a few weeks from new Veronica Mars eps, so I was thinking it was time for a good old VMFanficUtopia Challenge.

I propose this, which the lovely truemyth came up with quite some time ago:

"What Dreams May Come"

Take two or more VM characters who don't interact much (or who you wish would interact more) and have one dream about the other(s). This idea came to me from the sick desire to see Veronica dream about sharing a bowl of popcorn with Aaron Echolls as they watch one of his old movies.

This fic would be entirely AU because it would be occurring inside a character's head, but it would give an interesting opportunity to explore the characters. It could be as surreal/smutty/fluffy as the author wants to make it.

If everyone thinks this sounds cool, I'll post the new challenge tomorrow, and we'll give people three weeks to work on it over the holidays.

Due to some big commitments I have going on, I won't be able to take on a very active role moderating the community for the next few months. Heck, I doubt I'll have the time to write fanfic. Or brush my teeth, but my personal hygiene is beside the point. As such, I was wondering if anyone had any opinions on future direction.

I'm perfectly happy to turn over moderation of the community to anyone else who wants to run it, but I'm almost wondering if it should take a break. It was a great thing for the summer to keep things interesting when the fanfic was slowing down and becoming stale, but with the advent of the new season, I'm sure a ton of people are being inspired by the show itself. Plus, with the tight deadlines necessitated if we want to stay canonical, I just doubt we'll get much in the way of entries, particularly if we keep up with our mission, which is to sort of utilize the characters that aren't written about as much.

I'm thinking that if we do more sporadic challenges, such as when the show is in reruns, and reactivate full-time as a summer community, that might be the solution - keep things going, but not on such a tight schedule during the parts of the season where there are episodes every week. If we end up following that model, I'm certainly available to keep modding, but putting together the polls and trying to constantly find people to do banners and icons is just going to be too difficult for me on a weekly basis.

So, I open up the floor for discussion, and whatever y'all decide is the best course of action, I am totally cool with.

So, in an attempt to keep the fic challenges current with canon, I'm experimenting with doing weekly challenges and seeing what kind of response we get based on each new episode. Here's my suggestion for the next one - I'll cut it, in case people haven't seen the episode.

( Suggestion )

So, anyone have any new and exciting ideas for Challenge #5? Or, alternatively, since this challenge has been sort of slow so far, what do we think about extending the challenge by a week, so that our next challenge can incorporate ideas from the premiere?

We've got just over a week till the next challenge is announced - any ideas for the next one?

So, we're doing great on challange 3 - with a week left to go, we have 14 entries. However, more than half of them are ficlets. So, I was thinking this time we'd have more than a "Best Ficlet" award - we could separate fics and ficlets, and for each category, have "Best Plot", "Best Characterization", "Best Dialogue", and "Most Original". I think we have enough stories in both categories to warrant extra awards. Thoughts?

The only other fic challenge I've been involved with is loveathons, so I don't know what is standard practice, or even if there is one. However, I'd like to know what we, as a group, feel about voting for our own stories for various awards. Personally, I find it a bit gauche... especially if you do it for every single category. If you honestly think you did the best in a category, I think you can just leave that one blank. Personally, I vote by taking my story out of the running in my head and just evaluating the other stories against each other.

Have we been taking self-voting into account already and I just didn't know it? I think it might be useful to announce our policy on self-voting, assuming we have one. If we don't, I suggest we come up with one.

Thoughts?

Ok I made some icons for the next challenge. I'm going to post a couple of them here to see what y'all think of the general theme. If you like them, I'll post all of them at vmfanficutopia  after the challenge is announced, so let me know! 

I wasn't sure what we were going to call the challenge so I haven't made any banners yet, but if we come up with a name I'll make some.

          

Allrighty, since I'm trying to actually be organized in advance, I thought I'd get some early input on stuff.

For the upcoming challenge:

txtequilanights had the great idea to do some pre-series fic. One of her suggestions was "How did Lilly and Veronica meet? What about Logan and Duncan?". avoltzy expanded on this further, suggesting we could open up the challenge to any of the characters' first meetings, so you could include Jake and Lianne, or Lilly and Aaron.

I like this idea a lot - I think it could be really interesting to leave it open, let the writers decide which first meeting they're going to write about. It's broad enough to incorporate pretty much any character in the show. What do we think about this idea/ Is it a go? If so, should we place any more parameters on this, or just let everyone go hog-wild and leave the requirements kind of vague-like? Spew your opinions in the comments, and I'll write up the challenge guidelines according to the general consensus.

Graphics:

Is anyone here graphically inclined? We're going to need award banners for this round of stories. It'd also be cool to have promo icons and banners for the next challenge. I shall also prevail upon the stellar sophia_bee, to see if she wants to step up and pitch in again if no one here expresses any interest.

Thanks for your time and contributions!

I feel kind of crappy for suggesting this, but what would everyone think of extending the deadline for this challenge by a week?

The idea for the challenge got great feedback, but only three stories have been posted and it's now only six and a half hours to the deadline. I guess it's possible that everyone will post at the last minute or that the idea was interesting but people had trouble settling on ideas.

Personally, I have two ideas (one half written and one not at all) that I'd love to finish and post for consideration, but for real life reasons it hasn't happened. It's not fair to ask that the challenge be extended just for me, but if others have similar issues, I thought it might work out. Feel free to shut me down if you guys just want to move on to the next challenge.