Challenges, challenges, challenges

[kaz]

Here is one thing that I find frustrating about fandom: ficathons of the challenge variety.

It seems as if they're a very popular form of fandom participation; Yuletide is probably the best-known example, but I run into them absolutely everywhere. You know the format: person A signs up, receives a prompt and is asked to write a fic for it. Variations exist (e.g. A often writes a prompt they'd like to see filled of their own) but that's the general gist.

Now don't get me wrong, I find these pretty awesome ideas, and I imagine it could be very fun to participate! There is, however, just one eensy problem for me:

I really, honestly, cannot commit to things. I have autistic interest patterns, meaning I can't know when I will suddenly become possessed with the urge to play Morrowind, make jewellery or read Minesweeper fanfic 24/7 for three months straight. (Other people seem capable of still keeping up with their previous interests when a new one catches their attention. I am not.) I also have spoons to think of, and a) writing fiction is pretty spoon-consumptive for me, b) fandom *has* to be my last priority when it comes to spoon allocation. Because, you see, the spoons I spend on filling out a challenge fic might be the ones I needed to make it to university tomorrow. And then there's the awful soul-sucking guilt of not being able to follow through on things I promised, which may easily set off a downwards spiral for me. Fandom is something I do to *relax*, but fic challenges and the like actually contribute so much pain and angst for me that I wind up fleeing back to my day job.

"But if you can't fill your prompt, you should just e-mail the people running the challenge and explain!"

Er, a few problems with that.

Number one. Some people will probably be quite happy to accept "work is killing me" or "my dog died" or "my computer ate my fic nom nom nom" as reasons for dropping out, but may look askance at "so my interests have switched to this mind-numbing Flash game" or "I just don't have the spoons for it" or "I don't know why, I just start crying every time I think about the challenge" or, you know, "my fibromyalgia has flared up again" or other disability-related issues because I am not the only person who has these problems. Some people will demand reasons. I don't know whether the organisers fall into the "some" category ahead of time, and I don't like being forced to explain my disability to a possibly unsympathetic audience.

Number two. I have pretty massive social anxiety related to e-mail; LJ messages are somewhat better but not much. Somehow the act of sitting down and composing a formal message - not an LJ comment - to another person makes me panic about accidentally violating some to-me-unknown social norm and being massively rude without knowing and making the other person hate me. Furthermore, as this is also true for RL my letter and e-mail spoons go to RL things that I desperately have to do or else I'll be kicked out of uni/thrown out of my accommodation/have my bank account closed on me/etc. For me, there is no "just" in "just e-mail..."

Number three. If you have written anything of the "we will be kind of unhappy if you drop out without a good reason >(" variety, in fact if you haven't explicitly made it clear that dropping out is acceptable, I have probably worked myself up into such a state about this that I cannot, actually, think about the challenge without starting to cry. Attempting to communicate that I am dropping out to you, in a format I'm not very comfortable with, will probably end with me huddled in a ball in a corner somewhere before I even reach "Dear XYZ". Hell, I *still* feel miserable whenever I think about femgenficathon and that was over a year ago.

So. Yeah. This is the reason I am probably never going to participate in a fic challenge again, despite the fact that it seems as if it could be really fun and I'd like to try my hand at some of those prompts and everyone is talking about Yuletide and I would sooo like to participate and it makes me a very sad Kaz. :(

I am not going to demand that people change the format of things entirely just to accommodate me, but. Here are some suggestions of things you could do to make things possible for me, and other disabled people who might have these kinds of problems.

- Allow for people to drop out, even drop out without being able to tell you, and make clear that this is not ZOMG the end of the world in the rules.
- Communicate that you will accept any reason for dropping out and specifically that you are sympathetic to the difficulties people with disabilities might have.
- Have a page specifically on what to do if you feel like you can't continue! Something that would be *very* helpful for me specifically would be to have a post that people can comment on if they feel like they can't continue, with an example comment that you can c&p if you can't manage to say in your own words that you can't make it. If you insist on having it be via e-mail, provide a form e-mail people can simply c&p.
- In addition to the actual challenge, have a group of prompts that people can simply try filling out, or have some prompts you assign to people with no obligation to finish them.
- Have flexible deadlines; this one's less useful for me (because it's filling the prompt *at all* that's the problem) but probably very useful for other disabled people. Have similar clear guidelines and "it's okay if this happens" and pre-formatted e-mails for asking for a deadline extension, or just say that posting late is fine.
- Don't immediately ban someone who doesn't finish and doesn't tell you beforehand.

I have never run a ficathon so I don't know how realistic these are, but if a challenge did all of these I might actually be able to participate.

ETA because this is not clear: I totally understand that not all of these are reasonable for every challenge, that in fact some of them are very unrealistic for strictly exchange-based challenges, and that changing *existing* challenges is a rather different beast from making new challenges more accessible. I suppose this post is partially "I would like you to keep this in mind if you are thinking of creating a challenge" (e.g. either getting away from strict exchange-based format entirely or adding in options for people who probably can't commit to that) and partially "If you are currently running any kind of challenge, it would be really really cool if you'd do this" (form letters for drop-outs. This is actually the #1 thing I'd like to see, because I honestly have trouble describing just how difficult writing a simple e-mail can be.) Sorry for any confusion!

Comments

[liviapenn]

- Allow for people to drop out, even drop out without being able to tell you, and make clear that this is not ZOMG the end of the world in the rules.

I don't think a lot of mods are going to be fans of telling people it's okay to drop out without any indication at *all*, because then as a mod, you don't know you need to find pinch hitters until the deadline has already passed, and you either have to delay the entire ficathon, or go live and tell some people they still have to wait a day or two.

However, in the case of small or medium-sized fandoms, one thing that I've found to be helpful (as a mod) is sending out reminder e-mails, say, a week before the due date, usually with reminders of the deadline/details of how stories are to be posted, and asking people to confirm either that they're dropping out or that they're still planning on posting. Would this feel like it was overly pressuring/pushy to you, or helpful?

I really, really like the idea, btw, of a form letter for people who need to drop out of a challenge. It never would have occurred to me before, but it just seems so obvious that it would be *really* helpful. I think some mods might worry that it would encourage dropping out (sort of the "if we give teenagers condoms it'll encourage them to have sex" argument, I guess *G*) but if I were to run a challenge again, I would definitely do this.

- In addition to the actual challenge, have a group of prompts that people can simply try filling out, or have some prompts you assign to people with no obligation to finish them.

I love this idea too! I know there are definitely people who enjoy ficathons purely for the writing and don't really care about getting stories. Having a pool of no-obligation prompts-- obviously it couldn't possibly hurt, and if it does work out, hey: more stories! Again, totally not something I ever would have thought of, but a really neat idea.

- Don't immediately ban someone who doesn't finish and doesn't tell you beforehand.

I don't really understand why non-exchange-based ficathons do this in the first place, really. :/

[zvi]

If modding involves sending assignments to an individual or tracking them in some way, then every additional participant represents additional work on the part of the mod. Personally, I don't want to expend the energy (and my time/energy participation in fandom is limited, even as a normal person) on people who aren't going to turn up with a story (or whatever the exchange is intended to produce.) This is especially true for challenges where the mod has to generate their own object for participants to work off of (e.g. for picfor1000 or any of the bingo card challenges), or for challenges where there are assigned posting dates so that people watching the challenge are getting a story/icons/meta, etc. every day, because that sort of posting still requires pinch hitters.

I mean, I won't say this is universally true, but the reason for a lot of challenges is so that the mod can have more X exist in the world, and I can do about this much to get that much X, and people who don't turn X in mess with my X production formula, you know? And I, personally, am not running 3_ships because administrating challenges is something I enjoy doing.

[liviapenn]

If modding involves sending assignments to an individual or tracking them in some way, then every additional participant represents additional work on the part of the mod.

Sure, but I think in some cases when you balance that against the hypothetical additional work that it might save you later, it could actually be a net savings on time/energy. I was thinking of Comica Obscura specifically when I mentioned reminder letters, and harriet_spy and I came up with that idea because we knew it would be an incredibly harrying if not nearly impossible to find timely pinch-hitters for super-obscure indie comics characters, etc. And, I don't know whether it was the reminder letters or some other factor, but we always had a very low drop-out rate compared to most ficathons. (IIRC, the second year we ran it, no one dropped out at all.)

On the other hand, if we're just talking about, say, a Rodney/Teyla ficathon or something, where it's not the most obscure pairing in the entire world and pinch-hitters would be relatively easy to find, then maybe sending out letters isn't actually an efficient use of the mod's time. (Although on LJ/DW I can see other ways of doing it besides mass-email-- posting a poll in the comm and having people check in that way, maybe?)

[zvi]

- Don't immediately ban someone who doesn't finish and doesn't tell you beforehand.

I don't really understand why non-exchange-based ficathons do this in the first place, really. :/

That was the portion of your comment, and something similar Travis said above, that I was responding to, actually.

I already do checkin e-mails and posts for 3_ships, and if I had people post to DW or LJ, I'd probably offer the extra prompts, too. Since I post to a website with handcoded HTML (yes, yes, I know, so last century), it's just too much work. When the otwarchive software is ready for installing on my website, I'll probably revisit the issue though.

[kaz]

Just as a quick note - I assume when you say "as a normal person", you mean you're not disabled. I just want to let you know "normal" is rather loaded terminology when it comes to disability - and kind of painful for me to read. "Temporarily able-bodied" (or TAB for short) is the usual terminology, I use "currently abled" or "currently enabled" myself because I feel it's less exclusive of neuroatypical people, "nondisabled" also gets thrown around although it's somewhat problematic due to defining via negative - anyway, any of those is much preferable to "normal" and I'd be really grateful if you used one of them instead.

And I can totally understand that, but there are people who might be able to produce X but who won't be able to under strict challenges. Like, say, if I have a 30% chance of producing fic for a prompt that drops to 10% once you factor in the stress caused by the strict deadline and needing to somehow tell people I might not be able to make it, I definitely won't sign up for that mod's challenge, so they have no chance of getting an X fic from me. However, if they put out a more relaxed challenge, and I join, there is admittedly a 70% chance of me dropping out - but it'll be a lot less stressful for me, and the mod wouldn't have got anything from me anyway if they'd made the challenge stricter - and a 30% chance of getting fic that would not otherwise have been written.

There's of course the question of how much time the mod wants to invest for a 30% chance of fic, and I'm probably outnumbered by the people who work better under pressure... but I mainly want to point out that I and people like me *do exist* and I get the impression a lot of people don't realise that - they think that increasing pressure = increasing productivity for everyone.

Plus, I still think that even a very strict challenge could provide things like a form e-mail or comment if you need to drop out, because it doesn't seem as if it would be that much work to put up and I really cannot describe how much easier that would make things for me.

[zvi]

Sorry for the terminology, will try not to do it again.

My point wasn't that the things you request are uniformly hard (some of them — like silent dropouts — are impossible in an exchange challenge, but OTOH I did a drop out post and amended the rules of 3_ships to include a sample dropout e-mail this afternoon in about fifteen minutes) but that it is not true to assert that, because a dropout costs nothing to the mod in time or effort, there is no rational reason for a non-exchange challenge mod to ban people from their challenge.

[kaz]

I... suddenly realise I haven't answered this and meant to several days ago. Um, sorry. :(

However, in the case of small or medium-sized fandoms, one thing that I've found to be helpful (as a mod) is sending out reminder e-mails, say, a week before the due date, usually with reminders of the deadline/details of how stories are to be posted, and asking people to confirm either that they're dropping out or that they're still planning on posting. Would this feel like it was overly pressuring/pushy to you, or helpful?

Hmm, I think it could go either way. What I think would tip it over into being generally helpful would be a) some reassurance that if you are dropping out it is not the end of the world just please tell us now. I can understand that mods don't want people to think they can just sign up and then drop out and it's not a big issue, but I figure that a week before the deadline it's kind of unlikely many people will go "oh, I would have written the fic but since they say they don't mind drop outs I won't!", whereas someone with social anxiety and other such things will probably find it a lot easier to say "um, sorry, I can't finish" if it's made clear that they are not going to OMG bring down the whole ficathon or something by it. b) something like the form e-mail for drop-outs - saying that if you need to drop out, no explanation is needed and all you have to do is reply to the e-mail saying "Sorry, I need to drop out." Or something like that.

I really, really like the idea, btw, of a form letter for people who need to drop out of a challenge. It never would have occurred to me before, but it just seems so obvious that it would be *really* helpful. I think some mods might worry that it would encourage dropping out (sort of the "if we give teenagers condoms it'll encourage them to have sex" argument, I guess *G*) but if I were to run a challenge again, I would definitely do this.

I love this analogy so much XD and think it is quite accurate, too!