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

[jaaaarne]

It has been already pointed out that the conditions you proposed would be quite impossible in an exchange ficathon, but I immensely liked your idea of no-obligations prompts where people could just try their hand at doing something without actually signing up for the challenge.

I keep thinking back to a Christmas challenge I participated in a couple of years ago. There was a master post from the mods, and people signed up there by leaving a comment regarding what they can do and what they wish to get in return. Now I'm thinking that since all these prompts had been public, it would've been quite possible to allow people choose one themselves without signing up and being assigned something. In such case, people could participate without taking obligations. Sure, they wouldn't be receiving anything back, either, but it would be fair, I think.

The more I think about it, the more I like this idea. :) If I ran a ficathon, I would definitely try something like that.

[kaz]

To be honest, in my sad sad sadness about Yuletide I have been thinking of searching out someone's Yuletide letter, trying to write for it and (if successful) dropping it on their LJ as a kind of Suprise Secret Santa. >> If the prompts are public or can be made public with no problems, why shouldn't people be able to sign up with no guarantee of writing?

Or, you know, divide the exchange into flakes and non-flakes, with the first part being between people who go "er, I'd like to write something but I can't guarantee I'll finish" and people who go "here, have a prompt, but I don't mind if it's not completed". It's... there *are* things you can do to make even exchange-based ficathons more open to people who can't guarantee a contribution, you just have to get away from mapping prompts-that-must-be-completed to writers bijectively one-to-one. And I will stop at this point because I want to talk about the mapping being non-injective/non-surjective which is getting way too mathematical for this audience. Oops.

[cesy]

I like the maths part :)

I think for Yuletide, the NYR challenge is kind of useful, though it's not ideal. I wish it was possible to do treats for it as well as full fics, though - I struggle to hit the 1k words limit.

[kaz]

I should probably have qualified that bit, yes. *g* see if the mapping is non-surjective then there are people who do not have an assigned prompt and can attempt any of the others, non-injective means assigning several prompts to the same person - not ideal. OTOH, looking at the map - now no longer an inverse - going the other way, non-injective means assigning several people to the same prompt, whereas non-surjective means some prompts do not have any people assigned - bad! Of course, since our sets are not infinite the First Isomorphism Theorem shows that if we want the first map to be injective and the second map to be surjective both of these imply |{P : P is a prompt that must be completed}| < |{W : W a writer}|, so by the Pigeonhole Principle not every writer can generate a prompt. :)?

One of the very good things that has come out of this post on my part is learning about the NYR challenge! A bit unfortunate now, but definitely something I will be looking at after New Year's!

[blktauna]

You can do treats. Near the end there's the stocking stuffers. They can be of any length but need to be done on a schedule so that might not work for you either.

[highlyeccentric]

Just so you know (someone else may have notified you already) - Yuletide Madness, in which all prompts are loaded up for anyone to write quick-fire bonus stories and upload them to the archive - is now open to anyone with an AO3 account, not just Yuletide registered participants.

This is not QUITE ideal since the AO3 is still in beta and you need an invitation - but if you think you might have spoons to spare on writing fic on Christmas eve, you can head over to the AO3 now and I believe they have a form for requesting an invite.