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

[shopfront]

Thank you for making this post, it's really interesting and helpful to read about accessibility problems from a POV that's both similar and different. I have bipolar, and while it hasn't stopped me from participating in many of the challenges/fests/exchanges that I'd love to do, it does stop me from doing all of the ones I'd like. I'm lucky and still manage to complete quite a few though and I have a pretty low drop out rate, so I've learnt the best way to manage my spoons, but I understand your frustration at having to consider whether I'm capable of doing something I'm really excited about, when sometimes small tweaks would make it considerably easier for me. I sometimes function best of very short deadlines, and sometimes even the more generous writing deadlines aren't enough. I think your point about email stress is also a really good one. I usually get there in the end, but any sort of communication along those lines whether on or offline tends to take me a long while to get around to because first I have to struggle to push down the feeling of being shamed by my inability to keep up with my more able peers.

I think it's hard to accommodate some of these issues within the currently popular challenge/exchange format though. There are lots of smaller tweaks that can be used, like your suggestion about clearer drop out policies and email forms, to ease problems, but I think assigned exchanges in particular are very difficult to make any large changes to, given the requirements of getting everyone a gift. Maybe the answer is really less about changing aspects to the current format(s) - well aside from increasing awareness among mods about accessibility for the less abled so that the smaller changes are made more regularly - and more about a need for people to be more creative with these sorts of projects. Maybe less able people finding it difficult to participate somewhere despite the large range of fandom events that happen each year should tell us there's a bit of a rut going on here, and challenge us to diversify the way we run things.

And I must say, I went away and pondered the issue for a while before coming back to comment, and I've had just as much fun brainstorming ways to keep the elements I love most about the current general template used, while leaving behind some of the biggest obstacles to participating, as I do brainstorming for a new fic assignment.

[kaz]

Thanks! :) I'm glad this post is speaking to people not, uh, me. I also actually agree on short deadlines - I think longer deadlines gives me more time to build up panic, which means that by the time the deadline actually rolls by the issue has turned into one of those things I store at the back of my mind labelled "do not touch on danger of pain". But that's not something everyone deals with, and someone with more classical spoon problems - who might only be able to write rarely or a little and therefore need more time to complete something - will probably like long deadlines and flexible deadlines.

I agree with you that it's tough to accommodate this stuff in strict exchange-based formats, but I think it should still be possible to have a ficathon with an exchange-based element to it that has some more flexibility in it - for instance, some people might be willing to sign up (under the usual restrictions) without asking for a prompt in exchange, in which case you could have multiple writers on one prompt (in particular, a person with drop-out-amnesty and a person doing it the usual way), or people who sign up under amnesty conditions might not be able to request prompts/be able to request but only if they don't mind if their prompt isn't filled (in which case you'd have a pool of the usual challenge and a separate pool of no-guaranteed-fic). This would all be more work for the mods so I understand people sticking to the strictly "X writes a fic for Y's prompt", but I don't want to go so far as to say that any type of exchange-based ficathon can't be made more accessible for people like me apart from relatively minor tweaks, you know?

Brainstorming this is quite fun! I tend to frame these issues as "me sucking and therefore it being my own fault I can't participate" >>, but looking at them from an access point of view is very refreshing and interesting.