Friday, September 15, 2006

All FanLit Up

If you are one of the few, the proud, and the brave who have not yet been swept up in the Avon FanLit hysteria, I applaud you. You are probably actually writing your real book and/or doing other forms of paying work. The rest of us, I'm sorry to say, are not being very productive at the moment, so good on you. Because we need someone to keep running the world while we're preoccupied.

I actually had no intention of submitting an entry (the category for submissions is Regency and I thought the story premise was a little ridiculous) or of voting on entries (except for those sent in by my critique partners), but alas, I am weak. About midway through the submission period, I caved. And now not only do I have two entries (more on the second entry in a second), but I am also in the top ten list of Top Players! (You are awarded "buzz points" for every entry you score, for leaving comments with your scores, and other site activity. I've no idea exactly how these points are determined, but I have earned a lot of them somehow, enough to be in the top ten.)

One of the more frustrating things about the way this whole fanlit thing is working, however, is that you really can't tell how your entry is doing. My sense is that my "straight" entry isn't doing very well--it gets ratings from 0 (the lowest) to 5 and everything in between, but more on the lower side than the higher, it seems. I've generally only gotten comments from folks who liked it reasonably well, however, so I don't know exactly what the majority of people who give it 0's through 1.5's are thinking.

A good average score at the moment appears to be anything over 3.0, but you only see an entry's average immediately after you score it yourself and these averages apparently don't take into account all of the things that will determine an entry's final ranking (like how many times a chapter's promo was skipped), so that average likely doesn't mean all that much anyway.

But the primary reason I have gotten caught up in this FanLit thing is that it is fascinating to watch from a psychological point of view. The period for submitting and preliminary voting for the first chapter is quite long (it began at the end of last week and doesn't complete until early next week), and for the last few days, things have gotten more than a tad cranky. People are getting sick of seeing the same characters (Damien, Earl of Coulter and the mysterious Countess Fraser) and scene (the Duchess of Alderman's ball) over and over again. There are complaints in the forums about "unfair" voting and general nailbiting/hairpulling over the whole thing.

Early in the rounds, there was a simply hilarious entry called A Time to Rake. It was a send-up of Snakes on a Plane featuring Lord Samuel L. Jackson and it had me absolutely in stitches. But some people were really put out by it, taking it as a mean-spirited satire of Regency romance. Suffice it to say that some of those comments made me think we were all starting to take this thing just a tiny bit too seriously.

So I came up with my own spoof entry. I thought everyone was in need of a little comic relief, so I selected something I was sure would not be taken seriously but would simply give people a needed break from the same old, same old. And now that Lynne Simpson has thoroughly outed me on her blog, I will state with pride and for the record that the entry entitled A Regency Enterprise is mine. As you might have guessed from the title, it is a Star Trek parody. Unfortunately, entering it in the contest makes it the property of Avon, so I can't post it here, but I can tell you that McCoy gets to say, "Damn it, Spock, I'm a doctor not a ballroom dancer." (And that line still cracks me up, a full day after I wrote it.)

Okay, so I put that sucker out there yesterday morning after having composed it in all of thirty minutes and within minutes, the darn thing was pulling in ratings of 5.0 and getting comments like this:

"You need a "beverage alert" in your blurb. My monitor just got baptized in Diet Coke. ;-) Loved your story! LOVED it." -- This was from Lynne

"Cap'n, I canna take any more mirth! My sides hurt too much from laughing at all the dilithium-um, delirium! Thanks for the laugh - and this was very well written, besides."

"Brilliant! Refreshing. It so engaged me that I forgot to look for picky errors. Alas, I believe Regency purists will be shocked, but I adored it. Great imagination! You got guts, spunk and true wit. Live long and prosper!"

And my all-time favorite:

Fantastic! Every word sheer genius. You definitely deserve some kind of prize: give this author a tribble!
I have also gotten a few comments that make me think some people believe I actually entered this with the serious intention of having it win. Mais non! It was all just for comic relief, I swear. I figured it would make people laugh and provide a little break from the tedium. I never in my wildest dreams imagined it would get high scores. I figured people would score it a 0 or a 1 or something, even if they got a kick out of it. A few of the comments seem a bit irritated because it's not a Regency, but really--it's a joke. Even I wouldn't want to have to work with this as the beginning chapter for the next round, peeps, and I wrote it!

So the final irony is that I am pretty sure A Regency Enterprise will wind up with a better average score than my real entry. Which serves me right, really. But honestly, I have gotten way more "bang for my buck" out of the spoof entry than out of the real one because I have obviously given so many people the pleasure of a hearty laugh. And what could be better than that, really? The idea of winning the contest actually pales by comparison.

I have no idea if I'll be able to sustain my wit into the next round, but I am now considering entering some sort of parody entry each time because it really has been so much fun. I've already been asked by some of my friends if I will please do one with Next Generation characters, and since that show is actually my favorite of all the Star Trek series, I may just do. And perhaps I can think of some other TV shows, movies, or books to parody along the way. There are six rounds, after all, and I think Star Trek may lose its amusement value pretty quickly if I stick only to that.

So if anyone has any suggestions for me, I'm all ears.

15 comments:

Darcy Burke said...

That was brilliant Barbara and phooey on anyone with no sense of humor! How about Lost, Desperate Housewives, or 24? It would be funny to see how many times you could get Jack Bauer to say dammit. 'Course the body count would be quite high. (There's a website that tracks Bauer's body count - it's a riot.) Lost could be fun because, gee, just about everyone on that island is hiding something!

Looking forward to TNG!
Darcy

Jackie Barbosa said...

How about Lost, Desperate Housewives, or 24?

Alas, I don't watch any of those shows. (If it's on after 9pm, we generally don't watch it, because the way our lives are, we go to bed right after the kids do!)

You did make me think of one and I think it could be HILARIOUS. A parody of the X-Files. OMG, I'm already getting such great, funny ideas! Mulder, Scully, and CancerMan. HAHAHAHAHA!

I'll try to do TNG in the next round, but it depends which chapter gets picked to go into the next round. It may obviously lend itself better to one parody idea than another.

Thanks for the support. Really, though, I wish people wouldn't give it 5.0s. It doesn't deserve them and I myself would be cheesed off if it got to the finals (although then Teresa Medeiros might read it and she's a true Trekkie, so it would be kind of fun to have her "notice" me, LOL!)

Lynne Simpson said...

Eep. I hope you didn't mind being outed. You'd commented about it on a previous post, so I thought it was okay.

I hope FanLit catches on for other fiction genres and TV shows. I swear, Jacqueline, if they EVER did a Star Trek FanLit, you'd final every week. I meant what I said about Paramount giving you a call if they want to do a new movie. I could HEAR Leonard Nimoy in my head when I read Spock's dialogue in your story.

You're so right about people taking this thing a little too seriously, and it's fascinating to watch. I mean, can you imagine someone sitting there and repeatedly voting 0.5 and 0.0 on other people's entries in order to give her own chances a boost? I would never, ever do that, not only because it violates my sense of honor and fair play (which is a huge deal to me) but because of what it would tell me about myself. By doing this, a person is saying to herself that her writing isn't good enough to win fair and square, so she has to screw up other people's scores to give her entry a better chance. It's saying that winning this contest and getting all that attention is so important that it trumps honesty and fairness.

If a person who does this doesn't think that it will affect her in every part of her life, I beg her to reconsider. Sowing injustice, dishonor, and lies in the world, even in a relatively small forum like this contest, ALWAYS burns and poisons the person who does it. There is NO upside.

Heh...sounds like I'm taking things a little seriously, eh? The outcome of the contest, no. And the "Regency purity" of the entries, no. But the behavior, yes. Like you said, fascinating.

Lynne Simpson said...

Even if it was intended as a parody, Jacqueline, your writing was SOLID, and I hope that gets you some well-deserved attention. If you do TNG next, who'll be Damien? Worf? Ryker? Jean-Luc? I love 'em all!

Jackie Barbosa said...

Eep. I hope you didn't mind being outed. You'd commented about it on a previous post, so I thought it was okay.

Like I said in my comment on your blog, it's totally fine. You're right, I did effectively out myself. I just didn't plan to go around broadcasting in FanLit that I wrote that entry.

Even if it was intended as a parody, Jacqueline, your writing was SOLID, and I hope that gets you some well-deserved attention.

Aw, thanks. That's a sweet thing to say. (Along with saying if there were a Star Trek fanlit, I'd final every week, LOL. I'm really not sure I could sustain it very long!)

If you do TNG next, who'll be Damien? Worf? Ryker? Jean-Luc? I love 'em all!

I have no idea. It will come to me in a dream, I'm sure. OTOH, maybe it'll be the Countess this time who's a Star Trek character. Dr. Beverly, maybe?

But I'm telling you, the X-Files idea is starting to take shape in my mind and it could be funny as hell. (Mulder and Scully are called in to investigate the mysterious countess. Damien turns out to be CancerMan. The possibilities are endless.)

Lynne Simpson said...

LOL!! I'm sure a new flash of brilliance will hit you when the new premise is posted next Friday. :-)

Lynne Simpson said...

I'll tell you one thing that's really puzzling me -- the rankings and buzz points. I've voted on 326 out of 350 entries, but I only have 199 buzz points. Darcy's 122, Lacey's 96, and Jacqueline's way up there! I'm wondering if the scoring on our entries is figuring into it AND if maybe we get points based on how close we "guess" an entry's average when we vote on it.

Any thoughts?

lacey kaye said...

Lynne,

I've been wondering about those buzz points for a long time. Because when this first started, I wasn't reading/voting and I was like number 36. They say your scores/avgs have nothing to do with it, but like I said on my blog I've read less than 100 of the 350 submissions and I don't leave comments every time. So I have no idea what's keeping me afloat! But I do post on the forum, and that seems to give buzzpoints, too. But I didn't until about three days ago. So...

And I loved A Regency Enterprise. Seriously. Can't wait for the one with the holodeck!

Lynne Simpson said...

Hey, if the chapter that wins is really difficult to follow, the Holodeck could be a great way to write us out of it. Or, if not the Holodeck, a friend of mine was joking about how a second chapter could open up with a Bobby Ewing "I dreamed the whole last season of Dallas" scenario. ;-) I was going to jump into a Round Robin over at Harlequin a while back, but in that particular case, so many inconsistencies and downright unbelievable stuff had crept in during the first three chapters that there was no way to write a credible follow-up, at least not without a Holodeck or something. I doubt that happens with all their Round Robins, but it's always a risk, I guess.

I'm CompSci geek, so of course I want to figure out the formula for the points. As it stands now, Jacqueline has 53 more buzz points than I do. We've both submitted two entries, so we're even on that. I'm assuming she also did early bird registration, so we each started out with twenty points. Even if Jacqueline has rated all 354 entries in the pool and I've only done 330, that's just a difference of 24. Where do the other 29 points come from? I don't know if we get even a full point every time we vote. It may be more like half a point.

Did anybody notice how much their score went up when they submitted an entry? I should've taken a look before and after, but I forgot. I'll definitely do that next round. I think there may be a flat rate point award just for submitting.

I could be wrong about this, but I've got a hunch that the score has something to do with how well a person's entry is doing. If so, that's good news for all of us. In your case, Lacey, you still have a lot of points even though you've judged maybe a third (or even a fourth) as many entries as Jacqueline and I have. (I don't know how many Jacqueline has rated; that's just a guess.)

lacey kaye said...

Right now Jacq is in the top ten for sure. She has like 300 more points than I do! I think you're probably right (and I did early bird registration, too) but I think the more comments you leave the more points you get, too. I mean, look at Laura T. She couldn't have seen THAT many more entries than you, but she's active on the board AND posts a comment pretty much every time.

I really, really, REALLY hope it's related to how well an entry is doing! In that case, Jacq's Star Trek entry might be getting a ton of hits (instead of skips, since she made it VERY clear in the promo was it is!) and of course we know yours is/was doing well, too.

Anyway, go team! We're all getting the Avon Eye at this point and really, that's what matters, right?

Ok, I'm out for tonight. We're going to play pinball so I won't be back until tomorrow morning. (Nerdiness ensues...)

Lynne Simpson said...

I've definitely been curious about what Laura T is doing, because her point total is more than double the next closest. I think you're right, Lacey -- leaving comments with the score MUST do something. I was certain that forum activity had an effect, but Holly9000 posted recently that the forums and the buzz points are completely separate from each other. I asked her directly about the points awarded just for submitting an entry, and she said that was a secret. Well, I'll find out in the second round when I check before and after each submission. :-)

My hunch is that your entries are doing really well, Lacey. I know you got high scores from me, and I seem to remember seeing a lot of positive comments on both. If the buzz points are somehow connected to how an entry is doing, my guess is that your averages are quite healthy, given your ranking. And I agree -- I'd put money on Jacqueline being in the Top Ten. Woohoo!

I think the infodumping in my second entry is killing it. :-) I had a feeling that'd happen. I usually don't write like that, and if I ever rewrote it, I'd definitely want to fall back into my more natural pace.

Have fun with pinball! I'm off, too.

Jackie Barbosa said...

Okay, here's my theory for why I have as many buzz points as I do. I notice, first off, that you get more points for scoring entries a) the longer you read them and b) if you leave comments. All points seem to be in round increments of 1, but I notice I get more points the longer I've read an entry before scoring it and more points when I leave comments than when I don't. Laura T seems to leave a comment on EVERY entry she scores, which probably in itself explains why her buzz points are so high.

I'm also reasonably certain that you get more buzz points for scoring an entry close to its average score, the theory being (I suppose) to discourage people from rating entries either much higher or much lower than is "fair". I've given out a lot of 2.5's, and since most entries hover around the mid 2 range, I think that could explain my relatively prodigious buzz point total.

Take that for what it's worth!

Lynne Simpson said...

Hey, Jacqueline, have you heard about Simon and Schuster's Strange New Worlds Contest? I just read about it on Anna Genoese's blog. It's for Star Trek short stories, and the deadline's October 2nd!

lacey kaye said...

Holy Crap, Jacq! Get on that!

Lynne Simpson said...

It's 10 cents a word, too. That's a very nice rate for short stories.