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.