fkficfest | The 2024 Plan Post: "I'm sure there's a logical explanation for this..."

FK Fic Fest 2024

fkficfest is on for this year! After testing the waters on my own journal a few weeks ago, I'm skipping the traditional pre-game survey and cutting right to the chase.

Almost everything is the same as last year — challenge-style, minimum 500 words, minimum 51% FK for crossovers, 2 months to write, etc. — except that we'll elect our shared pool of 4 prompts via tournament brackets (Wikipedia article). We'll have a poll for prompt nominations, then a poll for ranking the prompts into brackets ("seeding"), and then a sequence of quick bracket eliminations polls to learn the community's favorites. (I hope that folks find this fun! If it doesn't work, we'll revert to ranked-choice voting next year.)

Schedule:

March 2 (Saturday): Prompt nominations open
March 7 (Thursday): Prompt nominations close
March 8 (Friday): Prompt ranking opens
March 11 (Monday): Prompt ranking closes
March 12 (Tuesday): Brackets voting begins (to be posted), with one round per day until 4 prompts remain. For example, with "byes" to bring non-ideal totals into line:
- 16 nominated prompts = 2 rounds
- 32 nominated prompts = 3 rounds
- 64 nominated prompts = 4 rounds
Soon after the final round: Prompt pool officially announced & rules posted
May 25 (Saturday): Stories due in our AO3 collection
May 27 (Monday, US Memorial Day): Stories begin releasing

About prompts:

Definition: For our challenge-style game, a prompt is a word, set of words, phrase, sentence, question, stanza, etc. meant to inspire an FK story.
Success: We'll likely get the most from prompts that can flex across different interpretations of FK, while also being specific enough to spark reactions.
Limits: 1-30 words. If a prompt is a quotation, include a citation (not part of the word count). And, of course, please, no vulgarity, incivility, that kind of thing.

Questions? Advice? Please share! As always, readers as well as writers are welcome to nominate and vote!

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Update, 7:45pm, March 1: The number of rounds is now better described. Dates to be determined after we have the total number of nominations.
Update, 7:09am, March 2: Your mod lives on Pacific Time. Unless otherwise indicated, all times are Pacific.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Announced on personal Discord server and the community one for my challenge comm.

Thank you for promoting the game!

Below, Nicholas_lucien helped me realize that I'd planned one too many round of eliminations, as we want to stop at a pool of 4 and not drive on to only 1. I'll adjust the dates tonight -- pushing a day later, not sooner! -- to remove the "spare" bracket and close the gap.

So at the end of the voting we will be left with one prompt? Just trying to figure this out!

No, we should stop at four. You've made me realize that I may have miscounted, and should likely redo the plan and the dates. I've never done this before; my apologies.

I have an obligation now, but I will try to fix this tonight!

Thank you again for spotting that I'd mis-counted the brackets! The post should now be clear.

We'll have a pool of 4 prompts in the end. I'm hoping that getting there via brackets will be (a) fun and (b) transparent. The "ranked-choice voting" the past few years has been to try to find the most widely acceptable consensus prompts, but I'm afraid it's been very non-transparent compared to "winner takes all" voting. Perhaps brackets can be the happy medium?

Thank you for explaining! I've never done a bracket before!

Is there a minimum number of prompts you need to form brackets?

Excited for FK March Madness!

If I've done the math right (always a question!), we need a minimum of 16 prompts to form traditional brackets. At 3 prompts per person, that would require at least 6 nominators, so I'm planning to raise the maximum nominations per person to 4 or 5. In the event we don't get 16 total, I'll put out an appeal.

If we get an odd total number, we'll include one "bye" for the most popular prompt.

Yay! :)
Where do you want us to post the prompts? Under this entry, or will there be one solely for that purpose?

There will be a specific post to collect prompts (as in past years). I apologize for the lack of detail here! I have just now woken up on Saturday morning (March 2) in my time zone. I will post it very soon.

Woops, sorry, forgot about the different time zones. My bad.

The 2024 Plan Post: "I'm sure there's a logical explanation for this..."

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Thank you for the promo!

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We should have a pool of 4

Updated post

Re: Updated post

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minimum 16 nominated promps (to yeild a pool of 4)

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Separate post to coillect prompts coming today (Saturday, March 2)

Re: Separate post to coillect prompts coming today (Saturday, March 2)