I helped with some critique/feedback back in the day, though IIRC I dropped the ball on getting feedback done for the fifth one (which was never published anyway). I don't think I was a mod yet back then.

I have strong opinions here regarding quality control and the fact that we need to, well, have it. We can't expect people to write professionally (we're not professionals, with a few exceptions). We can sort stories into two categories - those that are good enough as is, and revision is optional, and those that require revision before going in (at which point critique/feedback is provided and it's up to the author to provide another draft).

I'd like to think that we'd all rate all published as a 4/5 or higher if they were fanfics. If they're not there yet then try to get them there. But I'm not sure how everyone would want to handle that - public voting might be tricky. In the past I think we mailed out word documents for feedback to a handful of people, but it's been a while.

Anyway. That's my opinion. If everyone feels strongly that everyone should get in that wants in, that's fine too. We had some great stories in the past and that's going to be true again, regardless of rules or moderation. You all are fantastic.

As far as word count goes I tend to have strong feelings there (as many of you have seen from my posts in the Competitions). If 7,500 words is good enough for Nebula/Hugo awards I'd think it should be good enough for us - but there's nothing wrong with 10,000 either. Or even 17,500, if you want to follow their guidelines for Novelettes instead.

Just keep in mind Stephen King's advice: Second Draft = First Draft minus 10%. Most of us use more words than we need, imo.

I'm excited to see this being discussed again!

 

Also, here's some interesting word count information for all you Butcher fans.

I looked at the table of contents for both Brief Cases and Side Jobs, Butcher's two anthologies. I listed the starting page number for each short story and calculated how many pages would be in each short story. Rule of thumb is that there are approximately 250 words per page in a book.



Butcher averages about 8.5k for his short stories.

Shortest story at 6 pages (1500 words approx), though this appears to have been an outlier.
Second shortest story at 20 pages (5000 words approx).
His longest still come in under 60 pages, and if I recall at least one of those (Bombshells, maybe?) was marketed as either a novelette or a novella to help sell the new anthology. None reached 60 pages (15,000 words approx).

If Butcher can average 8.5k for his short stories across two anthologies, how much more do we need? I think 2k-10k seems a reasonable range.

Disclaimer - I had originally looked this information up in order to get a sense of where his stories fell in case we do a Dresden Fanfiction competition in Q3 (alongside our standard Harry Potter one). Waiting to judge interest before making that happen, but this seemed relevant information to have.

Disclaimer 2 - I do not have digital copies of either text handy to check how accurate these rough estimates are for these specific texts. There are factors that could tilt it either way.

 

I somewhat offered my thoughts earlier in a longer post but I’ll summarize and clarify. This is opinion only - feel free to adjust or go with something else.

Put the stories up in individual threads with a Poll that has two options.

1. Goes into Anthology - minor edits are the only thing needed.
   
2. Major edits needed before inclusion.

Anyone willing to provide critique should do so to help with feedback and possible improvement.

If a story gets voted #2 then they get to resubmit it in X time (a month?) to be voted on again as either admitted or not, depending upon if everyone feels the edits were sufficient.

Thoughts?

 

If High Fantasy is picked we’ll need to define that for ourselves. Traditionally it deals with (1) other worlds, (2) includes other races, and (3) has an epic good v evil storyline solved by something other than brute force.

We can’t all write epic victories over dark lords so we might forgo #3 in that list.

For our purposes it might be easiest to say “urban” is in our world or a recognizably similar one while “high” is set elsewhere.

But it looks like SciFi is winning anyway so with luck we won’t need to delve into that.

 

I see SciFi and Fantasy as sides of a coin.

Stuff exists/happens that can’t/doesn’t/whatever in the real world.

Does the story frame it in terms of magic (fantasy) or technology (sci-fi)?

Again - just my personal thoughts. Whatever we go with will need discussion to agree to ‘what counts’ before people write.

And as it’s not a competition there’s no reason everyone can’t run their ideas by everyone else to check.

 

I have no idea who plans to take point this time or who all will be involved in the logistics.

I’ll bring it up with staff tonight.