Community Profile

DRAFT TEXT BELOW:

This challenge will not begin signups until January of 2010. Sign-up posts and links to sign-up posts will go up at that time.

Welcome to the Rarelit Big Bang!

How the Rarelit Big Bang will work:
By Midnight PST on January 31, 2010, you must sign up to write either a 10,000 word story or a 20,000 word story, and indicate which fandom you are writing in.

You may:

• Sign up more than once
  
• Co-write
  
• Write a crossover/fusion (as long as your book-based fandom is primary)
  
• Write for a fandom which was initiated by a book but has subsequently had screen-based media made of it, as long as you base your story on the book canon only
  
• Write for a fandom that has multiple sources (King Arthur, Robin Hood, fairy tales, the Bible), as long as you are familiar with and grounded in specific version(s).

You may not:

• Write for a fandom that is not based on a play, a poem, or a book.
  
• Write in the Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings fandoms.
  
• Miss the deadlines and still participate in the challenge.

Full rough drafts (in other words, not betaed, but the complete word count) will be due on May 1 to allow your artists/soundtrack folks to commit to and complete their work.

Art/soundtracks/podfic:
We will scour the ends of the earth to find people who will do art, podfic, or soundtracks for all stories over 20,000 words. We may or may not manage to find people for shorter stories, but we will give it a go once our longer stories are covered. Podfic, naturally, will have to be a promise that someone would fulfill after the story is in its final form, so authors can either finish early and send the story to their readers, or wait until it has been posted and the reader can start after that.

Art/soundtrack/podfic signups will happen as soon as stories are turned in; we'd do it sooner, but we won't know which fandoms we actually have stories in until then, and you wouldn't be able to *read* the stories, so.

Stories will go live June 1, 2010

As you may already know, one of the most frustrating things about writing fanfiction for small, lit-based fandoms is that there is usually a small audience for it. So there are two unique aspects to this Big Bang challenge.

Cheerleading:
I hate a spammy community like burning. At the same time, I think checking in with one another will be an important and motivating part of this. So each week of the challenge, I'll be posting a single post to ask everyone about word count, how they're doing, etc. Our volunteer cheerleaders will read the post each week and encourage the authors. I'd also like to ask the cheerleaders to help pimp the community during signup and once stories are posted, and try to read at least one story by an author they're not familiar with in a fandom they don't know, so that even the tiniest of fandoms get readers.

These posts will be a fun place to post teaser snippets, link to pimping posts, encourage one another, and squee. Which brings me to my next point:

Pimping:
We'll collate links to pimping posts for all the sources being written in the community user info. If there's no pimping post currently available for your source, feel free to create one! I know I'll probably end up reading some source I wasn't previously familiar with, and I hope everyone else will, too.