What did you like about last season?
There were definitely a few things I liked. I liked how first off you had to nominate other people and couldn't nominate yourself. Then I liked the fact that the nominees were very representative of all of us on AC. I think just about every active member on this forum was at least nominated for something, which was nice. Finally I liked that the runner ups got recognized and got banners too. I wasn't expecting that and it was really nice to win something even though I wasn't the first choice.
What did you dislike about last season?
My only thing that I can think of at least was that I would've liked to see more of a variety of categories and an even spread to all genres. I know that we were trying to include more original categories, but I just felt that some categories were more directed say like an action/suspense story than a romance for example. I thought judging was fair, but the rubric that was used to evaluate the stories could have been more specific to the particular category it was up for. Obviously you can't evaluate a fantasy story in the same way as an angst one cuz they have very different elements.
What would you change if you were as powerful and successful as someone like Julilly?
I'd keep it basically the same with a few changes. First off I'd like to see some new different categories which we may have to do anyway because a lot of people are still on the same stories they were on last year. Maybe break them down by genre like Romance (Best romance, best kiss, best breakup, whatever...) Suspense (Best Suspense, Best cliffhanger, Scariest Moment, etc...) I think we also should probably exclude stories that were nominated last year with the exception if they are still ongoing and signifigant progress has been made on them. Same thing with series if they are still being worked on they can be nominated again, but if they are closed they can't. That way it won't be like the SAME stories. I'd also suggest altering the rubric slightly to category when appropriate. That's all I can think of at the moment though.
Hmm. Interesting points. I think the only things I could add would be that we kept the list of categories short for a reason. The more categories you have, the more repeats of stories and judges you need. By making 12 categories just for romance you're going to end up with a bunch that don't get enough entries to fill them, or the same stories in multiple categories. As it was we had three categories that got canned for having barely any nominees. There was more than one for different genres though, ie best romance, best tear-jerker, best cliffhanger, etc but if you make a bunch of categories for one genre you have to do it for all of them... how would you make as many for AU, or Fantasy, as you would for Romance?
I think too it would be hard to make the rubrics individualized
. Especially if you have dozens of categories. Keep in mind it's one person that does all of that, the judges just read and rate. We were evaluating the quality of the writing, the plot, the characters, the settings. I'm not entirely sure how you would get more specific to genre without it potentially getting very biased. You can evaluate a fantasy the same way as you would a romance. They're both fic, it doesn't matter if it's AU or angst, it's the quality of the writing that matters. That would be like saying a police drama and a period drama couldn't both be nominated in the same Oscar category because they're about different things.
I wanted to try and use more fact than opinion. I didn't want to know whether you liked the dialogue in chapter seven, I wanted to know if the dialogue made sense, and flowed, and assisted the plot, which, given that the judges had to apply, they had a fairly solid grasp of english and could determine that.
That being said, how did you imagine the rubric being changed so that it's easy for the judges, as well as easy for the person tallying the votes that is NOT biased?
