cloverfield: (lessthanthree)
cloverfield ([personal profile] cloverfield) wrote in [community profile] kurofai2015-05-01 08:44 pm

2015 KuroFai Olympics - Sign Up Post!

That's right, CLAMPers, the big moment has finally arrived: welcome to the 2015 KuroFai Olympics!

Following in the glorious footsteps of the 2014 Comedy v.s. Drama Olympics, the 2013 Future v.s. Fantasy Olympics, the 2012 Canon v.s. AU Olympics, and the one that started them all, the 2011 Fluff v.s. Angst Olympics, we are proud to present this year's theme of Fantasy v.s. Sci Fi!

2015 KuroFai Olympics Poster, created by cloverflynn

The showdown begins today, with sign ups for each team: Team Fantasy, for those adventurous souls who like their swords magical and their dragons plentiful and scaly; and Team Sci Fi, for those brave enough to fly beyond the stars with laser guns blazing! Prompts will be posted up on Monday the 4th of May, consisting of a core theme with a little flavour text to help get those creative juices flowing, and we hope you'll find them inspiring. Below you'll find your handy guide to this year's Olympics, and we strongly encourage you to read through it before signing up, whether you're a Olympian of several years or a brand new competitor.

So tell me: What are the KuroFai Olympics, anyway?

The KuroFai Olympics are a friendly team-based competition between two teams writing different genres of fiction, based around the same set of prompts, in this case being the genres of Fantasy and Science Fiction, or Sci Fi for short. While both genres fall under the umbrella of Speculative Fiction -being fiction that contains fantastical, futuristic or supernatural elements- they are very different in their approach: Fantasy gives us swords and spells where Sci Fi shows us robots and space travel. Think the world of LeCourt contrasting to the world of Piffle, or the Lord of the Rings contrasting with Firefly.

Each team will have the same number of competitors, and each competitor will square off against the corresponding competitor from the other team using the same assigned prompt, with both posting their fics on the same day as determined by the posting schedule.

For example:

The posting schedule for the Olympics is from the 13th to the 20th. Fred and Frankie are both competitors for Team Fantasy; Sam and Sally for Team Sci Fi, and they are assigned their prompts as follows:

School Life - Fred v.s. Sam
Stars Above and Stars Below - Frankie v.s. Sally.

School Life is scheduled to be posted on the 13th, and Stars Above and Stars Below on the 14th, according to the posting schedule. When the 13th comes around, Fred posts his Team Fantasy fic, and Sam her Team Sci Fi. The next day, on the 14th, Sally posts her Team Sci Fi fic, and Frankie xir Team Fantasy fic. It doesn't matter who posts first out of either team's scheduled posters, only that they post on the day itself. This works out great for Sally, as her timezone allows her to post her fic in the morning, and it also means that even though it's night time for Frankie when xie posts, it's still on the same date.

Okay, fair enough. But what do the Olympics need to be successful?

For a start, we need writers: competitors who sign up for both teams, compete over the prompts, and post their team fic on their scheduled posting day. Teams should have equal numbers of competitors, and will be capped at seven members each for Team Fantasy and Team Sci Fi: that's fourteen competitors all up. Seven members per team means seven fics per team, posted over the course of seven days. Why seven? It's a pretty lucky number, and also past Olympics have shown that it's the most successful size of a team. Any larger, and it's like herding cats, but it's still a good size to create a lot of lovely new fic.

We also need pinch-hitters. A pinch-hitter is a stand-by writer, someone who signs up with a team and will step up to write for any prompt left vacant due to a competitor dropping out from illness or accident or familial obligations. People get sick, children need adult supervision, work decides it's going to call you in with barely any notice, and any of the above mean you might not be able to finish your fic and post it in time. That's okay; it doesn't mean you failed. It just means you have a life outside the Olympics. But that's why the pinch-hitters are so important. If anyone cannot complete their fic or need to drop-out, all they have to do is let the chairperson know (i.e. yours truly, [personal profile] cloverfield ) as soon as possible, and the chairperson will then assign a pinch-hitter to their vacant spot, who in turn will step up to bat and take one for the team. Or something. Baseball metaphors are not my strong suit; we play cricket here in Australia.

Anyway. To make life a little easier for the pinch-hitters, who have the hardest job in the whole Olympics, if a pinch-hitter is called upon to fill a gap in the posting schedule, their posting day will be moved to an additional day, right after the end of the original schedule to give them as much time as possible to compete. Using the example from above, this means that if Sally has to drop out from Team Sci Fi and pinch-hitter Sarah takes her place, Sarah won't be posting on the 14th- she'll be posting her fic for Stars Above and Stars Below on the 21st, the day after the last day of posting for the contest, which in this example is the 20th. However, Frankie does not get any bonus time; xie still has to post xir fic for Team Fantasy on the originally scheduled date of the 14th. This means that everyone will still follow their original posting dates except for Sarah; she gets an extra 24 hours, to make up for the time lost from her starting late.

If anyone needs a pinch-hitter to step up and take their place, it is extremely important that you let me know as soon as possible. You can contact me through a PM here on dreamwidth, or by an ask or fanmail over at my tumblr. I check my messages constantly throughout the day, but I do have a full time job and live in one of the furthest timezones on the planet, so as soon as I can, I'll get back to you and help you get a pinch-hitter organised for your prompt.

If you do not have a pinch-hitter to step in for you, and no-one posts on your scheduled day for your team, or you do post and your fic is incomplete, I'm going to have to penalise you.

What? No one said there would be penalties!

I'm afraid so; it is a competition, after all. That said, the Olympics prides itself on being a fun, friendly comp, not cut-throat or mean at all, so I don't want you running scared; no-one will be eating your eyes, even if we are CLAMP fans. However, in order to make it fair for everyone, penalties are necessary for missing fics or incomplete ones. If no-one posts on your scheduled prompt day, your team will get a big, fat zero for that day's score. If someone does post, but their fic is unfinished, they will be docked points from their total score. It's still possible to get a decent score with an incomplete fic, and it's not the end of the world if you can't finish and you don't ask for a pinch-hitter: I've done it before myself, in the 2013 Olympics, when I pulled a tendon in my biceps muscle and made it impossible for me to finish my entry for Team Fantasy. (And for me to type for several weeks after; I really hurt myself.)

This is why it's so important that we have pinch-hitters, to swoop in and save the day if needed; and this is why it's also so important for your teammates to help each other. You're all in this as a team, after all, banding together to take down those smug magical/snooty scientific brats on the other side- show some spirit and support each other in your noble fight!

What happens if I miss out on a place on a team? Do I not get to participate?

Well, the teams are going to be capped in size as mentioned above, for my own sake and that of the readers. And it is first come, first served. I apologise in advance if you don't get a spot, or aren't on the team you preferred first, but unfortunately the nature of the game means some people will miss out.

However, if you can't get a spot as a writer, you can always be a pinch-hitter! Nothing's stopping you from drabbling along with the prompts as the competition progresses, or writing a fic of your own to match the theme or a prompt you really like, either. All we ask is that you refrain from posting it on the community while the contest is ongoing.

(Also, while a size cap is in place, if we get enough people who would like to participate, I may be talked into increasing the amount of participants, provided the number is even and we have enough pinch-hitters to cover potential drop-outs.)

Do I have to post here on dreamwidth?

You don't have to post your fic on dreamwidth, no, but you do need to make an entry post. That is, a post where you provide a link to the location where your fic is posted, filling the entry template which I'll post up on the community once the prompts have been assigned. It means that there is one centralised location for your readers to vote for you, which makes it so much easier to score you in the end. You're perfectly welcome to post on tumblr or AO3 or whereever takes your fancy, as long as it is accessible to the public, and you link back here.

I've seen some really gorgeous art for the Olympics this year, as posters and banners. Who made them?

This year we were lucky enough to have the amazing [personal profile] kittenkin make us up some gorgeous banners to use for each team -you might have seen me reblogging them on my tumblr- and they're going to be our official banners for each team entry. I'll provide the coding for them later, when I make the entry template post.

And as you can see above, the very talented [personal profile] cloverflynn has created a gorgeous poster for us as well. Our fandom has some amazing fanartists, that's for sure!

Yeah! All that art is gorgeous and makes me want to get started! But... I'm not a writer- does this mean I can't join in the fun?

What? No! In fact, we need you to make the Olympics happen! For the Olympics to be a roaring success, we need readers to vote for all the fics! Readers get to do the really fun stuff and read each fic from each team as it is posted, and score each one out of a combined total of thirty, using ten points from each category in the scoring rubric below:

1. How well did this fic fit the prompt?
2. How well written was the fic?
3. How much did I enjoy the fic?


Readers should grade each category from a scale of one to ten, with one being the least possible score and ten being the most. Scores will be added up and tallied for each team, and once the posting schedule has finished, published as a final tally to declare the winner!

I'll make a detailed post about the etiquette around scoring fics later, but basically it all comes down to this: be fair, but kind. No-one's here to hurt feelings, or make writers feel bad after all the effort they put in. I'm not too worried about it, though, because we're a really lovely fandom; one of the nicest ones out there, in fact, and I know everyone is going to score with this in mind.

Sweet. Be nice to each other; that's easy enough. When are we posting these fics, anyway?

I can't give you an exact date until I know how many of you are competing, and until I can assign you all your prompts without any hiccups, but with the rough dates I have in mind, prompts will -assuming nothing goes wrong and no one is set on fire- be posted up to claim for on Monday the 4th of May, and be officially assigned on the Friday the 8th, allowing for four days for inter-team prompt swapping and such. Your writing period starts on the Monday the 11th of May (though if you're organised, you can start as soon as you get your prompt) and ends on the Sunday the 31st of May; the dates for posting fics are between Monday the 1st of June and Monday the 8th of June. After that, there will be about a week for readers to vote, to be extended if needed, with a tentative finishing date of the 15th of June.

On the 4th, I'll make another post about prompts, so make sure you keep an eye out for that. I'll advertise everything I post on tumblr too, using the '2015 KuroFai Olympics' tag.

Uh... what timezone are we posting in? Because I live in the Americas/France/England/China/Antarctica and you seem to be somewhere else entirely...

That's a good point! In case you can't tell by my blatant disregard for baseball and use of Australian English, I am, in fact, Australian. I mentioned it before, actually, for those of you who weren't paying attention. And because I live in the Land Down Under, I am several hours ahead of most of you on the world clock. Still, like the years before, this competition will be run on Los Angeles Local Time, give or take a few hours leeway. So you need to figure out what your timezone is compared to L.A.'s, and make sure you post accordingly.

That said, timezones confuse the hell out of me, so I'm not going to be too picky about them; as long as you post within an hour or two of midnight on the day of your posting, I won't dock you any points. If you post after the next competitors have started posting for their prompt, however, and you're not a pinch-hitter, you're out of luck and you'll get a zero. I recommend using this handy time zone converter to figure out what time your fic needs to be up by.

Gotcha! This whole thing sounds awesome! Is there anything else I should know?

Just a few more things to wrap up this really long and information-packed guide:

1. All fics entered in the Olympics must be new, original works written for the appropriate prompt by a single participant. You can ask your teammate to help you out with coming up with an idea and betaing your fic once it's written, but you have to write it; and you can't take a draft fic you had prepared earlier and jazz it up for the prompt, either.

2. There's no minimum or maximum length of entries; if you can tell a story in a thousand words, more power to you, and if it takes you fifty thousand, that's great too. However, do remember you have a time limit, and physical limits too- don't be like me, and hurt yourself after writing twelve thousand words in a single day to try and finish on time and failing anyway. If you can't finish, there's no shame in calling in a pinch-hitter to bat for you; you're doing the right thing by your team, after all, and with the power of an Olympian comes the responsibilities of an Olympian.

3. Following on from point two, we suggest something like a word count of between five thousand to twenty thousand for the length of your fic. Any longer and people might not want to read it; any shorter, and you might not be able to express your theme and prompt as you'd like to. The average length of olymfics falls somewhere in that bracket range, and it seems to work pretty well.

Wait, I have a question about something you didn't cover!

Okay, that's not a problem; just post it in the comments, and once I've answered you, I'll edit it into the body of the post here.

Edit: A dreamwidth account is neccesary for signing up to the competition. All of the major information and posting will be in dreamwidth, and it is difficult to contact participants without it.




Now that that's out of the way, please sign up in the comments below, stating your preference for a team, if you have one (if you don't state one, you'll go where ever I put you and you'll like it) or if you would like to be a pinch-hitter instead. Let's work together and make this the best Olympics yet!

p.s.: if you're a tumblrite, please reblog this post to help get the word out!

aithilin: (Default)

[personal profile] aithilin 2015-05-01 01:13 pm (UTC)(link)
Sign me up for Sci-Fi!
caffeine_buzz: (good puppy)

[personal profile] caffeine_buzz 2015-05-01 01:18 pm (UTC)(link)
I was Team Future a couple years ago so I'll take Fantasy this time please :)

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[personal profile] mikkeneko - 2015-05-01 14:18 (UTC) - Expand
pokechan: CLAMP sketch of Kurogane laughing (Default)

Sign up! Team Fantasy!

[personal profile] pokechan 2015-05-01 01:18 pm (UTC)(link)
Throwing in my name for Team Fantasy let's go!! (I wish I knew the prompts ahead of time or I might have gone Sci-fi as a personal challenge, but first year let's take it easy self.) I will be happy to write for Team Sci-fi if we somehow find it lacking though.

Re: Sign up! Team Fantasy!

[personal profile] pokechan - 2015-05-01 14:07 (UTC) - Expand
floweranza: (Default)

[personal profile] floweranza 2015-05-01 01:19 pm (UTC)(link)
Hey there! I'd like to make a bid for Team Sci-Fi. (...Sci-Fai.)

I'm mokonatrc over on Tumblr. :)b

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[personal profile] mikkeneko - 2015-05-01 14:14 (UTC) - Expand

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[personal profile] reikah - 2015-05-01 16:23 (UTC) - Expand
mikkeneko: (wai)

[personal profile] mikkeneko 2015-05-01 01:26 pm (UTC)(link)
Kyaaa! OK, here we go. I volunteer as pinch-hitter! If we end up having more than one pinch-hitter, I'd prefer to be in reserve for Team Fantasy. :)

Can't wait!

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[personal profile] reikah - 2015-05-01 16:26 (UTC) - Expand
notpotable: (Default)

[personal profile] notpotable 2015-05-01 01:31 pm (UTC)(link)
I would like to try and sign up for Team Fantasy. I've only ever written a couple things tho :x
Edited 2015-05-01 13:32 (UTC)

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[personal profile] notpotable - 2015-05-01 23:39 (UTC) - Expand
ereshkigali: screencap of a turtle from School Rumble season 2 (Default)

[personal profile] ereshkigali 2015-05-01 01:47 pm (UTC)(link)
I am ready and willing to volunteer as a pinch-hitter!

eta: having just seen mikke's comment, I am totally cool with being in reserve for team sci-fi! that's my home ground, anyway.
Edited 2015-05-01 13:48 (UTC)
thecicada: A smarmy-looking cat with a sparkle (Default)

[personal profile] thecicada 2015-05-01 01:48 pm (UTC)(link)
I'll take fantasy, please! :D
This is super exciting! Good luck to everyone.
tsubasafan: buddha_loves_me (Default)

[personal profile] tsubasafan 2015-05-01 01:50 pm (UTC)(link)
Sign me up for which ever side! Owo just glad to get back in the saddle
badluck_koi: (Default)

[personal profile] badluck_koi 2015-05-01 02:01 pm (UTC)(link)
Signing up for team sci-fi. Go aliens.
odditea: (Default)

[personal profile] odditea 2015-05-01 02:20 pm (UTC)(link)
sign me up for either! :o

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[personal profile] odditea - 2015-05-01 14:26 (UTC) - Expand
animangod: kurofai is the chemistry of a car crash (chesmisty)

[personal profile] animangod 2015-05-01 02:40 pm (UTC)(link)
I want to be involved. .. however I am not positive if I wanna be a main writer or alternate so whichever one needs filling. Prefer Fantasy, but if needed on sci-fi that works too.

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[personal profile] animangod - 2015-05-02 00:44 (UTC) - Expand

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[personal profile] animangod - 2015-05-02 01:02 (UTC) - Expand
zelinxia: (YououYuui - HUGS)

[personal profile] zelinxia 2015-05-01 02:43 pm (UTC)(link)
PUT ME DOWN FOR TEAM FANTASY!
little_echo: Himawari-chan loves it! (KuroFai)

[personal profile] little_echo 2015-05-01 02:54 pm (UTC)(link)
HI THERE, I'D LIKE TO SIGN IN FOR TEAM FANTASY

(Anonymous) 2015-05-01 03:26 pm (UTC)(link)
Sign me up for Team Sci-Fi!!! (funnygeekpics from Tumblr here ^.^)

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[personal profile] triumphforks - 2015-05-02 19:21 (UTC) - Expand

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[personal profile] triumphforks - 2015-05-03 13:22 (UTC) - Expand
cloverflynn: (kurofay)

[personal profile] cloverflynn 2015-05-01 04:14 pm (UTC)(link)
I'd like to be on team Fantasy, but if there aren't enough for team Sci-Fi I'd be happy to do that as well. :D
superyuui: (twc kurofai)

[personal profile] superyuui 2015-05-01 04:20 pm (UTC)(link)
I'd love to be on team Sci-Fi :D (if there's too many either way then I don't mind being switched over to fantasy)
youandyourlilies: (Default)

[personal profile] youandyourlilies 2015-05-01 05:05 pm (UTC)(link)
I'd like to be on team fantasy, but if you need more on team sci-fi I'm okay with that too!

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[personal profile] youandyourlilies - 2015-05-02 01:10 (UTC) - Expand

[identity profile] not_my_century.livejournal.com 2015-05-01 06:24 pm (UTC)(link)
Aaaahhhh I'd love to write but my finals are pretty much June 1-8... I guess I'll kind of tentatively sign up for either if there are any spots left? If not you can put me in reserve for either!
mindlessadri: (Default)

[personal profile] mindlessadri 2015-05-01 06:27 pm (UTC)(link)
I'd like to sign up as a pinch hitter.
Thank you. :3
farenmaddox: (Default)

[personal profile] farenmaddox 2015-05-01 09:58 pm (UTC)(link)
Yo! I will put myself in as backup/pinch hitter/team cheerleaderand veteran advice-giver and all-around good guy.

In other words, I am signing up to be slotted in wherever needed, as needed. And if I don't end up being needed, I'll still be around to read and vote when the time comes!
aythli: (Default)

[personal profile] aythli 2015-05-02 12:29 am (UTC)(link)
I'd be thrilled to be either fantasy or sci-fi (leaning towards fantasy, but wherever the numbers even out is good for me!!)
aythli: (Default)

[personal profile] aythli 2015-05-02 12:33 am (UTC)(link)
Actually, you know what, I'll put my experience to good use - sci-fi me!

(again, assuming that helps your numbers and doesn't hurt it)

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[personal profile] aythli - 2015-05-02 00:44 (UTC) - Expand

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[personal profile] aythli - 2015-05-02 01:03 (UTC) - Expand
arisprite: (Default)

[personal profile] arisprite 2015-05-02 04:32 am (UTC)(link)
I want to sign up! I'm leaning towards Sci Fi. My name on tumblr is Arisprite. I hope it's not too late!

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[personal profile] arisprite - 2015-05-02 14:19 (UTC) - Expand