thoughts toward this year's FKFicFest

[brightknightie]

We've had a week now with the prompts for this year's fkficfest. I hope at least one of the three will click with everyone interested!

It's too early for me to know which prompt I'll use or what story I'll discover, myself, but thinking on the options:

• I looked up the "You can't have a better tomorrow if you're thinking about yesterday..." prompt and learned that the person who said it is a historical public figure with a legacy in automotive, weaponry, and environmental unintended consequences. So a run-in with that person's work could be one way of addressing that prompt (alongside the clear call-out to Nick's lines to Alyce in DK1, and subtler call-outs throughout the series).
• Pondering the "When everything changed" prompt, it occurred to me that it could suggest an AU or time-travel of some kind, as well as a turning point known from canon in the characters' pasts or deduced or invented new. Or it could be played smaller-scale or for comedy with the change being something like a new haircut or a glasses prescription, rather than something more obviously world-shaking, like the AMPH asteroid or Vesuvius, or someone dying or being born, or becoming a vampire or being cured of vampirism, or learning a deep truth. And of course the change could be for one of our recurring characters or for a suspect, victim, neck-of-the-week, etc.
• While the "hidden witness" prompt can readily speak to a witness for a police investigation, whether a human witness or an animal, plant, or inanimate one, or a witness to vampirism (a la an Enforcers incident), the word "witness" can be either noun or verb, and as a noun can be either the possessor of evidence or the evidence itself, and it has specific legal and religious uses as well as its common use.

What do you think?

I plan to start posting about the fest to the usual places throughout this coming week. No more posting on yuletide for us, as FK finally outgrew Yuletide last year* and is officially no longer a "small" fandom, but: fandom_on_dw, fandomcalendar, fksquee, last_writes, and femme_fic. Any others?

* That FK outgrew Yuletide only just last year and BSG78 is still fully eligible witnesses to the voluminous loss of fanfic through the years. Library of Alexandria...

Comments

[pj1228]

I haven't decided on a prompt yet either. Or rather I've narrowed it down to two prompts. I have a variety of ideas for one, but nothing yet that forms into a story. The prompts are all very wide-ranged in their interpretation, which is good, but also makes it harder to decide on which way to proceed.

In addition I realised that I already have written a story that would fit one prompt, so I need to make sure not to repeat myself.

[brightknightie]

Good luck and best wishes on picking a prompt and finding a new story that you want to tell!

Regarding repeating yourself: there are such things as "greatest hits." ;-) You probably do want a new plot, but you can always return again and again to your favorite themes! :-D

[nicholas_lucien]

It took a few days but I've picked the prompt. A rough idea is very, very slowly developing. I think I might change the main POV to another character and that might make the story flow better. Maybe ...

[brightknightie]

Congratulations on picking! Good luck finding the strongest flow for the story you want to tell!

[chelseagirl]

To be fair, I think many of us look at our own fanfic past with a critical eye. I was, I think, fairly prolific on FKFIC-L back in the day, but I've only reposted one of the stories to AO3 because the others didn't pass my self-scrutiny test.

[brightknightie]

Ah! I wasn't thinking of that; of course that makes sense.

I was actually only thinking of, for example, that nothing by Susan is there because she died before the AO3 began, which is such a loss for everyone who will ever love FK, and all the BSG78 zines of all the decades before the internet, some of which I'm sure were as marvelous. (BSG78 currently has 241 total works on AO3. That is not a typo.)

[chelseagirl]

To be fair, in the heyday of zines, fanfic was much less widely known, mostly to people who attended cons and the like (and this was pre-ComicCons, DragonCon, etc. before the geeks had inherited the earth) so the number of stories written was also probably significantly smaller than what you'd expect? I remember zines like Warped Space and some of the Trek and Star Wars zines, but back in the late 70s/early 80s, there weren't a ton of zines out there. I didn't really pay attention to original BSG zines because the show didn't click for me and I quit it pretty early on, so I don't have a sense of the volume.

If someone had access to Susan's stories, they might be able to post them -- I wonder who her executor was and whether they were aware of how prolific she was as a writer.