Awards Awards 2015: A Guide

Awards 2015​

A Guide​

​

Welcome to the Guide thread for the 2015 Awards. This thread should serve as your guide to dates, eligibility, rules, an FAQ and a place to ask any questions. It's likely to be long, so apologies, but we'll try and have the most important info up top! It will be updated as time goes on so make sure to check back.

There will be individual threads for each part (Nominations, Excerpts and Voting) of the awards along with with how to proceed with that part. This guide just has an overview of these parts and a place to ask questions as things go along.

Last year was a bit strange as some things had to be altered half way through the awards process. We have learned from last year, made a couple changes so we hope things will go smoothly this time around. If we have to change anything, we will let you all know as soon as we can.


DATES

In order for this process to not be ridiculously long, nominations and excerpts for ALL eras are going to be done at the same time, then voting will be done separately. Like last year, Beyond will be it's own era but Before and Saga will be combined.

Before/Saga and Beyond Nominations: January 24 - February 7th

Before/Saga and Beyond Excerpts: February 14th - February 28th

Voting Before/Saga: March 1st - March 8th
Voting Beyond: March 8th - 15th


ELIGIBILITY

• Stories that were started or updated in 2014. So January 1st 2014 to December 31st, 2014. (If, by any chance the story was started before the move and is still truncated, it is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED you either fix it or have a link to another site with the story by the time voting starts. Failing to do so means others can not read your entire work and may be less likely to vote for you. If there is a link, the story on that site MUST be compliant with the Jedi Council TOS.)

• Stories that have won previous awards are not eligible. The winners of last year's awards can be found HERE.

• Reposts of stories that were posted after the last awards are eligible so long as they have never won an award.

CATEGORIES FOR 2015 ARE:

Genre:
Best AU
Best Canon
Best All Around

Style:
Best Short Story (including Vignette, Song-Fic and Poem)
Best Epic
Best Series

Character:
Best Canon Interpretation
Best Original Character
Best Canon Relationship
Best Original Relationship

Author:
Best Author
Best New Author

Other:
Best Reviewer


*Details for the new categories will be found in the upcoming nominations thread.

NOMINATIONS

• At this point in time, it will require 2 nominations to go to the voting round.

• If a category has less than or equal to 3 fics nominated to go to the voting round, then any story nominated for that category will go on to the voting round.

• If a story is nominated for more than 3 categories (excluding Author categories) you must choose which 3 categories you want the story to go in the voting round. You will be sent a PM by the mods to choose if this occurs.

You may start gathering who you want to nominate for awards at any time, but please don't send them to the mods until the Nominations thread goes up. Please remember that you will need links to the stories that you are nominating.


EXCERPTS

After nominations, the authors who qualify to go to the voting round will be PM'd with what stories are eligible to go to the voting round. Those author will then PM the mods an excerpt to be posted in one thread by the mods.

Excerpt Length:Most stories: 300 words
Best Epic, Best Series, Best Author, Best New Author: 600 words

• As not every processor counts word counts the same, we will use THIS online word counter. Anything over the limit will be cut to the limit.

• You may include a short authors note to preface your excerpt that will not count toward your word count, but it should only be a few sentences at most.

Author Categories: any example of your writing posted here on the JCF that has been posted in the eligibility dates.


VOTING

• Anyone is eligible to vote, no need to sign up as in the past.

• You may not vote for yourself

• Anyone caught voting multiple times with a sock will be banned and no longer eligible to participate in the awards in any way.

• The person(s) who votes for the most winners will win colors. (This is not to encourage you to vote for who you think will win, but to encourage voting in general. Please vote for who you think is most deserving of the award.)

AWARDS/PRIZES

• If you win multiple categories, it is possible you may not be given multiple prizes, depending on the number of prizes we have available. This is excluding Best Author categories.

• Prizes will be chosen by the winner based on the following order: Best Author, Best New Author, the person with the most wins (ties will result in names being drawn at random), second most wins and so on until there are those with only 1 win. Then Genre winners will be given random number and based on those numbers they will choose their prize. The rest of the categories winners will be assigned a random number and they will choose in that order.

FAQ:

Why can a story only be nominated in 3 categories (not including Author categories)?
This is supposed to be for fun and having someone sweep a good chunk of the awards is only fun for that person. This isn't the Academy Awards and doesn't really have any bearing on life at all, so why don't we have as many winners as possible, while still being fair to that person as well! Last year we said an author could only win a maximum of four awards. People saw that as punishing the more prolific writers, so we have changed it so that a story can not be nominated for more than 3 categories just to see how it works.

Will there be an exception to the 3 nominated limit?
Possibly, if the nomination numbers are very low. If this is the case, everyone will be made aware.

What do you mean prizes will be chosen based on order?
Due to the nature of the prizes we have to award, there really isn't a fair way to distribute them. There will be a list of all eligible prizes and the winner will choose what they want as their prize.
Best Author will choose first followed by Best New Author. (Which era winner goes first will be drawn at random.)

Then anyone with 3 wins will choose (if there are multiple people with three wins, their names will be drawn out of a hat and they will choose in that order.)

Then anyone with 2 wins will choose (same as above if there are multiple people)

Then the three Genre Categories winners names -if there are any left- will be placed in a hat and pulled out at random, they will then choose their prizes based on that order.

Then all the other winners names will be randomly drawn and they will choose in that order.

To make it fair, prizes will not be given out until all awards are completed. There will be an announcement of winners after each era is completed and then prizes will be done.

What are the prizes?
We have a multitude of things which include: Cover art, drawings, colors, advertisement space.

Can I help with prizes?
Yes, please! We've had a few people already say they are interested in providing prizes, but we certainly need more! If you want to contribute, please PM the mods with your ideas or anything you would like to do to help with prizes, even if you've already expressed interest. We encourage creativity!


HOW CAN YOU HELP US?

As previously mentioned, we need prizes. If you want to offer up a prize, please PM us.

Secondly, we are looking for (ideally) 4 volunteers as 're-counters' of sorts. Basically, we would like someone to double count everything. We would like 1 person to double count all the nominations for Before/Saga, 1 person to double count all the nominations for Beyond, 1 person to double count all the votes for Before/Saga and finally, 1 person to double count all the votes for Beyond. What this would mean is that the volunteer would be added to all the PMs in their category and they would either keep track of all the nominations (what stories were nominated for what and how many times) or all the votes. They would then PM Mav and Bri their list so that we can double check against their list.

Note: if you volunteer, you are not eligible to win in that era (you can still nominate and vote in that era). Meaning that if you volunteer to count nominations or votes in Before/Saga, you can still win in Beyond.

 

Excellent! I'll have to start thinking of nominations, there were so many good fics last year.

I have a question about the series nominations, though - if only one "entry" of the series was posted in 2014, is it still eligible? For example, a lot of fics for the Dear Diary challenge would seem to form a series as they deal with the same characters/stories, but obviously the "series" itself spans before/after 2014 .

 

Yes, it would still be eligible, so long as at least one part of the series was started or updated in 2014, all parts did not have to be started or updated in 2014. (Any parts that were not updated or started in 2014, would not be eligible for any award other than as part of the Best Series award.)

 

I would be nice if we had a list of stories eligible for nomination. Could authors provide a list of their eligible stories to be posted somewhere?

 

I agree with JL. It would be nice to know what's eligible without having to sort through pages of forums.

 

Opps. Not sure what happened there, but yes "details for the new categories will be found in the upcoming nomination thread.

I agree it would be nice, but this has never come up before and none of the old awards had anything like this (that I can remember, and back then there were waaay more stories). So we don't have anything in place to do something like this, this year at least. I don't want to put something like this in place at the last minute, right before we are accepting nominations because not everyone would be able to see it and get their stories posted on it. I think it would give an unfair advantage to those that did manage. Maybe we can look into it next year.

 

I agree with Bri about having an eligible thread, it wouldn't be fair to do at this time, but we can think about it for next year.

I used to keep a file of links to stories throughout the year I thought I might want to nominate, which made it much easier when award time came. I know some of the newer people might not have known we do awards and wouldn't have thought to be paying attention, but just something to think about for the future.

 

The first FAQ question looks slightly...weird?!

Other than that, very excited that this is going on; my only problem with it is that the list of categories is too small and could possibly result in one niche being overexposed while everything else is ignored. Let's hope that won't be the case.

 

Sorry, I fixed it (I think). I do not engrish well and I just edited last year's guide... but you get the point.

The list of categories used to be VERY long pre-move. People voted for less categories when we did the big awards "how do you want the awards to be run now" survey in the spring of 2013. We took away one category from last year and added 2 new ones. We tried to brainstorm some other new ones for this year, but we felt that we had a good amount for our predicted participation. We are willing to add more in the future if participation in these awards is up from last year.

 

Yes. There will be descriptions of all non-self explanatory categories in the nominations thread, but an epic is defined by us as a single story that has approximately 30 000 words or more.

 

Understandable. I do think it would be a great idea for next year. The reason...when I look at the list of categories I am absolutely stumped. Best epic? Which stories did I read that were long enough to be epic? Best in series? Did I read a story that was part of a series? Also, if I read a story in January 2014 I probably completely forgot about it by now and it is most likely buried on page 47. I think this is why we have so little votes. It takes a lot of effort to research and figure out what stories I have read in 2014.

 

Yes, and it's especially hard to remember about short stories -- I haven't followed them all year long and tend to forget all but the most recent.

 

The one nice thing about these boards is it lets you know which stories you reviewed or posted in by putting your icon over the writer's icon. I have been going through the forum and looking for threads I commented on.

mavjade I have a question concerning the canon and AU relationship categories. If there are two canon characters from the profics that were eyeing each other in the novels, but haven't hooked up yet and a person writes a story getting these two canon characters together...would that be categorized as Best Canon Relationship or Best AU relationship? They are Canon Characters in an AU story.

 

Wow! Thanks for launching this, Bri

I'm dumping all my questions here, just to say where I need clarifications -- I'm not expecting an immediate answer as I'm sure a lot of that would be answered in the nominations thread.

Does AU include fics that stick to canon all along but go for a twist in the very last chapter?

Epic has already been answered (30,000+ words) but I don't completely understand what a series is. My guess was a thread of one-shots dealing with the same characters/theme/plot point, but after seeing JadeLotus 's question above does that include several multi-post fics that deal with the same characters as well?

Can each one of us nominate more than one fic/author for each category?

(Just to clarify) NSWFF is not eligible, right?

 

Sorry if these make no sense, it is 2 am.

(I know this was addressed to Mav but...) Mav and I may need to discuss this, but I think if it was generally accepted fanon (IE Talon/Shaada), it would go under canon, otherwise it will go under original. What fics get nominated under what is sometimes up to the nominator (like in this circumstance) but if we think it might better fit under another category, we may ask if we can move it.

Yes.

Both are considered series and both types can be nommed for best series.

Unless nominations are REALLY low (in which case we will tell everyone) only one nom per person per category.

Correct. NSWFF used to have categories all their own but were still a part of the awards, but since it's just Mav and I now, we kicked that part out. If you want NSWFF awards, go bug the NSWFF mods (no, ask nicely, they are nice people).

 

Heh. Here's another one. Should we consider episode VII fics as Beyond or Saga AUs?

*drops the can of worms and runs away*

 

Briannakin, thanks. I'm here to notice what nobody else would.

Also, is canon both current canon and legends?

 

Yeah, you better run. Whatever they are tagged as, that is what you go with. I think they are all tagged/labeled as beyond d-canon, so they would be beyond canon.

Yes. Canon, for this year, is both 'Disney-Canon' and 'legends-canon'.

 

That's good because I don't know anybody who is an expert in separating the two. Maybe there will be a Disney-canon Wookiepedia so I can figure all of this out in the future.

 

Wookieepedia has already set up parallel articles for Canon and Legends versions of a subject. See for example Qui-Gon; note the big "CANON" and "LEGENDS" tabs at the top.

 

More questions...

Can we nominate the same story in more than one category?

In the best character categories, can we nominate an ensemble of characters or does it have to be an individual?

Does "best relationship" necessarily mean a romantic relationship? Would things like friendship or an unrequited crush be eligible?

Does "new writer" mean someone who started posting in 2014 or can we go back a couple of years?

 

Yes.

An individual.

Details like this will be in the nominations thread, but a bunch of different types of relationships are eligible.

Their first story has to have been posted in 2014[/quote][/quote]

 

Thanks heaps.