First Annual Men of Middle Earth Awards

[foxrafer.livejournal.com]

Welcome to the inaugural year of the Men of Middle Earth Awards, where we celebrate the beautiful variety of the LOTR slash fandom. The awards are meant to recognize the best of each pairing in RPS and FPS for drabbles, ficlets, and short and long fiction. The FPS awards program will launch later in the year.




graphic courtesy of galor5

Eligibility requirements

What do we mean by the "Men of Middle Earth"? We're referring to "men" as in "all men are created equal." Anything goes here and crossovers are more than welcome. As long as half the pairing is from LOTR the fic is eligible for nomination.

All stories completed between July 1, 2006 and June 30, 2007 are eligible for nomination. Multi-chapter fics must have been started no earlier than January 1, 2006 in order to be nominated. Stories may be posted at any archive (Rugbytackle, VOLA, OEAM, Mirrormere, etc.) not just in LiveJournal.

Now writers and readers can post a list of stories (their own, favorite fics by other authors, or both) they'd like people to consider when making nominations. Leave a comment here with a link to the rec list in your journal. (Ideally the list will be divided by pairing and word count, but it's not required). Nominations will not only be limited to these stories, but hopefully this will be a great place for people to check out when they start thinking about nominations.

Nomination process

Nominations will be open from June 1 - July 31, 2007. You may nominate as many stories and pairings as you like. However, one person cannot nominate the same story more than once. Multiple nominations from one person for the same story will be disallowed in order to ensure that all fics have a level playing field in the nomination process.

Authors may nominate their own stories. However, when the final ballots are being put together those nominations may not count toward the final tally if there's a need to break a tie.

Please note: moderators cannot be nominated or vote for winners.

Nominations are made by the size of the story; the divisions are:

Drabbles (100 words)
Ficlets (101 - 1000 words)
Short Fiction (1001 - 8,000 words)
Long Fiction (8,001 and up)

As soon as a pairing has five distinct nominations in a specific size, that pairing becomes its own category within that length of fic division. Any pairing that does not receive at least five nominations in a particular size will be placed in a General Fellowship group, and the five fics with the most nominations in each size will become part of the final voting in this general category.

For example, 22 Karl/Viggo stories are nominated: three drabbles, ten ficlets, five short fiction and four long fiction. The Karl/Viggo pairing would become a distinct category for ficlets and short fiction, but the drabbles and long fiction nominations would be placed in the General Fellowship group with all other fics that did not receive five nominations. This general category will be divided by size and the top five in each size will move on to the final voting regardless of pairing. Therefore, if any of the Karl/Viggo drabbles are in the top five of general drabble nominations, they will be part of the final voting. Likewise, the same applies for the long fiction.

A similar approach will be applied for threesomes. However, when nominating a story with multiple pairings please select the primary pair in your nomination. The story will be grouped with other fics of that pairing. If, however, all the pairs in the fic have equal billing and no one stands out as the "star," please include all pairs in your nomination and the decision of which pair should be used will be left up to the author.

Nomination addendum: Because there can be significant differences between a 10,000 word fic and one 50K and longer, a Novel length category will be added if we receive enough nominations in a pairing to warrant this addition. For example, if we receive 18 MonaBoyd nominations in the Long Fiction category and five of them are longer than 50,000 words, a MonaBoyd Novel length category will be added for these stories.

Voting

In an effort to reduce the possibility of ballot stuffing, only members of this community will be able to vote. However, if you do not have a LiveJournal account and do not wish to create one, please e-mail to the moderator. E-mail balloting will be allowed but only from addresses previously "authorized" to submit votes. The polls will be open from August 10 through September 10.

Award Selection

The story that receives the most votes in each category will be selected as the winner. Each pairing has the potential to win four awards (one for each fic size division).

All nominees will receive an icon in recognition of this achievement. The winners will be announced by September 23 and will receive both a banner and icon.

Special Category: Classic Fiction

This category is designed to honor some of the incredible stories that we've enjoyed over the years. All fic completed before July 2006 are eligible to be nominated. As with the general voting, nominations will be made by the size of the story (please see divisions above). However, specific pairings will be honored throughout the year.

Nominations will open for the first entries into the MOME Hall of Fame on October 1. Further announcements and specific timetables will be posted later this summer.

Questions?

If you have any questions, please leave a comment here. A FAQ will be created based on this post and updated as additional questions are posted and answered.

Comments

[mesnica.livejournal.com]

*lol*

One further suggestion for when you put up the post for authors to bring the readers attention to their stories: encourage the authors to sort their stories into the length categories you offer. Most authors I know will have a full document with their story from start to end, including all chapters, so it's easy enough to ask Word for the word count (or whatever else program they're using, as most programs offer this feature), whereas for lots of readers who haven't saved the stories as doc on their computer, it's a lot of extra work to find out the word count. And extra work often means they aren't going to do it at all.

Brings up the question of how you'll proceed if someone nominates a 1300 word long story for Ficlet. Will you just switch it over into Short Fiction where it belongs or not count the nomination?

[foxrafer.livejournal.com]

I had planned to ask the authors to divide by fic length and pairing, but I'm still trying to come up with a feasible way of doing it myself if the author doesn't want to. Hopefully they won't mind doing a little extra work on the front end because you're right, someone reading the story may be put off if they have to find the word count on their own. Bottom line is that I'll be checking the word count myself for each nomination and putting it in the right category.

[silvs-fiction.livejournal.com]

Excuse me jumping in, I think splitting the fics by word count is a great idea, the list I have says that anything of 40,000 is a novel, so I don't know if that helps.

Another thought, if any of the stories are posted at Mirrormere (VOLA - archive may be the same) - they have an automatic word count feature on each chapter which might help you, and save you a lot of checking time.

I'm really glad the pairings set-up will give other authors a chance, alongside us Vigorli girls. ;)

[foxrafer.livejournal.com]

This is great info; thank you so much. I want to make this as easy as possible for people without making it extraordinarily hard on myself so any little tips I can pass on will be great. And the the novel word count info is very helpful. I never realized how prolific you guys are until starting to do this!

I'm so happy that you're here and that you like the set-up. If we could give awards for every possible pairing this first year I'd be inordinately happy.

[silvs-fiction.livejournal.com]

Well if it helps any, this is the list I have (I'm sure there are variations all over)

> 100 drabble
100 > 500 flash fiction
500 > 1000 short short
1000 > 15000 short story
15000 > 40000 novella
40000 and over novel

I have absolutely no idea how generally accepted those numbers are, so I'm not suggesting that they're the only way. Far from it.

Another question, which entirely self-serving I'm afraid *blushes* If a fic has two distinct pairings with a reasonably equal balance of emphasis (i.e. detailed storyline/smut for both couples) does it qualify in two categories or is it up to the author to pick which, or the nominators? I'm thinking of 'The Highwaymen' which has Viggo/Orlando and Sean/Karl in equal measure and as two separate pairs. Hope you don't mind me asking.

Silv
xxx

[foxrafer.livejournal.com]

I knew someone was going to ask this question but I was hoping it wouldn't come up so quickly! :-)

There are some things I have a general idea about how I want to handle them but just need to flesh them out a bit more, and then there are things like this where I have absolutely no clue. I'm 50/50 on it because I can see it both ways. I'm leaning toward letting the author decide which pairing category they'd like the fic to be part of but I haven't settled this in my head yet. For now I think the short answer is, I don't know. *g* I have to make up my mind before starting the nomination process and I'll let you know as soon as I become a bit more decisive.

And I definitely don't mind the question. Even though I had thought about this I imagine there are a ton of things that haven't crossed my mind yet so these questions are only going to serve to improve the program.

[silvs-fiction.livejournal.com]

Oh dear, don't ask me to decide - I'm useless at that sort of thing!
If the 2x2 fic isn't eligible for the final voting under both separate pairings, why not let the readers decide the pairings category with their nominations, since presumably they would nominate the pairing that stood out most in their minds, with the understanding that they can only nominate the fic once and must chose. If a fic was nominated sufficiently to qualify in two categories - which is probably highly unlikely - then let the author choose? That way the fic would get recognised in the category it was most deserving of, by the people in the best position to judge - the readers. From an author's point of view that would split the possible nominations and might not be the most popular option though.
Just my tuppence-worth really, I'll go along with whatever you decide, you're the boss ;) and I love the idea of the new competition that gives a lot more stories/pairings a chance to win.

[foxrafer.livejournal.com]

That's kind of where I'm going with this in my head. It's really good to know that someone else also thinks that'll work.

[mesnica.livejournal.com]

Are you using Firefox as browser? There's a word count extention for it. You only need to highlight the text, right click and chose 'Word Count' and it tells you how many words are in the highlighted part. I just installed and tried it and it works well for me (though it counts words with - in the middle as two words opposed to Microsoft Word's counting them as two, but apparently there are small differences of the counters in all writing programs, so it's negligible)

link (http://roachfiend.com/archives/2005/03/03/word-count/)

[mesnica.livejournal.com]

Keep in mind though that the word counter at Mirrormere and Vola counts all words, including the header.

Anything from 40.000 to 50.000 would be a good start for novel-length imo. 50k because that's what's considered novel-length by NaNoWriMo. Realistically a book of a normal size usually has at least 80.000 words I think, but fanfiction is different from original fiction of course :)

[foxrafer.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the Firefox tip and for the other info you've provided. It's so wonderful to get this kind of advice and assistance. It's a lot to keep track of and think about and I'm really grateful to receive help like this.