Challenge News

Hi, all! Sanders here with news on two exciting things coming up for us as DGC fans.

After the success of the summer fanworks posts, I talked to Cecilia about continuing them in a monthly challenge. Amanda agreed to keep wrangling the fanworks, and then S. had a brilliant idea. So, first, Wednesdays are going to feature “Rockin’ Robin”—a round-robin, multi-writer collaborative fic challenge. Second, we’re issuing a monthly challenge for all forms of fanworks. Suggestions for a name for the monthly challenge are welcome and I’ll personally make a mini-mix/meme/poem/ficlet for everyone who offers something up in the comments.

The details on the “Rockin’ Robin”:

Each Wednesday, Steph or I will post a starting place and an finishing line. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to fill in the blanks via the comments. Add a sentence or add a paragraph, using the comments. Then someone else will pick up your thread, and someone else will pick up theirs, and so on, until someone uses the finishing line.

The rules are pretty simple:
1. Share—let at least two people go before you jump in again, or give it 12 hours.
2. Share—let at least five tags happen before you use the finishing line.
3. When posting, reply to the comment rather than starting a new thread for as long as possible.

The details on the Monthly Challenge:

Each month, we’ll post three prompts: one image, one cliche or trope, and one music video. You can pick from any of the three to fuel your work, and submit any kind of fanwork in response from fic to vid, crochet project to line drawing, original songs, poetry, timelines. Anything goes.

Posting will take place on the last Saturday of the month. Prompts for the following month will also be released with that day’s post(s).

Our hope is to post submissions in batches, and to help us do that, we ask that you keep memes to no more than five and fic to a maximum of 1500 words at least until we can gauge how much of a response to expect and how much we can fit into a single post without it becoming overwhelming. Yes, I get that this is ironic from the woman who did a dozen video links in a single post and an 80+video YouTube playlist. You can’t say I don’t learn from my own enthusiastic mistakes :P.

Submission Guidelines:
Submissions should be emailed to dgcfanworks@gmail.com no later than the Wednesday before the last Saturday. Fic and images may be sent as attachments. Vids should be hosted online and submitted as a link.

Schedule:
9/26 first theme announced
10/28 submission deadline, 10/31 posting & new theme
11/25 submission deadline, 11/28 posting & new theme
12/23 submission deadline, 12/26 posting & new theme

Fic should be flash length—about 1500 words or less. Betas may be available from among the community and there will be a sign up post in the DGC forum to offer your services or ask for help.

Images should be a minimum of 640 pixels wide and 360 pixels tall, and a maximum of 1280 pixels wide and 720 pixels tall. (If your art is too big, use a free resizing tool like PicResize.com or ResizeYourImage.com.) To be on the safe side and make sure you’re not infringing on a photographer or artist’s copyright, either get permission from the artist to use their image, or use images that are licensed for re-use, are public domain, or Creative Commons. You can search popular photo sources like Flickr and Google Image search with a filter to only show you CC or non-copyrighted images.*

*This was taken directly from the meme contest post. Thanks, ctan!