B2MeM 2013 Is Coming!

[dawn_felagund]

Yes, that time of year is almost here again: time for our annual Back to Middle-earth Month event! Once again, the Silmarillion Writers' Guild, Many Paths to Tread, and Arda Inspired will be teaming up to bring the Tolkien fandom a month of fun, creativity, and community.

We are currently in the planning phases for this year's challenge, and we need help and feedback from our community to help us decide the challenge we want to run this year. If you have an idea for an event, please do share it in a comment here! (If you want to see what kinds of events we've run in the past, we have links to them all on the SWG site here: http://www.silmarillionwritersguild.org/specialprojects.php.)

Even if you don't have a specific idea for an event, if there's a past event that you loved (or a past event that you'd rather not see something similar to this year), please comment and let us know.

We have only one requirement for B2MeM events: They should be open to the entire Tolkien fan-writing and -art communities. Ideally, this should also allow people to participate whether they have one or thirty-one days free to work on challenges.

We look forward to hearing everyone's ideas and getting this year's event ready to roll!

Comments

[marta-bee.livejournal.com]

Dawn, if we *do* do BINGO again, would there be a way to encourage people to write fewer prompts? I think what bothered me as a participant was less the BINGO format per se and more the fact that you had to "game" it. You had different cards but those cards had different numbers on them, so that it was quite likely that a certain prompt simply wouldn't apply to me. Because of that, I felt driven to select multiple cards because the more cards I had, the more chance I'd have something to write each day.

One story a day is crazy enough. Feeling like you have to write more than one is absolutely insane for anyone other than a drabblist. (And I say this as someone driven to short fic.) More than that, I felt drowned out in the drive to actually get feedback. It seemed like quantity was rewarded over quality, in more way than one. I'm not blaming you guys; you all did a fantastic job and it always takes a year or two to work the kinks out of any large project.

How's this for a tweak, though. We can have lots of cards like we did before, and the cards would all have the same numbers, just in different orders. So there'd still be some luck involved because you're trying to get a row, but you're guaranteed to have a prompt to write every day with just one card. This actually sets up an incentive to work off a single card, and do a single story each day.

Personally I'd rather have a single set of prompts that's ordered different ways for different people, because like I said in my other comment I really like it when other people are working with the same prompt as me. It spurs the creative juices. But I get that may not be what the majority wants.

[dawn_felagund]

If I ever run bingo again, which I hope to do (and I am saying "I" because I have not run this past the other mods of any of the groups I admin, and we don't repeat B2MeM challenges, so it remains to be seen the context in which bingo will run again), then there will be a limit on the number of cards a person can claim. There were 105 available, and people claimed between one and 103. Managing the cards of those with those who had many cards was difficult, and we set up many huge card pages only to have the players use only a few of the cards or lose interest after a few days. The rule we had last year will continue that multiple prompts can be used in a single story, so if you end up with three prompts one day, you can satisfy them in a single story or write three different pieces, whichever you prefer. Part of what I liked about bingo was the combination of the various prompts that resulted and how those could be incorporated into a single challenge.

I like your idea about mixing up the same numbers on the cards, but I probably would never be able to do that for the simple reason that renumbering 105 bingo cards would be a HUGE undertaking--and a very tedious one--and I don't see myself being able to commit that kind of time anytime soon. It might be a lesson going forth for other groups who want to run bingo-type games to do this rather than use the traditional numbering system we used. There was definitely an element of chance involved, and a strategy component, but I actually intended both of those, as some people really like that kind of thinking, while others don't. (Part of the reason that we only run games that involve it every couple of years at most.)

[marta-bee.livejournal.com]

I think you may be misunderstanding what I was suggesting. I was not saying you needed to give each person a unique card. What I was saying was that the different cards should contain the same numbers, but in a different order from each other.

Say there are two cards available to choose from, one about Aragorn and the other about Feanor. Aragorn has the B row of: 1 3 5 2 4, whereas the Feanor card has the B row of 1 2 3 4 5. (And so on with the other rows.) So when you call out B4, then both Aragorn and Feanor players are guaranteed a prompt that day. The chance element is that it won't occupy the same space on their respective cards, which means that it won't line up in the same way - the Aragorn card may luck out, and get a Bingo off the first eight prompts, whereas for Feanor they might bump around so it takes much longer. Obviously the more cards you have (up to a point of course) the more variety you get. But it wouldn't be any harder than making a card for each prompt. The main difference is that each day you're guaranteed to have a prompt available to you.

[dawn_felagund]

No, I did understand. It may not seem so, but numbering the cards is a big undertaking. Each number is a separate text layer in a Photoshop file. That's twenty-four text layers to be altered per card, times 105 cards. Even if it takes three minutes per card (I'm being conservative), five hours of renumbering cards is just not something I'm up for right now. :) If someone wanted to do this to run bingo with the cards, I'd be happy to share the PSD files with that person. The main reason I'd be willing to re-run bingo, even if I do it on my own, is that the raw materials are there; I'd just need to choose a block of time when I could manage it behind the scenes.

[marta-bee.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I didn't mean to make it sound like it was no big deal. I think I was misunderstanding what you were saying, then - not surprising given I've been up all night and am not well physically. I certainly didn't mean to suggest what I was suggesting wasn't a big undertaking, just wanted to make sure we were on the same page.

THanks for all the work you do on BMEM. I honestly don't see how you and your mods find the time on top of running SWG. You're a real asset to the fandom.

[ladybrooke]

Dawn, would we (the participants that is), be able to unofficially claim cards? Not for anyone else to know, but merely to baby and love and write stuff from? Because I probably wouldn't have claimed as many cards officially, if I had thought that I could still write stuff from the ones I didn't claim if it caught my eye. Not to get stamped or rewarded or anything, but just for fun...because prompts are addicting for me.

[dawn_felagund]

Absolutely! :) Actually, the cards are still available for that very reason, for people who want to play unofficially with the prompts, even host their own games.

At the risk of ensuring you don't get any of presentations done, we actually have all of the prompts from prior B2MeM's still available on our Special Projects page. ;) But the BINGO prompts were by far the most extensive and diverse.