| Taking another little break |
[22 Nov 2008|12:45pm] |
| [ |
mood |
| |
determined (and ignoring stiff shoulders) |
] |
| [ |
music |
| |
Purcell Ode for St Cecilia's Day 1692 (Hail! Bright Cecilia) (Alfred Deller, ct, Ambrosian Singers, |
] |
Just long enough to bitch. I've been researching intensively this last week and more, for two stories, and I'm getting pretty tired of restarting my notebook several times a day because the memory has clogged up. Just think, when this one was built, half a GB was considered adequate. It's only two and half years old. Ah well, next time. I think I might go for 2 GB, when this one falls over, as well as a hard drive several times the size of the current 80 GB. (Thogh I do hope it will be partitioned; I've found it very convenient having two drives on this machine.)
*re-opens research URLs*
*returns to writing*
*hopes current fic won't turn out too weird*
|
|
|
[19 Nov 2008|05:46pm] |
Dear participants,
I don't care about your other fest deadlines. No, not even a little bit. Why would I?
With love,
Your Mod
PS- that's a serious question.
|
|
| help a sistah out! |
[17 Nov 2008|11:00pm] |
Mine:
 
Daughter's:
 
Son's:
  
My scroll
My daughters scroll
My son's scroll
|
|
| Something new (to me, anyway) |
[17 Nov 2008|05:03pm] |
| [ |
mood |
| |
grammar Nazi |
] |
| [ |
music |
| |
Soleriana: Passepied, Fandango, Contradanza and Bolero (Asturias Sym Orch/Maximiano Valdes) |
] |
I'm reading this (otherwise quite good) story full of "too" for "to" and apostrophes in all the wrong places, and thought it sad I was grateful that the author can spell per se correctly, but what I wanted to share was this: its' as a possessive, as in I like its' looks [not a quotation]. When in doubt add an apostrophe, obviously.
Has anyone met that before? I wonder if it's in Lynn Truss's Eats, Shoots and Leaves. Must look sometime.
Yes, I am skiving off from writing exchange fics. Again, with two due Friday and only half finished. I sank a glass or two too much last night while watching Order of the Phoenix, so I spent the morning reading lolcats: about as much intellectual exercise as I could stand.
|
|
| "rare" pairings? Not so much. |
[15 Nov 2008|09:25pm] |
|
I only have 14 gifts in right now, so it might be too early to observe patterns... but so far there are a LOT of so-called rare pairs in this fest. I have a feeling that posting next month is going to resemble the springsmut selection more closely than the usual smutty_claus range. There are only a couple of pieces that include what most fandomers would consider the more common/popular pairs. 5 out of the 14 feature pairings we've never had before. Considering that over the years, we've featured 117 different pairings, that's a lot of new ones.
|
|
| Holiday Cards for Sale |
[12 Nov 2008|09:30pm] |
Holiday Cards for sale this year.
After feedback, I've found a way to offer the cards for less and on white cardstock.
All cards are 5" x 7" folded, envelopes included.
Going rate is $2.00 a piece, if you order 5 you get a free card.
Shipping rates: 1-5 cards will be $2.00
6-10 will be $3.00
Over 10 will weigh at post office.
I figure the bonus card won't be counted towards the shipping rate.
Accepting Paypal, money orders and checks (checks will have to clear before cards will be shipped out)
Under the cut are previous year's cards, which have been modified to this year's style.
( Samples behind cut )
|
|
| intake procedures |
[09 Nov 2008|10:11pm] |
I have 9 assignments in!!! *boogies*
Anyway, I thought now would be a good time to talk about what I do with the assignments when they come in. This is something I've worked out since starting the fest, which I really needed to, since I used to spend a ton of time during December sort of flailing around and searching through my inbox for the right story. But it's definitely still a work in progress, and I know I'll make changes this year just like I have every other year.
First of all, my spreadsheet where I keep track of the fest has two sheets -- one for participants, and one for gifts. On the gifts one, I have columns where I keep track of the following information: author/artist, recipient, title, pairing, date received, date posted & notes. I mainly use the title to keep track of the works... it just keeps everything more anonymous in my head.
So when someone sends in an assignment, here's what I do:
- First, I open up the fic or artwork and look at it to make sure it meets the requirements: the pairing has to be one that was requested, there has to be smut in it, it has to include the header. There's more, of course, but those are the basics. :)
- Then, I enter it on my spreadsheet. I put the story or artwork on the gift spreadsheet, and check off the assignment as received on the participant spreadsheet (under both the author and recipient).
- If the assignment is fic, I make any edits to the header and formatting that are needed. 9 times out of 10, people leave out the lj-cut, so I need to put that in. I edit out the author name and replace it with ??. I make sure there's html coding and so on. Then I save the file in a special folder on my hard drive, using the title as the filename.
- If the assignment is artwork, I save the file in my folder with the title as the filename. Then I paste the header into a .txt file, make any edits that are necessary, and save that in my folder with the title as the filename also.
- I send the participant an email to tell them that I got the fic or art and that it looks good, fits the requirements and so on. (This is probably the most important thing, as I learned my first year -- I didn't email to confirm receipt, and people kinda freaked out. Ooops.)
- When I've received both a person's assignment and their gift, I highlight their name in green on both the participant list and the gift list to indicate that I can post their gift.
- After I've gotten a majority of the gifts in, I upload the artwork to my server with consistent names (filenames beginning with 08 to keep the web-folder neat), and edit the urls into the .txt files for each piece of art. Each piece of art is then ready to go and requires no extra effort at posting time.
- When I'm doing the posting, I sort by pairing so that I can vary the posting. I try to look and see how many pieces I have of each pairing -- if I have 8 A/B stories, and 4 C/D stories, then I need to post A/B twice as often to space them both out evenly across the month. When I'm ready to post a story, I have them accessible and organized by title, pre-coded and prepared to cut and paste into a post to the community.
- When the story is posted, I fill in the posting date on the spreadsheet. Then when I need to go in and do the master list & reveal, I can just sort by posting date and have a list to work from.
I know this is fairly complex, (and possibly frighteningly anal) and might be way more than some mods need. But it's something I've developed slowly over time -- it requires more time up front but saves me time in December when things are tight and I have 1200 other things to do.
|
|