Fanlib Retrospective, Part Two

The next part of my fanlib journey came about when Fanlib announced a new contest. Not understanding how contests on the intertubes work, this one, rather than being the tried and true standard of "One prize regardless of how many people participate however much", had set checkpoints for anyone who fulfilled the criteria.

I was writing the start of Left Alone at the time and planning on posting it as a continuation of my antagonistic biblefic thing. And if their incentives encouraged me to chop it up into a billion mini-chapters, reducing readability on their site, then I'd just have to suffer through acting against their interests for personal gain. I viewed it as a sort of alternative NaNoWriMo, up until the point I ran the numbers and realized they were asking for the equivalent of more than five NaNos in three months, at which point my view changed to something more like chop-up-existing-stories-and-slap-them-up-there-months.

The rules gave points for both submissions and reviews, so I planned to alternate between the two. Little did I know that the fanlib denizens I shared the site with were fucking insane.

In short order I was reexamining their rules and discovering that, thanks to their loose definition of what, exactly, constituted a story, combined with their permissiveness to post virtually anything (aside from too much of teh gay where teh childrens might find it), I could just post rants in the third person and get points for it. I quickly dashed off exactly that.

( Regarding Responding to Reviews )

I'd abuse this loophole in the days to come.