(no subject)

OK I GIVE UP, I HAVE TO KNOW.

WHERE IS THE CANON THAT SAYS JOHN (Sheppard, SGA) COMES FROM A MILITARY BACKGROUND? where where where where where? Did I miss it in my marathoning? was it one of the tidbits you miss when you watch television at four in the morning? Or did the SGA fandom make some kind of collective decision? Have some kind of hallucination/revelatory vision? What?

(no subject)

Soliciting opinions from y'all before I take this over to myriadwords. I think it's basically too late to run a YW fic challenge for the summer this year, and last year I was pretty disappointed by the rate of drop-outs and incompletes - er, including myself, so I'm not trying to be all judgy. But... I really want to get the comm. more active again, since we've had some people join lately, and someone recently asked me if I was going to run it again this year, so I wanna have something in the works. So: this is what I was thinking.

I think a good way to reduce dropouts would be to run the challenge as gift fic. Previously I shied away from that because I felt like it potentially put unreasonable pressure on participants and, if people dropped out, there would be a lot of disappointment. Also, I think gift fic challenges are a lot more high-maintenance. However:
- drop-out rates are really high. I think guilt would make them lower.
- I also think that the do-what-you-like model doesn't put quite enough pressure on people, to the extent that people slack off. A lot. I may be projecting here.
- god, dinner smells really good. OK, that's not actually a factor.
- that's pretty much all I've got.

On the other hand,
- aforementioned problems with effort put in by me and my happy band of volunteers - oh, wait, no, it's just me.
- need pinch-hitters. ahahaha.
- it *is* a bigger committment, so lower sign-up levels.
- I still need a runtime. Ideally I would really like to run this as a Christmas challenge, but, um, Yuletide is already the biggest regular source of YW fic, so... no. Due end of September? That would probably work if I started signups, like, tomorrow.
- need to figure out what kind of request submission would be useful, how to match people up, etc. By random? What about people who request slash from gen writers? all those questions.

So, people, I really need some opinions. I don't want to just let this go because I love my teeny tiny fandom. But I really don't know if any of this is feasible.

I would really value advice and opinions from all of you, especially people who have run challenges, people who have participated in challenges, and people in the YW fandom. plz send help!