The OC Slamjam: A Retrospective · 12:51am Sep 3rd, 2015
A Blog Post: A Clichéd Title
I’ve gone a bit quiet, writing-wise, over the past couple months, but it’s not because I haven’t been putting out any writing. I’ve actually been competing in what turned out to be the single largest (at least in terms of total wordcount), longest, and most trying ponyfic competition I’ve yet been involved with: Obselescence’s OC Slamjam.
If you’re not familiar with it and don’t care to read through the above links, here’s a brief summary. Ostensibly, a grand total of sixty-three authors came together for a tournament-style competition. Each of them submitted an OC (created for the contest or at least not previously publicly used), complete with physical, background, and personality descriptions. Every round, the authors (anonymous) would be paired up by OC and each would have to write a single story about both their OC and their opponent’s.
That sentence confuses even me, so have an example: in the first round, one of the thirty-one pairs was PresentPerfect and MerlosTheMad via their OCs, Loosestrife and Caps Lock respectively. Both Present and Merlos had to write a story about both OCs, so when the round went live for voting, we had two stories (one from each author) about Loosestrife and Caps Lock meeting somehow.
After all the pairs of stories in a given round were up to be voted on (in theory—dropouts were very common), anyone who came along (and/or was participating and bothered to) would read the pair and decide which story had better characterization, which was more skillfully written, which utilized the “character sheets” (those aforementioned character descriptions) the best or most thoroughly, etc. One vote, encompassing which story hit the most of those points and/or whatever else happened to matter to a given voter. And then author of the story with the most votes would move on to the next round.
Since this was a competition that started with sixty-three people, that meant six rounds of writing and then voting. The two people who made it through to the final round thusly had to write six stories of progressively increasing allowable length (first round stories had a maximum of 2.5k words, and that went up by 500 words each round to a ceiling of 4k for the last few), and dedicate chunks of over twelve weeks of their lives to this competition (one week for writing and one week for voting per round, plus various extensions and delays).
So essentially, it was hell for a person like me, who generally takes things slowly.
I was down to the wire with my submitting in almost every round in which I competed, and I burned out fast, but I kept pushing regardless. It didn’t help that, during the voting rounds, I also took the time to read every single entry and write (debatably but probably) the most lengthy and detailed criticisms of most every pair of stories for the benefit of whichever author happened to move forward.
All that said, this was probably the most incredible exercise in endurance writing and learning to please a rapidly self-defining community in which I’ve ever participated. That latter bit was one of the more intriguing things about the competition: as we went along, a secondary set of “rules” apart from the contest’s actual rules took shape, and to get the votes of the majority, your entry was better off abiding by them than not. They included things like featuring both OCs roughly equally, having the OCs impact each others’ lives/perspectives in some way, having a plot much more complex than a conversation between the OCs, not featuring characters other than the OCs too heavily, and a good many others. There were numerous exceptions where authors that didn’t follow these “rules” moved on, but they still had a tremendous impact on the votes.
With the intro to the competition as a whole out of the way, I’ll get into my experiences round to round. Here’s the part that folks reading this who actually participated (and who I didn’t meet in person at Bronycon, and who aren't coming to this blog via the thread in the contest group) have probably been waiting for me to say: my OC was Luster Lock.
Fairly proud of this picture, really. Hope you didn’t skip to here just to find out who I was, but if so, hope this makes it easy.
I know a few choice folks who are probably pretty surprised by that. And some others who I hope are feeling some sympathy for me; the Luster Lock entries were the most hotly contested of the first two rounds and the quarterfinals (read as: I only made it past the first two rounds by the skin of my teeth).
So yes, let’s get into the rounds. Warnings: A.) The links in the rounds titles go directly to chapters—the pairs of stories that I and my competitors wrote each round. B.) I’m not going to say all that much about the OCs themselves here, so if you want to know more about them, you’ll need to reference the Character Sheet Compendium (or just read the entries, I guess).
Round One: Luster Lock vs. Bristle
The first round was unique. That rapidly self-defining community I mentioned? That didn’t exist until after our entries for this round had been written and the first votes cast. The first round was essentially all of us getting thrown into the deep end before the instructor—an emotionally fragile man who can’t stomach the thought of his girlfriend of three years leaving him, and who stayed home that day to try and salvage his sputtering relationship without the thought even entering his head to call the pool and say he’s not coming in that day, in the absence of whom we were left with his far less capable co-worker “J-snack”, a man whose philosophy on swimming instruction fails to extend past his personal experience, which boils down to “throw them in and they’ll pick it up if they pick it up”—taught us how to swim.
With no idea what the burgeoning Slam-mind craved, some top authors got knocked out of the running in this surprisingly early stage. One of them happened to be my opponent: Aquaman, as Bristle. It was an incredibly close match—the closest of the round in terms of votes—but in the end, a narrow majority preferred my short, flirty piece to his longer, tenser one.
Now, I’d like to think that if an opponent of mine had really, really managed to wow me in this competition, I would have voted for them over myself. In each case (excepting the third round), though, I tended to see my opponents’ entries as roughly equal to or slightly below my own, for some reason or another. The thing about the first round—and this springs from that whole “not knowing what people want yet” thing, a little—was that my reasons for liking Aqua’s entry less than my own were so different from the reason(s) some other people based their votes on that it immediately reshaped my plans for future rounds.
Namely, I thought that the tension in his story dissolved too much when the dialogue started up, and that the dialogue itself was a tad stilted. While some other voters seemed to be of a similar mind, there were some whose specific complaint about Aqua’s story seemed to be that his take on my character—as a craftspony-turned-thief out for revenge against a client that mistreated her—was somehow a less valid and/or less representative-of-the-character-sheet take than my own safer, less serious one.
I couldn’t have disagreed more on that point.
In actual fact, before the first round went up, I’d had plans to write a story later in the competition with much the same version of the character (I didn’t for the first round because I’d had trouble coming up with a way to relate that to the character of Bristle, myself). Seeing that Aqua’s take—which I’d personally felt represented Luster Lock’s character sheet just fine—turned people off so, I shelved the idea. That was my first big compromise.
Round Two: Luster Lock vs. Heather Rose
This round was an odd one. Not the least bit because I wound up being asked by my opponent (Admiral Biscuit, who was on a made-for-the-contest alt) to follow up on my criticism of his entry’s mechanics. Wound up taking a fine tooth comb to his entry without him knowing that I was the one he was competing against, and that was an interesting experience.
The round was insanely tense, too. First pair of entries in the competition to tie, so Obs came in to cast a tiebreaker vote—in my favor, it turned out. Sadly, after the round was over, the whole thing was retroactively soured a bit when I came to find out that one of the votes my opponent got turned out to be from the fellow who edited the entry—it might not have wound up being a tie if that (effectively illegal) vote had never been cast, and boy would that have saved both me and my opponent a couple days of being nervous wrecks. But on the other hand, a vote (also effectively illegal, even if Obs okayed it) that was cast for me was cast an hour or so after the deadline, so who knows?
By the time this round rolled around, most all of us still competing had a general idea of what the voters might want, but the round two voting is where the Jamthink’s tastes seemed to become more fully finalized—i.e. there was still a good deal of room to miscalculate. And miscalculate I did: a very common complaint about my entry for this round was that I didn’t have Luster and Heather be focused upon equally. This in spite of the fact that I was very careful to have the two characters interact in every single scene. But no, specifically, it was a matter of screen time and perspective; it was a problem for some that I told the story I did through only the eyes of my opponent’s character, and left out concrete scenes and “plans” that only my own character would have witnessed/thought up.
And because of that, I made my next big concession.
Round Three: Luster Lock vs. Vanilla Skies
This was my one easy round, and there’s little more to say than that.
The author I was up against was the only one of us to get an automatic bye in the first round, and had had another automatic victory in the second when his or her opponent failed to submit an entry. What this meant was that while many of the rest of us (including me) had been given two rounds’ worth of criticism on our entries, this author had gone largely ignored. Moreover, this author was—to be frank—one of the weakest still present at that stage of the competition.
He or she wrote a story with the most basic kind of plot seen throughout the contest (the two characters meet, talk, and go their separate ways), boiled down to its shortest, simplest, and perhaps least engaging form. I won all but a single vote.
Still, it’s worth mentioning that many voters seemed to think that my entry for this round was my worst, and I can’t disagree. I went with a shifting third-person limited perspective so as to better focus on the characters equally. I went with a safe, semi-random way to have the two characters meet. I characterized Luster in a blander, less unique way than I had in the two previous rounds. In short, I wasn’t feeling this round at all, and the contest in general had had me burned out and frustrated.
So for the next round, I decided to say screw all the concessions, not bother with angling for votes, and just cut loose with my opponent’s character and a weird, vague plot and format.
Round Four (Quarterfinals): Luster Lock vs. Lilligold
And it actually kind of worked. I wound up in a tie again (the only other one of the competition, meaning I was involved in every tie there was—on that metric, at least, I was the most stressed-out person in the contest), and though Obs wound up favoring my opponent’s entry, he spent a good while covering how hard a decision it was for him.
I’d like to think that this was the most exciting matchup of the competition, even counting the ones yet to come in the semifinals and finals. Luster Lock, while perhaps not a competition favorite until this point, was at least very well respected. Lilligold was both. And the pair of us really gave it our alls.
Apart from the fact that the final scene of my entry (before the epilogue, anyway) flies right the heck by because I had only 800 or so words left by the time I came to it, I’m fairly proud of what I put forward in this round. My portrayal of Lilligold, in particular, was praised left and right—even Lilligold's author (ArgonMatrix) told me that it was his or her favorite version of the character.
The biggest flaw shared by both stories was that they didn’t quite fit the 4k word limit, though in different ways. Obs put it best when he said that my story was a condensation of two character arcs such that one doesn’t get explicitly resolved and the other doesn’t get fully established, while my opponent wrote a snapshot of a larger tale that doesn’t have the firmest foundation for its setting. In my book, the latter came out to be the better of the two in that sense, so I’m not particularly bitter that I lost.
Lastly, to speak on the collection of entries which I’ve just published and will be up shortly, the main thing is that they’re almost completely unchanged from what I submitted to the contest.
Yes, there was a lot I wanted to change or add, particularly (as you can probably imagine from what I said above) to my entry for the quarterfinals. In the end, though, I’d been done with this contest for over a week, fully burned out on it. Just coming back and looking at the document for that entry—even knowing exactly what I would do to make it however much better—drained me.
In short: 8/10 contest, would probably never do again.
Lastly lastly, I’ll say that if you ever see Luster Lock cropping up in any of my other stories, I assure you it was planned the whole time. She’s one of the kind of OCs I mentioned before that weren’t made specifically for the competition.
Bye for now, folks. It’ll be back to less left field–y junk soon.
Edit: Many Slamjam entry compilations, including my own, have been retroactively rejected from the site for existing in multiple forms. If you want to read what I wrote for the contest, the links up above are your only option at the moment.
Edit edit: On Dec. 19th, 2015, we finally got permission to post our entries back up on our own accounts. So yeah. Fic exists again.
This reminds me that I still need to read your round 4.
Luster Lock?
Maaaan...
D-Did senpai acknowledge m-me?
*begins hyperventilating*
I have nothing but sympathy for you, BP. I was a nervous wreck just a little into the second round, so I avoided the compilation story entirely until things had concluded, because seeing the votes for my match up was simply unbearable. I can only imagine how stressful it was for you to have to go through that three times, but you stuck around anyway, which goes to show I'm a coward and you're more a man than I'll ever be.
Neither was Mizuko, funnily enough. Heck, she wasn't even a pony OC originally. I look forward to seeing what else Luster Lock may be involved in.
Nothing against Obs for organizing this shindig, as I'm sure it was a logistics nightmare and he really put a lot of energy into making this work. But every time I heard people talking about participating as a writer or voter, it just sounded soul-crushing. 12 weeks (and by extension, a single elimination tourney) is just far too long to keep interest going. Hell, some contests in The Writeoff Association last three weeks, and people are going stircrazy by the end.
3365586
Is that a good maaaan or a bad maaaan?
3365670
I would have lost money, were I a betting man. :B I pegged you as closer to the finale.
3365632
The massive breaks in between rounds helped, as did the diminishing returns of how much was needed to read each time.
BP: Hey listen.
I liked Luster Lock even from the start. She's a great character.
I'm going to draw so much porn of her.
SO MUCH
I honestly though that overall your stories were some of the strongest in the competition.
My money was on you or Evergreen.
3365632
I'm actually kind of sad I missed out on the slamjam, as it started when I was in my "doing nothing" funk for a while. It seemed like it was a really fun idea, and if it ever happens again, I'd probably participate.
I was scared shitless going up against you in the quarterfinals. I had you pegged as the strongest author left in the contest at that time, and I knew there was a very good chance I would lose. You were right that it wound up being the most intense round of the whole contest, and it really could've gone either way. I just got a bit luckier than you, I reckon.
At any rate, you've earned a follow out of me. Well fought, my friend.
3365968 Agreed... I had a few choice OCs that I would have LOVED to go against because I knew chances were ass-kicking would be headed my way, and Luster was one of them. I had the most awesome story planned out for the Mango Vs Luster that never happened.
Pretty sure that wasn't one of the five or so guesses I threw at you over Skype. Somehow I'm not surprised, though.
I loved Supercell. That imagery and the meteorology stuff were mesmerizing.
I still don't get the Heather Rose one, though.
3365968
That's incredibly flattering to hear, and my saying that the former few feelings were mutual probably doesn't ring quite so meaningfully, but it's true. But it really wasn't luck, man—part of me is still genuinely surprised mine got as far as tying with yours, it was so comparatively flawed. Have a well-earned follow, yourself.
3366051
You didn't get the Heather Rose one? What's not to get? If someone didn't get one of them, I'd expect it to be the Lilligold one.
3366107 More like it didn't quite do it for me like the others did. But I'm burned out now, too, so I don't have much thinking power left to dredge up old rounds.
I'd be curious to see if after this has died down and everyone recuperates is any authors seek each other out to write short ficlets with characters they wish they had face in the slamjam.
I sadly have to confess that while I was aware of the contest, I didn't read any entries due to my own reasons. It's been very interesting seeing how it played out and definitely food for though if such a thing were to happen in future.
3366732
Actually, participants doing extra fics for pairings they wanted to happen has been under discussion since at least as early as halfway through the contest.
This competition does sound like really good fun! I should check out the entries sometime