4 Days until the deadline!

[briarwood.livejournal.com]

A quick reminder: there are just four days to go until our August 1st deadline. The deadline is midnight August 1st wherever you are in the world, BTW.

A couple of things, since this has come up a few times now. I'll also update the FAQ with this information.

Extensions
We want everyone's fic, art and/or vids in by the deadline. Yes, we do! *cracks whip* But we also want everyone to be able to complete their assignments and we do understand that sometimes, those deadlines just aren't possible. If you need a few days extension, we will probably say yes. If you need a lot longer...we'll need to talk about it.

You can request an extension by email to the usual mod address: summergen09 at gmail dot com When you email please include the date you want as your new deadline. And please be sure that you can make that new deadline. If you get an extension and then have to drop out it's that much harder for us to find a pinch-hitter, and if we can, the poor pinch-hitter has that much less time to write a fic.

Word limits
The minimum word limit is a definite rule. I don't think I'd reject a story for being only 999 words...but I might. 1,000 is the minimum set in the rules.

There is no upper limit. A couple of our submissions so far are long ones - I'm blown away that anyone can write a really long fic in such a short time (do you guys have a TARDIS hidden somewhere? And if you do, can I borrow it?)

But in all seriousness, if your story is longer than about 9,000 words, please remember that it might not all fit in one LJ post. The LJ limit is supposed to be 10,000 words, but it's a character limit, so sometimes it works out more than that, sometimes less. Test your story by posting privately in your own LJ, and if you need to, please split the story into multiple posts yourself. You can still submit the story all in one file, but make it as obvious as you can where the chapter break(s) should be. Either use lots of white-space (several blank lines) between chapters, or put in multiple rows of asterisks or something - so that your friendly mods can spot it when we quickly scroll through your story. Or you could send it in multiple files. Whichever works best for you.

Art and Vids
You don't need to format an LJ post yourself, only send the files and the header given in the submission guidelines.

If you want items to appear in a certain order, or if you're fussy about presentation, you can include an LJ post already coded if you want to. Or you could just number the files and we'll put the post together ourselves.

Questions
If you've emailed us before now with a question or issue and I haven't replied, it's because I need to check with pinkfinity and she's been away. Hopefully she'll be able to catch up with me soon.

Replies to submissions
I am doing my best to reply to everything - questions, submissions and so on - within 24 hours. I'm really sorry, but I can't do it faster. I hurt my back a few days ago (worst timing ever!) and it's not easy for me to sit at the PC. I have a good chair at work, but while I have LJ access there our firewall blocks gmail. So I'm able to do this just twice a day. I'm guessing that as we get closer to the deadline, there'll be more to deal with and I might miss that 24 hour window.

So if you haven't had a "receipt" email from me within 24 hours, or if you have any other problem with your submission, please don't panic, but feel free to nag me about it. Either send me an LJ message or leave a comment here. I'll reply as soon as I'm able.