The Big Bang Challenge Process
Attention, Saints Row fans!! Sign-ups for the inaugural round of the Saints Row Big Bang will go live later today!
Before sign-ups open, it seemed a smart idea to post up some helpful information since this is the first of these we are doing. Though we realize some of you may have participated in these types of events, we have seen from comments and tags that this will be a first time for several potential participants. Please note that if you do have questions, our ask box is always open.
So, if you have no idea what a fandom Big Bang is—or if you need a refresher—we’ve drafted up the following to try and clear up any lingering questions. Hopefully, everything you need to know is below!
In short, a Big Bang is a fan challenge in which fanfic authors write long stories, and fan artists of all sorts make art based on those stories.
For more detail, this is the general timeline of how a Big Bang challenge works around here:
Author sign-ups. You don’t have to commit to a particular story or pairing or character; you’re not committed to anything until you turn in your rough draft. Signing up is just a declaration of intent—and it gives the mods a rough idea of how many drafts to expect, and how many artists we need to round up.
There will be a mandatory author check-in about a month before the final rough draft due date. The mods just want to keep a good handle on how many people are still participating, for the reasons stated above.
Writers will have somewhere around 2-3 months to finish your rough draft. By the rough draft deadline, though, you need to have a mostly complete story. It’s okay to have things like [insert sex scene] somewhere, but the stories need to have a beginning, middle, and end, and be coherent enough for someone else to read and understand.
There will be a minimum word count—typically around 10K (ours is 8K), but I’ve seen much longer challenges aim toward 25K and above (we will likely never go that high)—but there will be no max limit. Write as much as your heart desires! Just remember it has to be complete (or close to it) by the deadline, and that an artist/mixer will have to be able to read it and create a work based on it in approximately a month. So the time frame for this challenge would likely not work for Odysseus Goes to Stilwater or other master epics in the 100K range.
Rough draft deadline—at this time, you’ll need to email the mods a document of your draft (.docx, .rtf, .pdf, or a Google Doc), so that the mods can verify that you have a complete enough story to go forward, as well as a story summary and header (with pairing, rating, warnings, etc.). At this point, if you submit a rough draft to the mods, you are fully committed to the challenge. We don’t want to have an artist put work into a piece, only to have an author drop out at the last minute!
Artist claiming—this is a blind process. The mods will take all the summaries and headers and post a list of them to a Google Doc without author names attached. Artists/mixers will browse this list and pick stories that sound interesting to them.
A few important notes for this part of the process:
This is, in fact, supposed to be blind. If you only want to draw/mix for a particular person—or if you only want someone you know to make art for your story—then a big bang is probably not for you.
Every story will have at least one piece of art. Once an artist/mixer claims a story, it will be struck from the list. Once every story has one piece of art, depending on artist availability/interest, the stories may open up for double claiming; those claims will work the same way, until every story has two pieces of art, and so on. This is absolutely, positively not a popularity contest, and there will not be a situation in which one story has half a dozen pieces of art, while everyone else only has one.
We strongly discourage anyone to post any other accompanying pieces of art until after the posting period is over. If a friend likes your story enough to want to draw a piece of art for you without signing up to be an official artist for the challenge, that’s great! But we’d really like the focus to be on the people who sign up for the challenge for the duration of the posting period. We can’t control what you do and don’t do outside of the challenge, of course, but in the interest of keeping everything fair and fun and peaceful, we ask that the big bang stories and art be allowed to stand on their own until the whole challenge is over.
Artists/mixers should be prepared to possibly work with characters/pairings/genres they don’t usually partake in. Allowances will naturally be made for triggering sorts of issues—if you can’t work with incest or non-con or domestic violence, as examples, we will make sure you don’t have to claim a story with those themes. (This is one of the reasons authors are required to submit a header, complete with warnings.) And if you’re really uncomfortable with explicit sexual content, we’ll do our best to make sure you don’t have to draw for 20,000 words worth of porn. But if you sign up to mix/do art for this challenge, you should be ready to potentially work with het, slash, femslash, or gen, characters from any DA game, with another person’s custom Boss, Playa, or OCs, drama or comedy or angst or domestic curtain!fic. Artist claiming is a first come, first serve sort of thing, and we want to make sure that every story has at least one piece of art, no matter what the content!
Artists/mixers will usually have 4-6 weeks to complete their work. The mods will email the rough draft to the appropriate artist, and that artist will read the story and create their work from there. (Thus, why rough drafts need to be complete!) If an artist has questions for the author, or wants input from the author of the story, the mods will put them in contact so they can collaborate. But the level of collaboration will be at the discretion of the artist. At the end of this period, both completed pieces of art and fully complete story drafts will be due to the mods.
The mods will work on a story posting schedule. Generally, the posting period will run 2-3 weeks, and every author will have a particular day they’re assigned to post their story. Depending on how many stories we end up having, there could be one story posted per day, or there could be three or four stories posted every day. Since we would like to try and showcase the participant’s work we will try to limit the number of postings per day so that every one’s work has a chance to be seen. The actual time frame and posting schedule will be determined based on the number of participants. Once your story has been assigned a date, the mods will email both author and artist to let them know.
On the assigned posting day, authors and artists will post their work to their preferred website. The artist is responsible for sending the link to their work to the author; the author is then responsible for making a master post, with links to the story and artwork, to submit to the SRBB Tumblr. Once we receive it we will post the submission on our site on your posting date.
Everyone reads the story, partakes in the art/mix, and lavishes love and attention all over the awesome creators!
That is the basic rundown of how this and other Big Bangs work. We hope that this has cleared up any questions. If there are still lingering inquiries, please visit our ask box.
