These are my thoughts on the categories at award sites, and the importance of picking the right one when nominating a story. I don’t know that the importance of picking the right category is something that would have occurred to me before I became a judge at so many sites – although I do recall struggling with it from time to time when nominating – but just in case there are others out there who may be planning to rush off to nominate without thinking about where a story has the best shot at winning, here is some stuff to think about.  Some of this has already appeared on my LJ, so if you saw it there, don’t be surprised if it sounds very familiar.  Not everyone has an LJ, though, so I thought I’d elaborate on those thoughts and post them here on separate threads – one for each kind of fic that is often misplaced in the nomination categories.
 
Just for the record, none of this is intended to offend, attack, belittle, or any other malicious intent that a reader might attribute to this post.  I’m just giving my thoughts on these things.  The only fics mentioned by title or author, will be those about which I have something kind to say.  I am only expressing my opinion in hopes that it will give those wonderful people who take the time to nominate fics at award sites (bless them all!) something to think about when they are picking categories.

Let’s begin with this very important question.  Should you be nominating this story at all?

The sad fact is, that not all fics that get nommed for awards really have any business being there.  Ideally, if you went down a list of nominated fics (as I often do –it’s where I find most of my reading material) and read them all, one at a time, you would find nothing but really quality stories. Not all of them might appeal, due to subject matter, writing style or whatever, but you would understand why they were there competing for an award.  Alas, that is no longer always the case.  Every now and then, you find a fic (or two, or three, or *sigh* more) that makes you go “What was the nominator drinking? And where can I get some?” Whether nominated by a friend out of a misguided sense of loyalty, or self-nommed by the author out of a sense of hubris, the poor little fic ends up with a score (if it gets one at all) that isn’t even in the same two-digit zone as the others in the category.

 It’s certainly possible to find differences of opinion among people in terms of which of the top third of the stories in a category should win. If you have six judges, you may get six different first place fics.  But, you wouldn’t be likely to find the poor little mis-nommed fic among them.  Bad is bad (and, yes, truly bad fics get nominated sometimes), mediocre is mediocre, and heavily flawed is heavily flawed.  In <strike>MY</strike> a perfect world, nothing would ever get nominated (or be accepted into nomination) at an award site except truly exceptional stories.  Nothing provides a judge with a more wonderful dilemma than having to spend hours rereading and rescoring all the fics in a category because they are all so extraordinary that you want them all to get first place.  On the other hand, if you can dismiss a good third of the nominated fics right off the bat because they aren’t even readable, let alone award-worthy, that’s just sad.

IMHO, every fic nominated in a category should have a fighting chance of catching the judge’s eye; and if you are going to take the time and trouble to nominate a story, you owe it to the author to see that it A) genuinely deserves to be considered, and B) is nominated in the categories in which it stands the best chance for success.

The various categories where I think nominators run into problems are all going to be given separate threads so that no one has to wade through a bunch of stuff in which they aren’t interested to locate the one they do care about.