LabRat - I have a suggestion - nothing new or startling - but it might help.
In my experience, a ficathon generates more authors and a spate of shortish stories.
Admittedly, by the time we organise a ficathon (and some might prefer to wait until after the Kerths), get the stories written, and get them to the archive, it's going to take a couple of months, but it might help fill the archive in-box over the northern hemisphere summer.
Perhaps we could give guidelines to participants - try to choose prompts conducive to shorter stories.
We could run it the standard way - all participants give 3 things they want and 3 they don't want and those prompts are given to another author. Or, to try something different, everyone could give 2 or 3 things they want, and prompts could be mixed up. ie every author gets 3 prompts from 3 different people.
Or we could post a set of prompts at the beginning of a two week/month period, and any author feeling inspired could write to those prompts. Perhaps these stories could be posted anonymously and we could include a 'guess the author' competition as part of the fun.
I'm willing to organise it if there is interest from others. We could call it The Archive Appreciation Ficathon.
Corrina.
