Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Fanfic Related It's Kerths Time!

Hi everyone!

As you've noticed from the great quizzes that have already been posted on the LCFIC group (thank you, Meredith, Hazel and Wendy!), it's time for the 2005 Kerth Awards!

The 2005 Kerth Awards will be the eighth annual fanfic awards for L&C fanfic -- it's hard to believe it's been eight years already since the first awards! But it's wonderful to see that L&C fanfic is as popular as ever.

This post will update everyone on the Awards, as well as let you know about some changes we've needed to make this year.


Kerth Website:

The official Kerth website can be found at:

www.erinklingler.com/lnc/kerths.html

From here, you can still find links to everything you need to know about the Kerth Awards, from the list of eligible stories to the FAQs to information on how to nominate and vote. Check back regularly, as we'll be updating the site as the Kerth process moves along.


Eligible stories:

The list of stories eligible for the 2005 Kerth Awards can be found here, though keep in mind this page is in the process of being updated. It should be updated and ready to go by no later than Sunday:

http://www.erinklingler.com/lnc/Kerth_Eligibles.html

All stories which were uploaded to the L&C Fanfic Archive during 2004 (other than those which were already eligible in a previous year) will automatically be considered eligible for the 2005 Awards, unless we've heard otherwise from the author. In addition, stories which have been posted to other websites or forums (LCFIC group, Fanfic Message Boards, Annesplace, etc.) during 2004 can be considered eligible if the author notifies the Kerth Committee (kcom@lcficbmbs.com) and provides a link to the story. These additional stories and links will be added to the eligibility page as we hear from authors.

In other words, if your story was uploaded to the Archive in 2004, it will automatically be eligible, but if not, please write the Kerth Committee ASAP if you want us to include it.


Automated Nominations and Voting:

Last year we created a format to automate the nomination process to make it easier to both nominate stories and tabulate the results into the final ballot. We will be using this system again this year. Stay tuned for more specific information!

We will also be using the same automated voting system as we've used in the past. Again, stay tuned for the URL as we get closer to voting time.


2005 Schedule of Dates:

Sunday, February 13: Nominations open

Sunday, February 27: Nominations close (at midnight EST)

February 28 - March 6: Kerth Committee sorts nominations

Monday, March 7: Final list of nominees posted

Saturday, March 19: Voting opens

Sunday, March 27: Voting closes (at midnight EST) (Note: This is Easter Sunday, so plan ahead if you'll be otherwise occupied that weekend. )

Saturday, April 2: Kerth Ceremony, 6pm EST


2005 Category Changes:

OK, everyone, this is where we've made some fairly significant changes, so please bear with us as we explain what we've changed and why.

The number of eligible stories dropped off significantly this year compared to years past. This year, there are a little over 200 eligible stories whereas the last two years, we've averaged 300 stories. Since we only have about 2/3 the number of eligible stories this year, the KCom felt it necessary to adjust the number of categories accordingly.

This wasn't a decision we took lightly, since we know that people often think about their nominations as they are reading throughout the year (and we also know that everyone has their favorite categories, which made it especially hard to decide which ones to cut back!) But we felt strongly that we needed to keep the number of categories somewhat proportional to the number of eligible stories in order to keep the awards meaningful, and that the following categories featured stories which could best be included in other categories and/or where the recent trend has been to have fewer of them than in years past.

As such, the KCom has decided to eliminate the following categories this year:

-- Long Revelation (stories compete well in other categories)

-- Tearjerker (stories compete well in other categories)

-- Early Years/Superfutures (fewer eligible stories than in years past)

-- Innovative (a recent addition created to "thin out" other categories when numbers were high)

-- Series (fewer eligible series than in years past)(**NOTE: As we've allowed in the past, series parts may be combined to compete in theme categories (but not in size-restricted categories. For instance, six stories from a series cannot combine to make up a single entry in Best Epic). For example, in 2002, Shayne Terry's Fugue/Fusion was listed as a combined entry under Best Alternative Universe and in 2003, Riley's Lucy to the Rescue/Lucy to the Rescue Again was listed under Best Comedy. **)

Now lest you think we were all going scissor-happy, we have also decided to add one brand new category, one which we feel combines elements of several recently dropped categories:

-- Best Original/Supporting Character

This category features stories which do an excellent job of creating and/or enhancing characters other than Lois and Clark. This could be a minor character from the series or an entirely new character; good guys or villains; side characters interacting with Lois & Clark or those off on their own adventure. We are especially excited about this category because it combines some of the elements of categories which we've had to drop in recent years -- Best Lost Episode, Best Villain, Best Early Years/Superfutures, Innovative, etc.

To give you an idea of what we mean by "best use of an original or supporting character", some examples from previous years might include: Beth Luthor of S6, Chris Carr's use of Tempus and Wells in "Ties That Bind" or her use of Nigel in "Love, Loyalty, and Luthor," Jenni Debbage's Rad-Nor in her Universal Union series, Nan Smith's Lori Lyons in her Home series, Pam Jernigan's nightclub trio in "Hearts Divided," Jimmy Olsen in Chris Mulder's "A Life Well Spent," and Irene Dutch's original characters in her Firestorm series.

(And our sincere apologies to the Kerth Quiz Team who have already created quizzes based on last year's category list. We got a bit of a late start this year on the KCom due to some real life issues and we didn't get them the changes in time for them to adjust their schedule.)

You will also note we moved around the category order in some instances, in an attempt to keep the short categories together on the ballot.


2005 Categories:

** Best Super Short (1-10k) -- Very short stories.

** Best Short Story (11-50k) -- Short stories of any subject or tone.

** Best WAFFY Story (1-50k) -- Short, mainly light stories intended to give the reader a Warm and Fuzzy Feeling. No A-plots.

** Best Comedy -- Generally short stories where the main purpose is to amuse.

** Best Holiday/Special Occasion Story -- Generally short stories that deal with a special time of the calendar year, i.e., Christmas,
Thanksgiving, Fourth of July, Valentine's Day; or with a special occasion in Lois and Clark's lives, such as a birthday or an anniversary.

** Best Mid-Length Story (51-100k) -- Mid-length stories of any subject or tone.

** Best Short Revelation Story (under 100k) -- Shorter stories which deal specifically with a revelation.

** Best Short Episode Adaptation (under 100k) -- Stories which alter the events of, or start from some point in, a particular episode. Includes adaptations, continuations, and rewrites.

** Best Long Episode Adaptation (over 100k) -- Stories which alter the events of, or start from some point in, a particular episode. Includes adaptations, continuations, and rewrites.

** Best Alternate Universe/Elseworlds Story -- Stories which feature parallel universes (including the Alt World that was introduced on the show), or stories in which the author has made major changes (such as time, place and/or nature of the characters) before where the series started in the Pilot. Cross-overs would also fit in this category. No size restrictions.

** Best Original/Supporting Character: Stories which strongly highlight a supporting character from the series or creates a new, interesting character that plays an important role in the story. No size restrictions.

** Best Drama (under 400k) -- Stories which focus on a series of exciting or suspenseful events. Stories can be similar in tone and balance to the show's episodes, or tackle a more serious subject matter, and will generally, though not always, contain a significant A-plot.

** Best Relationship Story (under 400k) -- Stories which focus mainly on Lois & Clark's relationship. No tone or timeline restrictions. Might include "getting together" scenarios, or focus on their developing relationship, either before or after marriage.

** Best Epic (over 400k) -- Epic-length stories which are either A-plot(drama) or B-plot (relationship) driven, of any subject or tone.

** Best New Author -- Limited to authors who first published their Lois & Clark stories in the past year.

** Best Overall Story -- A story of any type that is outstanding overall. No size restrictions.

DISCLAIMER: The Kerth Committee does its best to keep these categories unchanged on the ballot, however, we may need to tweak category size requirements or to add, delete or combine categories in order to best represent the nominations that are submitted.


Thanks, everyone. We know there are a lot of changes this year, so if you have any questions, please let us know!

Erin, Kathy, Pam and Annette
The Kerth Committee
kcom@lcficmbs.com
(edited by Pam to fix some funky line-wrapping)

Question...

You guys are going to say I'm a pain in the backside, but after all those years you're used to me. You knew I would have a bone to pick with you, re.tearjerkers (what in the world am I going to present now that you got rid of my favourite category? ), but actually my question is about best series.

If I want to nominate something I would otherwise have nominated in series, how do I nominate it? Do all stories in the series count as one, and therefore if I nominate them in best relationship I nominate the whole series in relationship, together? Or do they count separately, in which case I nominate all of them separately in relationship?

Actually I have a second question: is there any way to make the "best revelation" category one without any size limit, like it used to be a few years back? With the new categories, epics (unless elseworld) can only fit in *one* category bar overall, so it's a bit unfair to those stories. Yes, I know they're not numerous, but why wouldn't they deserve to be considered for their other qualities. They used to fit in tearjerker or long revelation as well.

And last question, I'm a bit confuddled over the new category. Can you give specific examples (using stories from previous years) to explain what you mean?

Thanks.

Kaethel

I'll confer with the rest of the K-Com on the first two points, but Kae, just to be a smart-alec, I've gotta quote this from Erin's post:

Hazel put together that list for us, and she explained:

I specified those stories to give examples of new characters that fit into LnC's current timeframe, elseworlds, nextgen, and supporting characters ranging from the good guys to the villains.

For those who aren't familiar with the names/fics above, here's a short review (assuming my memory doesn't fail me <g>):

Beth Luthor was an original character, interacting with L&C.

Wells and Tempus were the major characters in "Ties that Bind," which didn't include L&C.

Nigel was the major character in "LL&L," which did include L&C.

Rad-Nor was the bad guy, interacting with Lois and Lord Kal-El.

Lori Lyons is an original, major character, interacting with Clark.

My "nightclub trio" are original, supporting characters, interacting with Lois & Kal.

"A Life Well Spent" focused on Jimmy, without L&C.

And Irene's next-gen series has original heros and villains as the main characters of the stories; L&C are supporting characters.

So... My personal definition would be, "any well-developed character who's neither Lois nor Clark" With "well-developed" being subjective, of course. The story might or might not include Lois and Clark. Hope that makes it a little clearer.

PJ

Whooops! That's what happens when I don't read posts thoroughly enough! Apologies then.

Kaethel

That's alright It's probably worthwhile to break them out further anyway, for the people who haven't read or can't remember the specifics of those examples, so thanks for asking!

I'm really excited about this category, btw -- putting that much work into a character other than Our Heros deserves some credit. And I think it's a very rich field this year; when the idea for the topic was first suggested, I thought of at least 15 eligible stories which would be strong contenders, just off the top of my head, and that doesn't count all the stories I *haven't* read.

PJ

*Love* the new category, KCom! Great idea.
Yvonne

Think your condensing of the categories seems very sensible. Also very much like the new category of original character / expansion of secondary character - a category I've been lobbying for, for a couple of years now. Maybe even make this into 2 categories - one for "Best Orginal" (eg Chris Carr's Winnie) and one for best expansion of existing character (eg Nan's Lois' reincarnation Lori)? So we aren't comparing 'aplles and oranges' within the same category.

Would like to see a stronger recognition of stories with an A- plot. Perhaps, make that a required part of the Best Drama category? That would have the added plus of distingusihing that category from "Relationship" (which nearly all of our stories are anyway:) ) I'm biased here though - A plots are so hard to write compared to B plots!

Erin, (and K-com) thanks for all your work on this, plus all that time to come which you'll put in. Kerth time is always a nice distraction:)

c

I think the new category sounds great, too.

Prior to the past year or so, didn't the Best Drama category require an A-plot? It seems logical enough to me, and as Carol said, that would provide more recognition for stories with A-plot.

And I would like to second Kaethel's request to eliminate the size restriction on Best Revelation. I had already been working on my Nominations List, and there were some stories in the "Long Revelation" category that I would hate to knock out of the running, because the revelations, I thought, were terrific.

Kathy (sobbing along with Kae because the Tearjerker category is gone - one of my favorites too!)

I agree that the size restriction on Best Revelation should be removed. I would also suggest removing the restriction on Best Drama. Some dramas are over 400K but aren't epics, and it would be a shame to leave them out.

Nan

Kaethel asked:

You can do it either way. If you think it's just one part of a series that is outstanding, just nominate that one part where you want to. If you want to nominate the entire series, you can do that, too. Once the noms come in, we'll see where things are and create the ballot. If most people just nominate one part, we'll just include that one part, but if most people nom the entire series, we'll include the entire series. (And as we mentioned in the announcement message, this isn't anything new -- we've done it this way in previous years as well.)


I'm not sure what you mean here, Kae ... besides the specific size category, an Epic could also be nominated in Long Ep Adapt, Alt/Else, Original/Supporting Character and Best Overall. That's five separate categories. (Though with our long-standing "two category" rule, any given story can only make the ballot in 2 of those categories, plus Best Overall.)

While we on the KCom haven't had a chance to discuss the Revelation size specifically yet, I did want to mention why we decided to keep it as a short story category in the first place. Keep in mind that 80% or so of the eligible stories are short stories, yet less than half of the categories are restricted to stories of that size. Since it's generally true that short stories have a hard time competing with long stories in the theme categories, we felt it was important for them to have enough categories of their own.


KathyM observed:

You're right; before last year, Drama did require an A-plot. Last year, however, we took out this requirement, and said that stories covering a serious subject matter could also compete, even if the A-plot was not the primary focus of the story.

The reason we made this change was because there simply have been fewer and fewer stories that are A-plot driven and it was getting harder to support the category. If that trend has reversed this year, though, and there were a large number of A-plot driven stories, please let us know! We on the KCom haven't read every story on the eligible list, so maybe we missed some when we were doing our rough counts.

But remember that A-plot driven stories aren't excluded from this category -- the definition has simply been expanded to include other stories that were at risk of falling through the cracks.

OK, I think that's all the questions so far ... if you think of any more (or I missed something), please ask!

Kathy

Nan wrote:

Nan, our definition of an "epic" is any story over 400K. We created the Epic category a few years ago specifically to create extra spaces on the ballot for longer stories -- basically, to thin out Drama and Relationship and make 15 slots for these stories instead of 10. Stories nominated in Epic *are* Dramas or Relationship stories or both. (Usually both -- stories which are this long and well done enough to be nominated by the readers almost always include both an A-plot and a B-plot.) So these stories aren't overlooked -- they are actually given extra slots on the ballot.

If you have some stories in mind that you think are being left out, though, please email us and let us know what they are! Our goal in deciding on categories has always been to cover the eligible stories as thoroughly as possible.

Kathy

Paul

Kathy, thanks for clarifying. Yes, I know your motivation for putting size restrictions on certain categories, and you do know I've always fought to keep that long revelation category alive. But yes, long revelations are rarer than short ones, and I can see why you couldn't have one category for these this year. I'd still like revelation to be without any size-restriction, but whatever works.

In any case (and sorry for forgetting to say that last night), kudos for all your hard work. And yes, now that I understand the new category better, I can think of some stories that will fit there very well.

So basically, for series, my question was because of size-restricted categories. Now, I know Erin said for example that 3 stories in a series can't compete in Epic even if they're over 400k together. But let's see if I get this right. Does that mean I can the whole series in Short Story for example?

Like, for Best Short Story:
Lois Dies (46k) / Clark Cries (22k) / Lex Is Alive (35k) - by EvilTorturer.

In which case, do they count as *one* nomination (and then *one* Kerth Award, if they win) together? Or are they kept separate? You seem to say it's a case by case decision, depending on how the noms turn out. Am I making sense?

Kaethel

Returning to my suggestion to split "Original / Supporting Character" here because I like this category so much.

Creating a new character is different from expanding what we know of an existing character. Both are challenging tasks - the orginal character has ot be carefully written if s/he's to become more than just that stock personna who merely advances plot. I bet we can all think of an original character in an L & C fic whom we cared about, almost as much as Lois and Clark, or one who had us in stitches, or one who was a chilling villain.

Writing an extension is challenging too - but different. Here we have the character already created for us. We know what Bill Henderson looks like and we have a sense of his personality. When we read him in a story we recognise those moments that are 'pure Henderson' in the same way that we do for the characters of Lois and Clark. Yet in many ways extending a supporting character is more difficult than writing Lois and Clark becuase we know less about that character to begin with and yet the expansion must also fit with what we intuitively sense is 'Henderson'.

So it would be nice to see the authors of both types of character recognized.

At the risk of having the K-Com throw bricks at me, I'd also like to suggest that these categories be divided between stories under and over 100k (or 50k - whatever seeems appropriate.) It strikes me that there have been some very strongly written characters in many of the shorts this year - yet, as Kathy pointed out, short stories seem to get sidelined by the longer fics. I hadn't realised there were so many shorts this year compared to longer fics and this would be another way of recognizing them.

c

Well, Short Story is a size-restricted category... so you could nominate any/all of those individual stories, but not as a set. But if you wanted to submit them as a series to Best Comedy, that would be fine.

The case-by-case part is for the theme-based categories. If "Lois Dies" gets 12 nominations, while "Clark Cries" and "Lex is Alive" both get only one or two, then only "Lois Dies" goes on the ballot for Best Comedy But if most people nominate them together as a series, then we'll probably put them together on the ballot.

PJ

Carol, hang on a second while I find my brick...

I like your ideas for splitting the category, and I agree that there are different challenges for creating/developing different types of characters... but the trouble is that there's a smaller list of stories overall this year, so we were trying to reduce the total number of categories. We'll definitely keep it in mind, though; if the category is flooded with nominations we'll look at splitting it somehow, and there's always next year

PJ

Hang on hang on hang on! Back to being utterly confuddled. The series I have in mind has three stories, all of which are under 400k (so it can't be nominated in Epic). But together, the three stories amount to more than 400k... does that mean they can't be nominated in Relationship, which has a size restriction? Or Drama, for the same reason? Because then it means I can't nominate them anywhere unless I nominate all three separately.

Kaethel

I am sad to see long revelation go. There is a difference between short revelations where the revelation is the focus on the story and long revelation where the revelation has to be a smooth insert into a longer, more complex story that could have an a-plot and a b-plot. It's almost like comparing apples and oranges.

Same with series -- I am curious as to how many series were eligible last year vs. this year. It is a lot of work to write a series to make individual stories that carry on a theme and a universe. It is a shame to see the category go.

I agree with Carol that writing a purely original character and writing an extension of a supporting character are really different. Basically, I agree with everything Carol said.

- Laura

Well, Kae, the rest of the K-Com will correct me if I'm wrong, but yeah, that's basically it. The individual story parts can be nominated in Relationship or Drama, but not the series as a whole. However, they can still be nominated as a series in (if they qualify) Long Ep Adapt, Alt/Else, Original/Supporting Character, and Overall. If you're thinking of the series I think you're thinking of, then it would qualify for all those categories.

It's not perfect, I know, and the change this year isn't especially advantageous for it -- we try to avoid that, but it happens sometimes. (I really could have used a "Best Krypton/New Krypton" category the year I came out with Hearts Divided, but the trend just wasn't there... <sigh> )

The idea behind a length-based category is that writing a single epic-length story is a very different challenge than writing four or five mid-length ones. (I don't know if it's easier or harder, but it is different)

When the nominations come in, we may re-assess, but for now, that's the rule.

PJ

Hey, Laura, you snuck in there

True... the Best Revelation category was originally intended to be only for those shorter stories that focus on the revelation, and I still think there's a good argument for that. For one thing, the longer and more complex stories can generally compete well in other categories.

One of the reasons it took us so long to come out with the "official" list for the year, btw, is that we knew we'd have to eliminate some categories, and we didn't want to get rid of any of them.

Yeah. Actually, though, we (K-Com) discussed cutting the Series category last year, as I recall. This year, when we knew we'd need to reduce the number of categories, it was one of the logical candidates.

And yeah, I agree with Carol, too, but we're trying to keep the category list shorter, this year.

PJ