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What's the Support Stacie auction, and why should I care? As some of you already know, a few of us who write in the Doctor Who/Torchwood fandoms have been taking part in recent 'author auctions' to raise money towards a cancer victim's treatment.
Stacie, a member of the Gilmore Girls fandom, was diagnosed in March 2007 with breast and ovarian cancer.
The full story is detailed
here , but briefly the Catch 22 was this: she was still on probation in her new job and so wasn't covered by health insurance, and as her spouse is self-employed he didn't have health insurance. The bills are mounting and are now in excess of $200,000.
The Gilmore Girls fandom rallied to raise money to help her, and in the last year or so the fundraising effort has spread to other fandoms including Harry Potter, Roswell, Twilight, True Blood, Merlin and, of course, Doctor Who. The last auction, in April of this year, raised
over $29,000 !
It's still not enough. Stacie is about 25% of the way to her financial target, and still a long way to go in her treatment. The Support Stacie campaign has just announced the
September Author Auction and is accepting signups. I would dearly love to have Lois and Clark writers represented in the auction this time around!
How does it work? Authors sign up by completing
the sign-up form , downloadable from the website. You give your name, your fandom, a link to your stories and then an indication of what you are and are not prepared to write (for example: L&C romance and angst, other minor characters; will not write Lois or Clark romance with any other character). You also state the length of story you're offering - minimum bids vary by story size. The minimum story length is usually 500 words, but most authors sign up for at least 2500. When the auction is over and your winning bidder has paid, you will receive a story prompt from your winning bidder which you are encouraged to write within 30 days - though people are flexible on that; I still owe stories from the April auction!
Bidders get involved by hanging out on the auction forum, hosted on
Majik\'s World of Fanfic forums . Once the auction has opened, you bid for your favourite authors until the auction ends. Last time, some bidders combined bids to reach a higher price. In that case, the story is written for all bidders.
Some authors throw in special offers to increase bids, for example offering an autographed copy of the story if bids are over a certain amount, or bid-incentive drabbles. Last time some people also offered vignettes for $20, bids limited to people who had bid for them on the main auction thread and been outbid. Payment is accepted via PayPal.
Sounds great! What do I do next? Run over to the
Support Stacie website and sign up! Also, encourage your friends to sign up - the more L&C authors involved, the better. Let's make a huge fandom splash!
The timetable for the September auction is as follows:
# Friday, September 4th – Deadline for author registration forms
# Friday, September 11th, 11:59pm – Auction opens
# Monday, September 14th, 7:00-10:00pm – Auction ends
But I don't write, and I can't afford to bid! You can help out by publicising the auction, encouraging writers you know to offer their services. And even if you could only afford $10, what if you combined forces with ten other people who could also only afford $10? There's a bid of $110 on a popular L&C writer, right?
So please sign up and let's put Lois and Clark fanfic writers on the Support Stacie map! And if we get five authors posting here to say they've signed up I
will sign up to write an L&C vignette... or even a sequel to one of my fics.
Wendy
