mdzs-kinkmeme

[mdzs-kinkmeme]

Hi Mod(s)! I've submitted a dozen prompts for mdzs kink meme 2024 so far but there's two prompts that didnt let me submit them. I was told these prompts would render my overall sign up invalid and i didnt know why. One was a chengxian prompt, one was a prompt applicable to any wei wuxian pairing. i used existing tags only, filled all required areas and didnt exceed the word count but it still happened. help?

Hmm. I've had similar things happen to me occasionally and it definitely can get a bit mysterious! It's usually something with the tags, often the "additional tags," but I can't remember more than that at the moment. I've never seen it have anything to do with the content of the prompt itself.

If you'd like to email me a screenshot of your attempt I might be able to diagnose it for you: mdzs.kinkmeme@gmail.com

[mdzs-kinkmeme]

Hi! I've been sending in prompts on AO3 for the 2024 kink meme and I realized that for a while no further fics have been added. Is that normal? I read that you have to read through prompt fills and approve them, so I figured you'd be the best to ask. Have there been no fills the last month? Or have they been posted outside of the kink meme maybe? Is there maybe a special month where writers fill them and I missed that? I've seen enough claims to have gotten quite confused.

There have been fills for older prompts, but no fills for the 2024 meme!

Here's my email inbox of fill notifications, so you get a sense of how often they're coming in in 2024:

Only a handful each month. And this is spread out across all of the different prompt collections, so it's really VERY slow.

My guess is that most fills coming in at the moment are prompts people picked up years ago and are only getting around to writing now.

It's entirely possible that most of the authors who were active in the fandom when the kink meme was a common topic of conversation on mdzstwt/mdzsblr have moved on, and new authors joining the fandom in the last year or two are less aware of the kink meme as a potential source of inspiration.

I'd love to whip up a prompt-fill event, or at the very least a prompt highlight event, but I am unfortunately up to my eyeballs in other projects (well, more like multiple part-time jobs AND multiple volunteer positions) and don't have the mental bandwidth to do much more than make sure any fills that come in are read over and approved (ಥ _ ಥ)

If you have any interest in running a kinkmeme-related event, or have anything you'd like me to retweet/reblog/reskeet etc, I'd be happy to help out!

And don't forget—one of the easiest ways to remind people they can fill prompts is to find somebody's else prompt to talk about on social media, or, better yet, fill a prompt yourself and tell the world how much fun you had doing it!

[mdzs-kinkmeme]

How many prompts can a person claim at a time?

By kink meme rules, there's no limit! There isn't any way for me to affect that on the moderator end as far as I'm aware. If a limit exists, it will be part of AO3's basic programming. If you find a limit, please let me know and I can add it to the FAQ.

There is an AO3-set limit to how many prompts you can submit; it's 50 per collection. So be judicious!

[mdzs-kinkmeme]

Do we need to finish the fic before fulfilling the prompt on ao3?

Nope! As long as the content of the first chapter doesn't make it impossible to fill the prompt, it's fine to just post Chapter 1 of your fill.

However, don't just post a 'placeholder' that says something like 'I am going to write this fic soon!' That isn't necessary or appropriate.

I answered this question in more detail here.

[mdzs-kinkmeme]

Hi, do you still beta fills for the kinkmeme?

When I check my mail, yes! <(＿　＿)> sorry April 2023 anon!!!!

Tumblr is fantastic at not reminding me I have mail in here, so if you really want to get ahold of me I suggest emailing me directly.

[mdzs-kinkmeme]

Hi! If I am writing a multi-chapter fill but I don't want to post it all at once, should I wait to officially add it as a fill until I've finished posting it? I think the first chapter technically meets the bare minimum requirements, but the bonus stuff plus extra for the prompt is all later.

It is fine to start posting a multi-chapter fill before it fulfills the prompt! I will give it a look to make sure you seem to be aiming in the right direction (so no filling "wangxian slow burn with eventual wedding" with a work that starts with one half of the ship perma-dying) but I definitely don't expect you to bang it all out ahead of time.

Lots and lots of fills so far have started with just one teasing chapter and many do not continue. That's not a problem—it's the nature of kink memes to have a lot of aspirational starter fills.

[mdzs-kinkmeme]

Hey, I’m a little confused about how this works, do I send you my prompt here, or do I submit it on ao3 somehow? Is there a limit to how specific my prompt can be? Where can I see previous prompts and/or fills? Leaving anon off on purpose, but I appreciate your efforts for privacy. Thank you for all your hard work!

A thousand apologies for letting this molder in the depths of my ask box for nearly a whole year! I hope you found the answers to your questions. There is a FAQ on AO3 linked on this tumblr, but I suppose it's a bit hard to get to on mobile!

Prompts should be submitted via AO3 here. Just look over to the left and there's a link under "prompts" called "prompt form." There's a bunch of instructions on the form and some suggestions for how to write a good prompt, as well as a suggested template.

As for how specific you can be: as specific as you like! However, the more nitpicky you are, the less likley someone is to fill your prompt. You're trying to be specific enough to capture a writer's imagination and specific enough to warn the author off things you really hate, but if you start dictating every single plot beat or giving micromanage-y editorial advice, no potential authors will be interested in trying to please you.

Previous prompts can be found here; •2020 Prompts •2021 Q1 Prompts •2021 Q2 Prompts •2022 Prompts •2023 Prompts

[mdzs-kinkmeme]

Last year I deleted a prompt from a previous year(it was either 2021 or last year). I’ve had regrets about deleting it since and was wondering if I could resubmit it for this year, or perhaps a future round if not this year? I’ll try to avoid changing my mind about submissions from now on.

Go for it, I don't keep a close enough eye on prompts any more to even know either way 〜(￣▽￣〜)

[mdzs-kinkmeme]

what if my work is in anonymous collection, are you able to de anon it?

If you are set to Anonymous in a different collection, your username will continue to show as "Anonymous" to your readers even if I uncheck the Anonymous box in the MDZS kink meme back-end. This happens frequently when authors participate in gift exchanges and fill a kink meme prompt with the same work. I set their username to public (at their request), but it remains private until the gift exchange collection reveal. So we have tested this feature several times!

To be clear, even when you are set to Anonymous in another collection (like the general "Anonymous" collection) I can still see your username on the kink meme's back-end. I just can't reveal it to your readers through AO3.

[mdzs-kinkmeme]

Hi! Is it okay to use one of the prompts we've picked up for your Kinkmeme event toward the MDZS Big Bang event? They've already given the okay from their side as long as you are also okay with it.

Oh goodness, sorry anon, I didn't see this! It's definitely okay. Prompts are just to get you writing!

[mdzs-kinkmeme]

On a similar vein, if i like a prompt on pinboard and want to write it, what should I do?

If you like a prompt on the Pinboard and want to claim it, click the blue title of the prompt: it's a link to the prompt on AO3! Then click the "claim" button on AO3 and the prompt will be added to your claims. Claiming the prompt through AO3 will make it easy to find later when you have written a fill and want to link it to the prompt—it will show up when you go through the "New Work" page on AO3.

If you click the Pinboard link and it's broken, then it's possible that prompt was deleted off of AO3 by the prompter for some reason. In that case, you can claim this placeholder prompt instead.

[mdzs-kinkmeme]

What's a pinboard? Sry i don't get it.

Pinboard is a social bookmarking website that allows you to make a public collection of links. You can annotate each link with a description and with tags. It's very similar to how bookmarks work on AO3—probably because they're both based on an earlier social bookmarking site called Del.icio.us.

Even before AO3, fans liked to use social bookmarking sites to collect links to fanfics. When kink memes became a thing, they were easy to add prompts to, but hard to find prompts on—for example, if you only wanted to fill prompts about Jiang Cheng and didn't care about Wangxian or 3zun—because the prompts and fills were just a bunch of comments on a master post, not something that was easy to filter through. To help fillers find the kind of prompts they wanted to fill, industrious fans would painstakingly collect all the prompts from the master post and put annotated links to each of them in a social bookmarking site.

When AO3 was made, they clearly wanted to build that "annotate all the prompts" thing right into the prompt meme system, but they ran out of resources partway through (or something. I don't know the exact story.) Right now, when you add prompts to an AO3 prompt meme, you can stick character tags and ratings and trope tags onto your prompt, but...those tags can't be used to filter through prompts! The only tags that work as prompt filters are the fandom tags!

So unfortunately, if I want to make it easy for authors to find the kind of prompts they like, I have to use a social bookmarking site that links to the prompts and annotates the links.

That's where our Pinboard comes in.

Me and my tag wrangling team came up with our own tagging system and painstakingly tagged all the prompts in the first round of the MDZS AO3 Kink Meme. It took for freaking ever and we all kind of ran out steam after a while, which is why we only got through the 2020 prompts. But some of us have been talking about trying again this spring, and I'm really looking forward to it!

Now that you hopefully understand what our Pinboard is for (filtering through prompts that other people have submitted to the kinkmeme to fiind one that you, an author, want to fill) here is a how-to document to help you find prompts with it.

[mdzs-kinkmeme]

The MDZS kink meme is open for 2024 (& Onward!)

Traffic has slowed down quite a bit over the past year, so I'm making one last round that will be open indefinitely. I'm still reading & loving every fill I get, so keep prompting & filling as much as you can!

While the tag wrangling team and I haven't been working on adding to the pinboard for quite a while, we've been talking about getting into it again, so we may finally have a searchable archive for more than just 2020. Fingers crossed!

Let me know if you have any questions (❁´◡`❁)

[mdzs-kinkmeme]

Hello! When will the 2023 kink meme start?

Sorry for keeping you all in suspense for so long. I have finally done battle with the ADHD weasels that run my brain, and I have defeated them...for now...

Happy Valentine's Day! The 2023 Kink Meme is OPEN!

[mdzs-kinkmeme]

why is it that you have to manually de-anon the fics submitted? it makes me nervous about submitting fills to the kinkmeme because i'm worried about delays / if it'll just end up not de-anoned at all for some reason. (i'm paranoid 😅) wouldn't it be easier to have fills off-anon by default and point people to one of the anonymous collections elsewhere on AO3 if they want to be anonymous?

I've definitely thought about doing it that way, but ultimately decided on having it be anon by default because

(a) that seemed more in the spirit of the original Livejournla-style kink memes, which were overwhelmingly anonymous-only

(b) a lot of people don't know how to use the Anonymous Collection and folks already struggle with the limited guidelines the kinkmeme has to begin with, so I didn't want to make something as important as "privacy of your deepest and darkest kinks" difficult for them.

I do sometimes wish I'd gone the other way, since the vast majority of people do go ahead and de-anon immediately - I think if I did another kink meme in a different fandom, I'd go with default public, but at this point I don't want to confuse people by switching horses mid stream.

If you're paranoid about me not de-anoning quickly (which is a fair thing to be concerned about at this point because as submissions slow down, I'm not checking every other hour anymore) then you can always send me an email ahead of time to make sure I'll be online to see the notification right away when you publish your story!

It's not uncommon for me to de-anon within, like, ten minutes of something being posted; most of the time it's a few hours max because that's the longest I typically manage without looking at my phone. The biggest problem is if you've submitted something as a draft, I will get a regular notification for that draft, and then I have to remember to go back and check to see if it got published for real on my own because I'll never get a second email.

Seriously though, if you have a concern of that sort, reach out to me on a messaging platform or via email ahead of time.

Or...you can even publish the story NOT in the collection to start with, then add it once you've received the first wave of reader reactions!

[mdzs-kinkmeme]

Will there be a kink meme for 2023?

Yes! I will post it either on a random day when I get around to it, or the 23rd of January 2023, whichever comes first.

[mdzs-kinkmeme]

Hi, the closing message (prompt) from mods on the 2020 round is gone. I thought I should let you know. ❤️

Oh dear! One of my volunteers had to put up the original message on my behalf because I used up all my own prompts (on both my personal account AND my kinkmeme account) taking prompts via tumblr. Since it's been a while, I deleted one of my old prompts that had no claims and put a replacement closing message up myself just now :)

For those who aren't familiar - the closing message is what you can submit to if somebody deletes a prompt before you can claim it!