#my discord server wrote 92 FUCKING ACE ATTORNEY FICS IN 2022 ALONE

[vonpharma]

“handwaving genuine, good-hearted concrit, to refusing to even engage in the conversation at all, to constant changes that make the event less fun for a huge chunk of us”

Do you mind if I ask more about this? I’ve also participated in sicktember (casually) and I haven’t really noticed anything that fit this, so I just wanted to ask more about your experiences if you were comfortable elaborating. I’m mostly curious what changes were made that made the event less fun (other than delay in prompts released I heard about that)

yeah sure! right off the bat i wanna say that this is not something i was like. PISSED OFF or intending to start any drama about, just some stuff that made the event less enjoyable for me.

i also wanna say that you haven't noticed it because sicktember is very very careful to not publish anything that makes them look bad. they do not engage with any of their replies or asks unless they can spin it in a very sanitized, pr-friendly manner. try creeping through the tags and replies on some of their posts, and while a lot of shit is deleted or lost, you can still see traces of it, some of which i will link to here.

the prompts becoming more delayed. i wasn't here in 2021 (when they dropped in early march), but in 2022 they dropped in mid may. that was awesome because it gave us all lots of time to prep--my favourite thing about sicktember is how accessible of a prompt event it is! the prompts don't all drop like a week before the event starts, you have all summer to write so if you have a full time job or responsibilities you can still participate. this year they made it very clear the prompts were ready to go in may but didn't drop them until mid-june.

when people started sending asks about this, they responded thusly. they maintain this weird kinda... pr-friendly, stepford smiley vibe whenever anyone tries to open a dialogue with them? and it just comes across as so dismissive of anyone trying to make genuine points.

here they say that "many things go into planning prompts" but don't elaborate on that at all. for context, the night before this ask, they had made it clear that the prompts were all ready to go. the hand-waving comes in the form of all the "suggestions" they offer here--"well, you don't have to do every prompt!" (but i want to. it's fun. it feels good. and that's what i've done in the past) "you can write after september!" (i did that last year. it was kind of miserable. i like posting with everyone, it feels like a big celebration!) "we give you like 100 days!" (that's cool. but you could give us more at no detriment to yourself. a lot of us didn't make the deadline last year.)

check the notes on this post and you'll see several disappointed contributors/fans who are trying to open a dialogue with the event runners, all of whom were ignored. several people have reached out to me saying that their asks about this were ignored.

2. last year, they said they would only be accepting fills on the sicktember blog through submissions, and only posting 10 random ones a day. in the past, sicktember has reblogged every single fill directly from the writers.

here's why this is shitty:

when you submit something to a blog, the blog owner then becomes the one who effectively "owns" its engagement. that means any notes, reblogs, comments, follows, etc. all go to sicktember. they do not go to the person who MADE THE STORY. if you, the author, want to see what people are saying about your work, you have to pull up the sicktember window and obsessively check it. if you want to respond to any comments, you give sicktember more notes.

this is just more work, especially if you still want those notes. you would then have to make TWO posts, one on your personal blog and one on sicktember's. and people are probably disinclined to reblog a story twice. it is not exposure or engagement to do this, it actively robs authors of engagement.

sicktember might not even post your fill. they pick ten random ones a day. this is because...

they literally admitted that they lose followers when they reblog every fill. they said aloud that it is all about engagement for them. maintaining followers means more to them than highlighting the contributions of all the people who are making their event what it is. they are quite literally trying to maximize followers and stealing engagement from their contributors. it's kind of fucking insidious.

the only valid point here is the thing about reducing mod workload. still, they could've just... opened apps for another mod? inquired for some extra help? lord knows i would've jumped at the opportunity to curate! i'm sure others would've too.

contrast this to whumptober, who religiously reblog every single fill despite being a much longer running event than sicktember.

this is why i started @sicktemberfeed. with permission, but the mods were even weird about THAT... i asked if it would be ok to make, and they said "well, it's not like we could stop you." weird fucking answer. it's fine to say no.

3. i didn't speak out about point 2, but did speak out a little bit on this blog about point 1. @yes-i-am-happyaspie's husband (@spaceninjas42) dug through my blog, somehow found my untagged critique (it was not vitriolic or cruel, just a plea for an open discussion) and started getting on my case for talking about it on my personal blog. there was a second, much more vitriolic reply that he left but i was a dingus and blocked him as soon as i saw it, which means it's now marked deleted and i have no way of getting it back or proving it. that's kind of a "just trust me bro" situation.

4. the prompts this year were not very good. that is a purely subjective opinion i have, but a lot of us agree that they really stray from the concept of sickfic. we have a lot of heavier whump events floating around and the appeal of sicktember is that it is for fluffier, more low stakes stuff. seeing "cardiac arrest" and "anaphylaxis" and "medieval treatment" on there had me and a lot of others scratching our heads. their response to this is always "just sub it out!" but when we start running out of alt prompts because so many of the main ones are not what the audience is vibing with... there is room for critique there. there is room for a discussion.

i can't stress enough that the problem isn't necessarily these changes--they are not dealbreakers! the problem was sicktember's attitude. every single time anyone in the community tried to say 'hey, i think this idea could use work/tweaking' the response was basically just, again, the happy-go-lucky stepford smiler pr voice "we'd like to remind you that blah blah blah! happy writing, authors!" and absolute refusal to talk to their community at all. as i've said many times, this is not a dichotomy--where one side is "we fold to any criticism! our fans control us!" and the other side is "you're not entitled to anything! we run this event for free despite our busy lives!" like you can very much find a happy medium there but they just. do not.

none of that is a deal breaker, genuinely. i was still planning on participating up until the very end, and i obviously am now.

what was a deal breaker was them posting harry potter shit.