Furry Writers' Guild plan juried fiction award
Progress is being made on the Cóyotl Awards, a juried award for furry fiction to be run by the Furry Writers' Guild, with the first winners announced at Rainfurrest 2012 next September.
While some details remain private to guild members, preliminary rules have been published. The award is currently to be presented in General and Mature sections for the best Short Story, Novella (over 7500 words) and Novel (over 40,000 words).
Each member may submit five nominations to each category for works they are uninvolved with to a five-member council, rating them on plot, character, setting and literary merit; the four works with the highest weighted average will be voted on by guild members.
Update (18 Oct): The restriction on the number of nominations was removed before the ballot closed.
The award was floated as an alternative to the Ursa Majors in June 2010. Extensive debate followed to define 'literary quality' and the recognition or differentiation of mature work.
About the author
GreenReaper (Laurence Parry) — read stories — contact (login required)a developer, editor and Kai Norn from London, United Kingdom, interested in wikis and computers
Small fuzzy creature who likes cheese & carrots. Founder of WikiFur, lead admin of Inkbunny, and Editor-in-Chief of Flayrah.
Comments
This sounds great. There have been complaints since the beginning of the Ursa Major Awards that the selection should have some better quality control than just the greatest popularity among everyone who voted, but nobody could figure out how to appoint a "panel of experts" that Furry fandom would accept. Now we can see how the concept will work out.
Fred Patten
I wouldn't mind having a slightly larger voting committee than five; on the other hand, for the Ursa Majors, the literary categories are some of the most difficult to vote on, because the likelihood that any single voter has read all the nominations is pretty small.
The nominations are made by guild members through the "council". It's like a jury of peers, rather than a jury of elites. The council tallies the nominations and votes and has the ability to exclude works, subject to their own majority vote.
This was not clear in the original story; I have updated it. See the rules for full details.
The council members are self-nominated (randomly picked if more than five arise). They select one of their own as a chair.
Yes, another reason that we made the Ursa Majors a popular vote award was that it was felt that creating a panel of judges would possibly create a serious financial burden on those judges, if they had to buy every nominated book and magazine to read the nominated stories. It was not realized when the award was created that so many nominees would be posted for free on the Internet.
Fred Patten
Ah, a Nebula to the UM's Hugos. Good idea, and I'm glad people seem to have picked up on the idea of a juried award.
Kay Shapero
http://www.kayshapero.net/
So, did I just miss it in the rules, but did they explain the difference between "General" and "Mature" works?
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"Mature" is their euphemism for porn, isn't it?
It's anything that would make it "restricted" (~above PG-13); sex, explicit violence, drugs, etc. From recent discussion:
This is, naturally, another point of contention. Personally I like it better than a general/erotica split, or not including erotic works at all.
Personally, I'd hate to be the one to tell the guy who wrote a realistic depiction of the horrors of vivisection that he lost to porn.
Grin - if it helps this is a pretty common approach - the "Mature Audiences" label as used in a lot of places (including the Recommended List and the Ursa Major awards) means the same thing.
Kay Shapero
http://www.kayshapero.net/
I don't support Furry Writers Guild.
How very insightful...
Mister Twister missed an opportunity.
(In my Flayrah fanfic, I ship Perri Rhoades/Mister Twister. The sexual tension is unbelievable.)
Actually, the Coyotls now have a website and they're starting to take nominations from FWG members. http://coyotlawards.org
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