Subject: My (rather drastic) thought...
Author:
Posted on: 2014-02-21 15:47:00 UTC
... is to scrap profiles altogether.
Well, maybe not - but to shift focus. I'm pondering a 'random prompt generator' which will do what I've just done for LDP - give you a situation to put your agents in. Then a Permission Request would consist (perhaps solely) of two stories (200-500 words) based on two separate, random prompts.
The idea came about when we had a rash of people being told off for giving lists of appearance and attributes, but no personality. Since it is sharding hard to describe a personality in a bio - at least for me - I figured a constrained version of the writing sample could work pretty well.
It would also do away with 'here's my writing sample, it's a haiku I wrote twenty years ago - hope that's okay!!'. And it would confirm that people actually want to, you know, write stories with these characters.
That said, it would rather reduce the backstory aspect of the request, or more importantly, the 'random abilities and attributes' part. Two very nice stories might just not mention the fact that the agent in question likes to paint herself in Sue blood and dance on their corpses, and that her hand turns into a lightsaber. So it may be that we ask for the following:
-Two stories from random prompts, showcasing your agents.
-Brief bios telling us their backstories, appearances, and anything we really should know.
-The badfic.
There's a certain amount of Assume Good Faith involved - but we should be anyway. And if someone decides not to tell us about the fact that their agent occasionally explodes nuclear weapons in the cafeteria, we can always concrit it out of existence when the mission comes out.
So, since I've apparently gone into this when I didn't mean to... thoughts?
hS