In the beginning was Eru, the One, that in Arda is called Iluvatar-

No, wait, wrong story.

When Jay and Acacia first wrote the PPC, I don't think they expected anyone else to want to write it - but people did! So they made some vague rules about how to do so. The idea of asking for permission came, I suspect, from Miss Cam and OFUM; there was a lot of crossover between the OFUM newsgroup and the early PPC community. When the PPC was pulled from FF.net, Miss Cam hosted their missions, and that site is where the Permission rules come from.

If you want to write your own spinoff, there are a very few rules we'd prefer you to follow. (Not compulsory, of course.)

Okay. Things you should and should not do when writing spinoffs. This is, generally, only "should".

1. Email Miss Cam or ask at the PPC Board for permission before posting. If you don't do this, at the very least tell us you've written one and send the link, so it can be linked in the Archive. Also if you don't get it beta'd, use a spellcheck.
2. If you're introducing a new Department, keep to the naming traditions. Department of Mary Sues, Department of Bad Slash, Department of Personnel, Department of Intelligence.. are you seeing a pattern? Good. Stick to it.
3. We've written some fun gadgets. Use them. This is, obviously, only a suggestion.
4. Another stylistic suggestion: Inside jokes are fun. Many jokes about Discworld, a few movies, and various random things we've seen online are made in the original PPC, the towel stuff in Clan of the Cactus made me giggle, it's fun.
5. Say, in your Author's Note, what fic you're entering. New spinoff writers need to know what has and hasn't been done. MSTers may be looking for material. Morbidly curious people like me may actually want to read the fics.
6. Pay attention to the Backstory. Try not to contradict.

Yeah, it's pretty simple, and the 'permission' can even be given retroactively!

As time passed, Jay and Acacia left. They appointed Miss Cam (already in place, you can see), GreyLadyBast, and Thalia Weaver as their official Permission Givers; I think that's where the title comes from. At this point the process was still pretty loose: I've recently described how I got permission to write DOGA.

But time kept on, well, passing. Someone (Bast?) told Leto Haven he could give out Permission as well, which was fine, but then Thalia left amidst drama, Cam stopped frequenting the Board, and Bast went off in a huff. Over that span of time, various other people were told they could hand out Permission - BeautyID, Bjam, NenyaQuende, Tough Cookie, Rohirric Monkey, and our very own still-around-somewhere PG, Araeph. When several of them left, they appointed a few more - TZA, Doc Filth.

But Permission was changing, as it got further and further from Jay and Acacia's authority. It was somewhere in that period that they started asking for a sample of your writing and a description of your agents; nothing particularly defined, but it was there. They also made a firm requirement that you ask on the Board, rather than by email; prior to that, email was quite common! It's how Kaitlyn got her Permission (from Thalia Weaver, I think).

In 2006 (yes, all of four years after the PPC began), we altered how we appointed PGs - we switched it over to elections. I was brought in on the very first election (and yes, I did protest and say I didn't want the job. They didn't listen), along with Techno-Dann. We've had another... five, I think, elections since, plus one extra-normal appointment (JulyFlame designated Cassie as her successor when she left; that's what she meant about her PG status being a bit vague).

How Permission is actually obtained has changed too, generally under two opposing influences. Neshomeh and Araeph have been a driving force in making things more strict - looking hard at SPG, requiring decent characters and a clear grasp of writing humour and the PPC. On the flip side, I've been trying to make the process easier - people were having to ask repeatedly because their writing sample wasn't humour, for instance, so I've worked us through several iterations of 'specific PPC writing sample'. The Random Prompts are the current version of that - people were previously mostly writing their agents' arrivals, and those all tend to come out the same.

For a long time we also had a hard limit of 'be here a month before you asked', but (in a rare moment of agreement) we did away with that on the basis that people were reading it as 'on the 32nd day you're on the Board, you MUST ask for Permission, and you WILL receive it'. Yeah.

So what's the future of Permission? Personally, and I know Nesh disagrees, I want to do away with agent profiles. I want a Permission Request to consist of nothing more than a piece of writing with your agents in it; if I can't tell who they are from that, you need to rewrite it anyway. Actually, my ideal scenario would be for Permission to become PerMission - you write your first mission, and a PG says whether you need to go back and rework it. But that would be horrible for the people involved, so let's not do that. ;) Other ideas have included a sort of mirror of the Sib Houses - a PG with a few concerns, but not a 'total failure' scenario, can ask for a longer-term PPCer to take you under their writing wing until you've found your feet, granting you 'Permission under so-and-so' until they say you're good enough.

And that, at least, is how I remember it. Araeph wrote a post describing the early events slightly different; I know for a fact that she'd wrong about Leto, because the Board Archives include him giving out Permission before even Thalia had left! But she may be right about the rest.

[Vanishes in a cloud of pixels]

hS

So I alert you with Harry Potter, Des (if I may use the nickname) is summoned via tea, and Huinesoron is flagged down with LotR and it's fellow bookses. Fascinating.