ANNOUNCEMENT BOOK | Pokémon Watty Awards

11/27/15- Important Update.

Hello everyone, Scarlet_Regnar here

First, I would like to apologize for not being online for the past few days (weeks) despite the uncertainty with the Special Awards; I had to deal with some personal issues that came up unexpectedly and I literally had no time to do anything with the contest.

There's been a lot of discussion on the subject of my getting rid of the Special Awards, so please allow me to explain my reasoning:

I want this contest to expand!

Not only on Wattpad itself, but to other writing and fandom-related websites. I want the Pokemon Watty Awards to be a lighthouse that shines its light through the millions of bad fanfiction/real person fiction and highlight the diamonds in the rough. Thus, as I think about growth, I take into consideration which options will allow the contest to grow but not tax the people running the contest. This was one of the things I struggled with this year because we have over 100 fics eligible for awards to count, so I felt like I couldn't balance life and this well. I plan to hire at least one moderator, to help assist me in this process, in January, so stay tuned.

Next year will bring new changes: I plan to eventually expand the Pokemon Watty Awards to DeviantART and Fanfiction.net. This influx of new people means that we need some sort of control mechanism to keep like 300 fics being entered. Thus, next year, as a sort of test case, we will be having a small hurdle of sorts for fics to climb over: a basic threshold for grammar, spelling, punctuation, and formatting. Basically, I want to make sure that people take this contest seriously and don't give us fics that aren't readable / are a pain to read visually. If you really want to enter, you'll put some TLC (and I don't mean the TV channel) into your fic. This doesn't mean that I will deny you because of a typo, but I'm serious about cranking up the basic writing quality of the content we accept. Fanfiction writing already gets a bad rap from people saying it's not "real literature," so I want to stop that. However, we will allow re-entry of fics denied once the problems we note are fixed. We're not grading on the narrative itself, just the mechanics of writing.

Anyways, back to the topic at hand...

For the time being, the Community Testimonials will remain as the fan contribution portion of the awards. If you don't like this, too bad for now. HOWEVER, I will consider switching back/modifying/adding something new instead of the Community Testimonials for the 2016 Awards next year.

That being said, I'm extending the deadline to enter testimonials to the 30th. We do (I believe) have all the judge's sentiments in on the Category Awards, so I fully plan to publish the results on Dec 1st at around 8am-ish (heavy on the "ish").

Thank you all for your support, and I promise to give this matter a thorough thinking through once college stuff and schoolwork and everything is calmer for me.

-Scarlet_Regnar