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On this page, I've got the history of the 1st annual Kerth Awards in 1998. Hope you enjoy reading about it. Or, if you'd just like to know which stories were nominated last year, you can link on over to Genevieve's site.
In February/March of 1998, the L&C Fanfic List started talking about the possibility of awarding awards to the best fanfic stories. The first step was to come up with categories of stories. With some help from the list, Leanne Shawler and I came up with 28 categories. Nominations were restricted to stories that had been uploaded to the archive prior to the end of 1997. Then Leanne very bravely offered to compile the nominations. That herculean task done, we had a list of nominees, and we were ready for voting to begin.
Various FOLCs helped with the voting process. Some set up webpages (you could find all the nominated stories through Genevieve's site, and Peace set up both a voting form and a list of Kerth Nominees with short bio information on nominated authors) and some others helped Leanne to count the votes.
While votes were being counted, discussion turned to the possibility of doing a fancy awards show on the IRC. I thought that was a very cool idea, and, in a foolhardy burst of confidence <g> I volunteered to coordinate the ceremony. Luckily for me, several FOLCs agreed to help me, most notably Erin Klingler, who helped immensely and ended up being our mistress of ceremonies for the show. That's when I set up this page.
The awards ceremony was held March 28th, with an enthusiastic crowd. I don't have the exact number of attendees, but at one point, over 70 FOLCs were in attendance. And now, the information you need to know... the results can be found here!
We had two channels running - the awards ceremony in one, and chat in another. As promised, I now have a full log of the awards ceremony (edited to remove IRC commands and other non-essential clutter), so you can see the MC's comments, the presenter's descriptions of their categories, the acceptance speeches, and of course, the commercials <g>
And if all you were interested in was the commercials (after all, what's a big splashy award show without fancy commercials?), I have those, too, all by themselves -- they're worth a look.
This all took place on the Internet Relay Chat (IRC). If you don't have IRC software, you might want to try mIRC. mIRC is a very excellent program, and it's widely used so you can find lots of FoLCs to give you handy tips. Remember, you need to connect to an Undernet server; from there, /join #loiscla
I want to say a great big thank you to everyone who volunteered to help out on this thing - vote-counters, presenters, loggers, bouncer, wav jockey, control booth ops, fashion consultant, prize-designer, commercial-writers... and an especially big thanks to Erin, our nearly fearless Mistress of Ceremonies! :-)
And looking back at it, I think my acceptance speeches were fairly incoherent <g> so let me take this opportunity to do them better... Thank you Sarah Wood & Chris Mulder, my two most faithful editors, and thank you to all the FOLCs on CompuServe for their support and cheerleading. Thanks especially to everyone who has ever written to me to say "I liked that one... please write more." Finally, thanks to my husband Kelley, who's got the patience of a saint :-)
And now that you know all about the Kerth Awards, feel free to check out my personal page (with lots of pictures of my son! :-), or go back to the FoLC Obsession Page.
This page was last updated July 18, 1998