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Greetings!

I am new to MEFA but have a story nominated here, thanks to Ariel. It is
called *Threshold* and is categorized as *Romance: Hobbits: Multi-Age:
Incomplete*.

I have begun to write reviews for stories, and so have begun to browse
around the site.

Checking out the award categories, I see that *Threshold* is nominated only
under *Genres: Romance: Incomplete*. I did not see it listed under *Races:
Hobbits: Incomplete*, nor under *Times: Multi-age: Incomplete*.

Is this an oversight, or was a decision made to put it in only one of the
three categories?

Thanks so much.

~ Mechtild


Here is *Threshold*'s listing at MEFA, for reference.

In
http://www.mefawards.net/MEFA2006/index.php?page=storiesBrowse&navbar_search=mechtild&cmd_search=Search


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Hi Mechtild,

> Checking out the award categories, I see that *Threshold* is nominated only
> under *Genres: Romance: Incomplete*. I did not see it listed under *Races:
> Hobbits: Incomplete*, nor under *Times: Multi-age: Incomplete*.
>
> Is this an oversight, or was a decision made to put it in only one of the
> three categories?
>
> Thanks so much.
>

This seems to be a really common misunderstanding. I'm sorry for any confusion.

When you gave us information about your story, you identified three
possible main categories and the order in which you would like us to
try them. Specifically you selected

Times: Multi-Age
Genre: Romance
Race: Hobbits

You also ranked these options, telling us the order in which you would
like us to place your story. For your story that was:

Ranking: Genre-Race-Time

So when the other categorizers and I sat down and tried to sort these
stories into categories and subcategories we first tried to put it in
your first-choice main category, which was Romance (because you ranked
Genre first and chose Romance as your genre). If that had not been a
possibility we would have tried to put it in the Hobbits main
category, and only used Multi-Age if nothing else worked.

When you see "Genres: Romance: Incomplete", that is our way of
identifying three important pieces of information.

"Genres" is your story's division. We don't give out awards at this
level, it's just a way of telling the reader "these are main
categories based on being a certain genre" (or about a certain race,
or set in a certain time period).

"Romance" is your main category. Again, we don't hand out awards at
this level. Stories are placed in a main category as I explained
above. The category is used to give the reader more specific
information than the story division - for example that it is grouped
with other drama stories, or other stories about hobbits. More
importantly, it's what determines what *sub*category a story gets
placed into.

"Incomplete" is your subcategory. This is where we hand out awards. We
will tally up the number of points each story gets and use those to
give out first, second, and third prize in each subcategory. There may
also be a number of honourable mentions, depending on the size of that
particular subcategory. We give out enough HMs so that half the
stories in any subcategory receive either a place or an honourable
mention, so a subcategory with eleven stories will receive first,
second, and third place, and three honourable mentions; whereas a
story with seven stories would only receive one honourable mentions.

The sub-categories is where the real work of categorizing stories
comes in. Incompletes, fixed-length ficlets, and poetry each get their
own subcategory by default. Each subcategory must have five stories by
two authors, and it can't have more than fifteen pieces. So if there
were only two incompletes nominated with "Romance" as their first
category choice, we would have to either have to put those stories in
their second or third choice, or else find three stories with Romance
as their second or third choice and move them into Romance. Similarly,
if Romance had a lot of fixed-length ficlet pieces nominated we would
have split them into two FLF subcategories somehow. For example in
"The Great Years" there were I think thirteen FLFs nominated, which
technically could have been one subcategory but is a tad on the large
size. Half of them were set in Gondor, so I created one subcategory of
"Times: The Great Years: Gondor Fixed-length Ficlets" for those
stories, and a second subcategory of "Times: The Great Years: General
Fixed-Length Ficlets" for everything else. We do the same thing for
stories that aren't one of these three specialized forms. All the
stories in any main category that aren't poetry, FLFs, or incompletes
have to be subdivided into groups of 5-15 stories, and we award prizes
to each of those sub-categories.

That is a long way of saying: each piece is only put in one division,
one main category, and one sub-category. We try to put them in the
main category you mark as your first choice but sometimes this isn't
possible, which is why we gather three choices.

Does that make sense? Sorry I couldn't just give you a simple answer. :-)

Marta