Yes, it's this time of the year again, so without further ado:
It’s March, and you know what that means. Other than shit weather. That’s right, it’s the Unreality-SF.net Story of the Year poll!
…Yay.
So here’s how it works. Over the next seven days, you can nominate a maximum of three TV tie-in stories from the last 12 months that you quite liked. We’ll count up all the nominations, and the ten stories with the most votes will form a final shortlist. You then have a week to vote for the one story from that shortlist which you want to win. And the one with the most votes is the winner. Obviously.
There are some rules about what’s eligible:
1) Officially-licensed stories that tie-in to a TV drama. We know this seems obvious but in previous years we’ve had nominations for Dan Brown novels and slash fiction. Format-wise, though, anything goes: books, audio plays, comic strips, ARGs, hip-hoperas, whatever.
2) Stories that were published for the first time between March 1st 2010 and February 28th 2011. The reason being that the poll is supposed to mark this website’s birthday, which is in March. (Obviously the poll is also supposed to celebrate excellence in Writing About Television, but birthdays are really fun. *bakes cake, wears sparkly hat*)
3) Individual stories, not collections thereof. So, say you’ve read a really good anthology. You can nominate stories within that anthology, but not the anthology itself. If you vote for the anthology, we have two options: we can either sit down with a calculator and pedantically give each story an equal percentage of your one vote, or we can just ignore your nomination completely and have a sandwich. Guess which of those we’ll actually do.
4) Non-fiction is fine as long as it does tell a story. So a making-of is probably going to be fine, as long as there’s a clear narrative, but an encyclopaedia isn’t.
THAT’S ALL.
(p.s. The nomination form thingy logs your IP. We’re not going to share it with anyone because we’re not bastards but we will keep a note of it while the poll is running to make sure you don’t vote twice. Cos if you do, we’ll just ignore all your nominations. And give you a really hard stare. Then you’ll be sorry. Yes you will, shut up.)