LJ Idol Presents:

 These next couple stages are rough to get through, so it occurred to me that I should take you back a bit further. 

Back before there was such a thing as LJ Idol. 

I've told this story quite a few times over the years, but i think it's good for the context. 

When Survivor Borneo was airing (known just as "Survivor" back in those days - the first US season) there was a lot of talk from the Screen Writers Guild about how reality shows were cheap to make, as opposed to scripted shows, and how they were going to be used by the studios as a weapon against writers. 

I certainly wasn't a member of the Screen Writers Guild by any means, but as someone who had spent his teen years and in into his early 20s pouring through the pages of magazines like "Writer's Digest",  I've always felt a great loyalty to the idea of writers supporting each other. 

Of course, my end of the summer the show was so big that I couldn't avoid hearing about it, and getting curious, and the rest was history.  There was a certain guilty feeling about how 

Back in my high school days, I ended up getting suspended for putting out an "underground publication", it was part newspaper-like columns (which A LOT more swearing) and a literary magazine of poetry and short stories.  I was on the staff of the official literary magazine and felt that the editor's attitude to the writers at the school were that they were beneath her. I don't recall the exact quote now, but there was this image I had of her looking at them like they were all just a field of grass that she was walking on without ever truly seeing. Which is why I called MY publication "Speaking with the Grass"... which, in retrospect, sounds like it's a drug reference. :D 

I didn't really think much of it at the time, but despite being a writer myself I wasn't publishing any of my own work. Which, again, in retrospect, makes sense with my story arc, but at the time I didn't really think about.  Putting together the zine became my creative expression, with the benefit of having the interior moving parts that it showcased other people's creative expressions inside of it. 

I kept "SWG" going for awhile, even after the suspension (I just stopped distributing it on campus - and even then I ended up getting in trouble when a copy made it there anyway)... and for awhile didn't really do much, but I found that I needed something like that in my life... and into my time at St Petersburg College, "Mr Dooley's" was born.  (I'd seen that name on a couple local businesses,  so every issue had a slight name change "Mr Dooley's (fill in the rest here sort of thing")  It was basically the same publication, except I had more experience and was doing it better. 

That publication would come and go over the years. At one point, when I was broke but it was the early days of my personal internet access (1995 or 96) I restarted the publication as an e-zine. It was the same sort of thing, but I sent it out as an email.  Not an attachment mind you, an actual email!  :O It was LONG.  That went on for a few years into the marriage to my first wife until I kind of dropped everything and concentrated on writing fanfic. 

By a few years into that, I ended up being in charge of a website that "published" fanfic as "Editor in Chief", basically coordinating a shared comic book based universe with all of the writers, and it kept expanding from there. I started writing less and less and coordinating more and more, shaping my creativity into something other people could use as well, and setting the stage for the spotlight to be on them. 

It was in the early 2000s when I had an idea of combining this love of writing (and writers) with my love of reality shows - it was called "Fanfic Survivor. (Because it featured fanfic writers and it was very loosely based on Survivor). It was very much a rough draft.  I pulled together the things I knew at the time, and crafted what I could craft, but my own skill set wasn't to the point that I could merge those two things in a way that made sense.  People had fun. But it was a "one and done" idea. 

It wasn't until 2006 that I would try to do something like that again. I'd been putting together these weird little "who would win in a fight" matches between people on my FL, which seemed to amuse them and I wanted to do something a little bigger... so I was trying to think of what to do next... so I threw out a bunch of ideas, really just potential names for things. One of them was "LJ Idol" - American Idol was a huge show, and I was on Livejournal... the name was more of a joke than anything.  No concept. Just one idea in a mix of other ideas. 

But then I started thinking about it... and the concept slowly came together, and after a few days, I knew how this could work. Not just "work" but this could actually BE A THING. I started researching and realizing that this didn't exist anywhere. That these ideas that had been percolating in my head since high school, or longer, all kind of fit into this system.  So I mapped out the general game mechanics (how the polls would work, selected the topics, etc) and started talking to people about it. I was able to get 9 of my friends to sign up for that first season. We hit snags that I hadn't expected, and I learned from them. I took the constructive feedback, including my friend Hillary saying that it needed it's own LJ community, instead of just being on my personal LJ, and I started work on a second season... again, I mapped the entire thing out... and again, there were snags with the rules and I learned and adapted them until I got to a place where I knew how to make Season 3 work. (which is the one that exploded to 72 contestants and kept growing from there until we reached 300 at the last gasps of an active LJ).

I think it's important to have this context because - per the conversation in Part 2 of the reunion - I think there is a misunderstanding of what Idol is... because for a lot of folx, they come here to be inspired to write and for the friendships.... insert a ton of different combinations of reasons, and those are all great and valid. 

For ME, this is my creative endeavor. While I was running the last season of Idol, I was planning out future seasons.  It may look like it's running on its own, but the stages are planned out as are the topics. One change from early Idol was that I would say "This topic is happening on Week 5" and regardless of what else was happening, that topic would happen there. Now I give myself a little more leeway to feel out the room and move it back a couple weeks/switch it with something else that feels more of the moment or (very rarely) cut it completely.... there's a game twist that has been on early drafts of a season since Season 6... but every time I've gotten close I start getting worried and end up pulling it.  At some point, it will show up.  Maybe.  :) 

The ideas at the foundation of Idol are deeply personal. As I've said elsewhere, the topics (other than this event, which were all Survivor related) are all things that have come up in my life. Pretty much every aspect of this game is a little piece of me that I am putting out into the world. When people sign up and compete in Idol, it feels like they are doing that inside of my head, adding their own talent and imagination to the mix as they go... when it's working, it's a wonderful feeling.  When it's not... well, anyone who has ever had criticism about something they have written can tell you that it can feel deeply personal.  Constructive criticism, when handled correctly, can be a great thing... it helps you get better. (A great example of that from this season was my conversation with Jen. She was surprised at how eliminations were handled, and it inspired me to add a little something personal to the mix with my "goodbye emails".  (I said "upset" before, but she was more just concerned about how that might come off to people. It was a great note and I took it, thought about it, and used that data base in my head to make a valuable addition to the mix.) 

Or even where this event came from in the first place. Toward the end of last regular season, gunwithoutmusic and I were talking about Survivor and he was asking if I'd ever run a season (there was more to it... but I think that's the basics.) It wasn't a new thought. I'd had it before. Other people had been asking me about it over the years... but there was something about that conversation where things just ended up clicking. 

Again, I sat down and mapped out the mechanics of how this would work. How the Survivor rules could be fit. How idols would work. The placement of each topic within the season.  The more I planned, the more I liked the idea and it wasn't long before this idea "jumped the line" over the other concepts I'd been working on. 

As other people have pointed out, it takes a lot of work to make it look easy.  :) 

I'm pointing this out because I don't know how many people think about it in this context - it's kind of like how if someone emailed you about an entry and said "that part didn't work for me and here's a suggestion" and posting "that entry really sucked"... both of them might be difficult to hear. Honestly, there is a good chance you purposefully made the decisions on what to put into your entry and were really proud of it, and having someone show up and criticize it might hurt. But one might contain information you can use, even if they might not fully understand what it is you were doing with the piece... depending on the context of the rest of the conversation. The other doesn't.  

(and no, I'm not fishing for compliments. Even though it may sound like it... I've just been thinking about how people tend to view Idol as "this thing that exists" and not an ongoing project still being written and shaped)

This is all leading to the 3rd tribal council, and the decision made there.  It was a rule put in place before any contestants ever showed up, and had me staring down the barrel of a season about to go off the rails. 

Which, oddly enough, is where Borneo was at the same point in the game.  The first couple boots had been the oldest contestants, and the tribe was leaning toward voting out Rudy... depending on which version of the story you believe, either production stepped in and told them to vote for someone else (Stacy Stillman's testimony) or that the tribe decided to go in a different direction (official story)... had Rudy gone out at that point, the game would have been entirely different. 

With Survivor: LJ Idol, we'd gone through a rough first drop and then a difficult elimination with a divided tribe that seemed to be trying to find its footing... and then this week happened and things looked bleak for how this season was going to go... 

Which leads us into the actual events of the week, and a wild tribal council that ended with two people leaving us.  Looking back over the posts from that week, that is when my cat died, which caused the first delay of the season. I have to wonder what would have happened if there WASN'T that extra time for events to unfold. 

Looking at my comments from the the Challenge Mat, as well as remembering specific conversations, I knew there was a lot of tension going into this challenge on the Luzon side. Things felt like they were about to boil over... and they did. 

impoetry had come into the game all fired up - he was going to the be the Next "Coach" figure, and I was still playing on that... hoping that he would take the bait and run with it on the mat. But real life was already starting to take him away from the game and he was playing distracted. 

It felt like the game was on a knives edge at this point and it could just as easily implode, and all of that effort would have been worthless... and into that breach, Asaga ended up winning immunity, putting Luzon back on the hot seat. 

I wasn't entirely sure what was going to happen... would the "factions" go after each other? Would every just agree to go after the "weak links" (people who didn't have as many connections and didn't "do as well" in the poll... mind you, that were were only a couple votes in that gap between "doing well" and "not doing well" when it came to Luzon. It was a razor-thin margin at times. 

As far as I could tell, if those factions ended up sticking together, then either bittyjane or flipflop_diva was on their way out. 

I was feeling terribly about that. I thought bittyjane was in a rough spot from the start and flipflop_diva had ended up on a tribe without her "natural allies" (fellow Survivor fans)  I kept wondering if one of them would find the idol to play it and turn the tribal council upside down... or maybe someone else... anything could really happen!!

This was the first tribal council where I used the third question to just ask general questions to the group, which I think worked better. 

I also thought there was a chance that alycewilson was also in trouble. She'd had some votes the first Luzon tribal council. To me, as a Survivor fan, this was the vote that made the most sense to me.  (Sorry Alyce!) She is far too good, and likable.... and is the kind of person who would fight it out to the end. If you have her on your radar, my head was saying this is when you need to take that shot, before she vanishes back under the waves and you don't see her coming until too late. 

The vote ended up in the first tie, between bittyjane and uselesstinrelic, with flipflop_diva and alycewilson both getting a single vote.

Which meant we went into our first revote. The outsider vs the one outside what was seen by some as  "the power structure" of the tribe. (the outcast) 

I was preparing myself to "go to rocks", which would have resulted in a random person being voted out of the tribe. I honestly thought that it might come down to that. 

Then the vote started... and I was on the edge of my seat as the votes started coming in and it was looking like another tie... 

Until uselesstinrelic let me know that they were quitting the game. 

I was upset with this for various reasons, ranging from being a fan of their work and knowing how close we were to a tribe swap... to the fact that the decision came when the vote had already started, meaning that I couldn't stop it and just declare it a "sacrifice"... this wasn't regular Idol.  There were orders of operation at play. Once the host tells people it's time to vote, all other actions stop, and do not resume again until after the vote is read and a torch is snuffed. 

I felt like I was watching a train wreck that I couldn't do anything about... I kept visiting and revisiting to see if there was ANYTHING that could be done... I had not built that leeway into my structure though.  So my only hope was that the last votes being cast would come out for uselesstinrelic... after all, I had heard that they had asked people to vote for them... 

It still sucked. But not as much as the alternative.  The last two votes came in for bittyjane.  The tribe had decided to keep uselesstinrelic. Would they change their mind and stay... that was in the air for maybe about a half minute before I found out, nope, they were still quitting. 

So we ended up with a double elimination. 

It was absolutely the correct call. I stood by it then. I stand by it now. But it's also one that I regret a great deal. On a personal level, if there was anything that I could have done to keep bittyjane in the game, I would have done it.  (or even just talked uselesstinrelic out their decision....)  But when I put this thing out into the world, I accept the restrictions I put on myself to not interfere... it's a bit like performance art,  if I act upon it, I change what it is in that moment... 
In that moment, I thought there was good chance that bittyjane would be fighting her way back into the competition (which almost happened).., and thought that further played into the idea that an Asaga would get to the end, I didn't see her coming back and helping anyone who helped vote her out.  :)  

Luzon had walked into the tribal council already down in numbers, they came out having lost two more.... I wasn't sure they were going to recover...  But there WAS a hope, if maybe this smaller group actually proved to be an advantage in the challenge.... 

(more conversation in the comments)