Middle-Earth Fanfiction Awards' Mission and Charter
The Mission:
The mission of the Middle-Earth Fanfiction Awards is to encourage the writing and reading of Tolkien-based fanfiction through feedback and recommendations and to recognize excellence in Tolkien-based fanfiction on the internet.
Charter:
The Middle-Earth Fanfiction Awards (MEFA's) were begun on April 22, 2004 by Gabrielle Lawson, aka Ainaechoiriel. Having had positive experiences in over eight years of participating in the Alt.StarTrek.Creative Awards, Ainaechoiriel sought to bring the same comment-based system to the Tolkien/LOTR fandom.
In order to do this, she borrowed heavily from the Alt.StarTrek.Creative Awards with a few differences. Lacking a built-in pool of stories written by the participants throughout the year, the MEFA's needed nominations to provide that pool. Given the incredible quantity of Tolkien-based fanfiction, a time set apart for reading nominated stories was needed. Thus, Ainaechoiriel broke the entire Awards contest into a four season schedule: Nomination Season, Check Ballot Season, Reading Season, and Voting Season, followed by the announcement of the results.
Whereas the Alt.StarTrek.Creative Awards are facilitated within the alt.startrek.creative newsgroup and website, there was no such cental location for Tolkien-based fanfiction with the necessary tools. Thus, Ainaechoiriel created the MEFAwards Yahoo Group, requiring membership to participate as a nominator/voter/reader. The group exists to discuss the awards, to work out nuances in the working of the contest and for the actual participation in the awards through nominating and voting. The Archives of the group are public. For other aspects of the Awards to be public, Ainaechoiriel created the MEFA website at http://home.earthlink.net/~ainae/mefa. The main purposes of the website that differ from the group are a public location to showcase nominations and provide links to those stories for readers. This will also allow non-member authors to check their nominations for accuracy.
All Awards results, including vote/comments, will be made available to the public via the website in order to encourage readers to read the nominated and winning works of fanfiction and also to encourage the writers of said works to continue writing.
The Awards officially began on May 1, 2004 at midnight US Central by the opening of the 2004 Nomination Season.