WOOLF (Spring-Summer 2022)

[Auroni]

I’m pleased to announce WOOLF (Written Officially by Obliging Literature Fans), an open-difficulty (similar to previous CO literature tournaments such as It's Lit and RILKE) guerrilla packet submission literature side event that is intended as a spiritual sequel to the 2014 Gorilla Literature tournament. Like that tournament, this set is intended to celebrate and showcase the differing sensibilities, tastes, and approaches used by some of the game’s best and most enthusiastic literature writers; unlike it, there will be no formal restriction on or approval process for who can submit a packet; if you would like to write, feel free; so long as you submit a complete packet that follows the distribution and meets a minimum quality standard, it will be used. I would particularly love to see packets from current undergraduates and/or people who enjoy writing literature questions, but who don’t quite have five years of experience doing so. You may submit an individual packet or collaborate on a packet with up to one other person.

The set will be ready for in-person or online mirrors in Spring or Summer 2022. Ideally, it will be attached as a side event to a suitable in-person tournament during that time frame, but if no such tournament is found, then I will run online on an open weekend day. This is an open tournament that anyone can play; submitting a packet is purely optional.

All packets should consist of 20 powermarked tossups length-capped at 9 lines in 10 point Times New Roman, and must adhere to the following minimum location and genre-based distributions:

Minimum of:

4/0 American Literature
4/0 British Literature
3/0 European Literature
3/0 Non-Western Literature

Minimum of:

5/0 Novels
3/0 Poetry
2/0 Short Stories and Novellas
2/0 Drama
1/0 Non-Fiction and Criticism
1/0 Literary Culture, Misc, Other

You are free to write the remaining questions in any category that you would like, or across categories, but please do not allocate all these extra questions into the same category (don’t, for instance, submit a packet with 10/0 American Literature or 9/0 Poetry). Additionally, all packet writers must take care to balance their questions across a number of other considerations, including but not limited to: answerline difficulty, time period that the work was written in, diversity of author by gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and type of answer. Because it is improbable and undesirable to set quotas for all of these factors, I am leaving it up to individual authors to determine what an appropriate balance should look like. I will note that although this is a difficult open tournament, and creative approaches/occasional extracanonical sojourns are encouraged, please refrain from writing extremely difficult and/or vanity tossups that you expect only a couple of people can answer at or before the end.

For now, please hold on to your packet as I work out the logistics of the tournament; contact me to express interest or to indicate that your packet has been written. I will likely appoint one person to collect and run a minimum quality/basic requirement check for the packets, since I will be writing and playing the set myself.

Packet list (bolded when complete):

Auroni Gupta
John Lawrence
Mitch McCullar
Matt Bollinger
JinAh Kim & Jordan Brownstein
Rob Carson
Caroline Mao
Stephen Liu
Will Alston & Jason Cheng
Taylor Harvey
Andrew Wang & Kurtis Droge
Chandler West & Jaimie Carlson
Nick Jensen
Shan Kothari & Sam Bailey
Tim Morrison
Jonathen Settle & Chris Borglum
Vincent Du & Henry Goff
Jonathan Magin & Andrew Hanna
Rahul Keyal & Ethan Ashbrook
Elia Cugini

[Auroni]

I am floored by the magnitude of interest that has already been shown for submitting packets to this event. I am going to tentatively cap expressing interest in packets after 20; if we do actually end up with all those submissions, then I'm heavily leaning toward running this as either a day-long event or as two, more conventional side event-sized tournaments on different weekends. I am open to additional suggestions for how to run the best tournament while still allowing as many people as possible to write.

[VSCOelasticity]

I'd be interested in collaborating with someone on a packet if anyone wants to form a duo or larger group.

[Zealots of Stockholm]

If slots fill up, I am also interested in a collaborator, particularly someone who likes poetry/wants to write the poetry questions.

[Ehtna]

If anyone would like to collaborate, I have read some books and non-books and stuff.

[Auroni]

By my count, we have 18 claimed packets now, so I will cap submission offers for the moment. A few people who have claimed a packet have expressed openness to collaboration, so if you would still like to write, contact me and I may be able to pair you up with another writer.

[Auroni]

I've made a poll for aspects of WOOLF logistics -- if you are interested in playing, writing for, or staffing this set, then please take a second to fill it out: https://forms.gle/HaNvr2Z8QLLWetgg9

[Auroni]

This tournament will be run in-person if at all possible in Spring-Summer 2022 (ideally as a side event paired with a tournament at which enough people are in attendance). If there's no such tournament, I will run it online on an open weekend toward the end of that time frame.

[Auroni]

I don't think I will have enough time or energy to personally coordinate this project, but I believe that it is a worthwhile idea and has plenty of people already on board, so I would hate to see it not happen. I am looking for a volunteer to take it over from me.