SciOly Novel

[knottingpurple]

I've been trying to do NaNoWriMo this year, writing a novel about two girls who do SciOly at rival schools in the same state, and although I haven't been to Nats, and I'm not a builder, and there are a million other aspects of SciOly that I haven't personally experienced, I don't really want to have to fudge all of the details... based on the wiki page about the number of teams per state, if some state decided to not send someone to Nats, then the second place team in the state with the next largest number of teams would get to go to Nats, correct? Would that decision have to be made at the beginning of the year, or could it be made after other states had started having their state competitions? And if so, how would this be announced to the school which would then become able to go to Nats - would it be on soinc? On the state website? Sent in an email to the team? Does this happen often enough that anybody knows?

I like my two protagonists too much I really want them both to go to Nats and be happy but I don't want them to know straight from the beginning that both schools will be able to go because then there wouldn't be so much stress at States, if that explains why I'd be asking something so particular.

I'm sorry this is a really strange thing to ask probably but I can't think of anywhere else to ask it, so thanks in advance! I might also become curious about other technicalities later I don't know we'll see...

[Unome]

I've been trying to do NaNoWriMo this year, writing a novel about two girls who do SciOly at rival schools in the same state, and although I haven't been to Nats, and I'm not a builder, and there are a million other aspects of SciOly that I haven't personally experienced, I don't really want to have to fudge all of the details... based on the wiki page about the number of teams per state, if some state decided to not send someone to Nats, then the second place team in the state with the next largest number of teams would get to go to Nats, correct? Would that decision have to be made at the beginning of the year, or could it be made after other states had started having their state competitions? And if so, how would this be announced to the school which would then become able to go to Nats - would it be on soinc? On the state website? Sent in an email to the team? Does this happen often enough that anybody knows?

I like my two protagonists too much I really want them both to go to Nats and be happy but I don't want them to know straight from the beginning that both schools will be able to go because then there wouldn't be so much stress at States, if that explains why I'd be asking something so particular.

I'm sorry this is a really strange thing to ask probably but I can't think of anywhere else to ask it, so thanks in advance! I might also become curious about other technicalities later I don't know we'll see...

(also definitely talk to Z, he'll probably post here soon)

Correct, if a state gives up its national tournament bid, the state with the next-largest number of teams would get a second bid. This determination is based on that year's registration numbers; it officially occurs sometime in late March/early April, and is posted on soinc.org (you can still see the info info from last year here). It's definitely possible for a state to drop its bid late; in 2011, DC dropped their bid in Div C in very late April/early May and Eastview from Minnesota got to go to nationals.

Luckily for you, there are plenty of people on this site willing to dive into the technicalities

[knottingpurple]

Thank you! I made it happen in the story that they find out on soinc that another school dropped their bid (and then they all Facebook messenger each other and everything is hype etc etc etc) - I haven't actually decided what state the main part of the story is set in, there's a part of me that wants to make the events take place in a specific year and so look up which state which only sent one team to Nats had the highest number of teams in that year but there's another part of me which enjoys the laziness of just writing [state], and [east town] and [west town], and [third team], and like I don't want to accidentally misrepresent the culture of teams in another state if they're different or something. Maybe if I like it enough to revise it I'll do more research then. The only event which absolutely has to be in the story is wind power, but there are several different years during which wind power has been an event, right, and any other events aren't really central enough to the story that swapping them out would change much, so I guess the year is variable. I'm excited today, I finally reached halfway (2 days behind schedule but I started 4 days behind schedule so you know what) but I feel like a good part of that was having had a SciOly meeting at school and having spent so much time afterwards goofing off with my own team, and now I just really want to express that sort of culture.

I'm rambling, I'm sorry. But, again, as I said, thanks! You were really helpful. ^.^

[Unome]

Thank you! I made it happen in the story that they find out on soinc that another school dropped their bid (and then they all Facebook messenger each other and everything is hype etc etc etc) - I haven't actually decided what state the main part of the story is set in, there's a part of me that wants to make the events take place in a specific year and so look up which state which only sent one team to Nats had the highest number of teams in that year but there's another part of me which enjoys the laziness of just writing [state], and [east town] and [west town], and [third team], and like I don't want to accidentally misrepresent the culture of teams in another state if they're different or something. Maybe if I like it enough to revise it I'll do more research then. The only event which absolutely has to be in the story is wind power, but there are several different years during which wind power has been an event, right, and any other events aren't really central enough to the story that swapping them out would change much, so I guess the year is variable. I'm excited today, I finally reached halfway (2 days behind schedule but I started 4 days behind schedule so you know what) but I feel like a good part of that was having had a SciOly meeting at school and having spent so much time afterwards goofing off with my own team, and now I just really want to express that sort of culture.

I'm rambling, I'm sorry. But, again, as I said, thanks! You were really helpful. ^.^

I'd personally suggest that you go for a specific area, as long as it fits with the culture (and there are plenty of people on here that know about culture). Also if you haven't already seen it, you should take a look at the event history chart on the wiki.

[knottingpurple]

I know the culture in my novel would make sense in my own state but I feel like if I do that then the fictional high school teams become direct parallels of real schools (which they're not meant to be! I more or less imagined like two polarized distorted versions of what my school's team could be, and then evolved them from there! but anyway) that gets really awkward. I didn't mean to put stories about real people, the two main characters are 100% from my imagination but I still don't want to set the story in my state. I guess if there were another state with the same culture... I can go look in the forums about that... >.<

[knottingpurple]

So I just wanted to say thank you, Unome, for your advice, and also thank you to the forums and the chat and the wiki for just generally existing, for giving me ideas of what other context and anecdotes to include in the story. I managed to get to 50,000 words yesterday (or apparently officially it was 12:01 AM today, says the official website, but shh) so that counts as winning.

Now I just need to actually name my town, and get the scenes in the right order, and properly incorporate the scores spreadsheet I created, and come up with a title (and add that title onto the pretty wind power-related prospective cover I drew, because my novel somewhat turned into an alternate reality where wind power gets the love it deserves)... And then revise it a lot because it's very imperfect.

But I had a lot of fun writing this and I'm glad I ended up exploring more of scioly.org so yay.