Hello! That’s a very good question! I apologize for not including that in the FAQ! Also, thank you for sending this message! I’m not the best vision-wise, and I noticed now that I misspelled it.

A Pinch Hitter refers to someone that fills in at the last minute. If a contributor is unable to participate in the zine and needs to leave early in the creative deadline, then a Pinch Hitter will be asked to take their place to create something. If you’re wishing to apply as a Pinch hitter, be it as a writer or an artist, you will possibly be asked to fill in for someone else if something happens to them. It’s a term that’s borrowed from Baseball actually! Leon would be proud.

Hello! Excellent question! Currently we are a bit hesitant on someone being both a Moderator and a Contributor to the zine, purely due to the possibility of Mod obligations making it difficult to complete a piece within the content time frame. We hope to not spread Mods or Contributors thin, so as of now we are leaning towards Mods not being Contributors.

Hello! No worries, I am happy to un-confuse you (I hope).

You can read previous years on AO3: 2021, 2022. There was no 2023.

Which, this is fair. I should have a post somewhere with archive-y information, and that's my bad. I'll make a note to do some housekeeping in the coming weeks.

As for what kind of prompts to expect? That's entirely on the Codywan community as a whole. I don't really put a limit on what types of AU prompts are allowed to be submitted so long as an AU can be created from it. Canon, Modern, Magical, Fantasy, what have you. If you can dream it, submit it!

If you want to see every single (initial) submitted prompt (cleaned up) from 2022, you can see them on this Google Sheet. There's 246 word prompts (give or take, I was bad at sorting out some of the specific scenarios), 15 specific scenarios, 33 images, and 28 quotes. From there it was narrowed down to our final prompts.

The format is going to change a little for this year in terms of how many final prompts there will be and what prompt formats I'm going to accept, but those announcements will be made officially down the road when the event is live.

The final setup is going to be 10 word prompts (so your standard AU prompts), 5 scenarios, 5 images, and 5 quotes. There will be 5 alternative word prompts and 3 alternative scenarios.

Hello! The way the prompts were submitted were:

Teacher AU Professor AU Academia AU

And we just smooshed them together since they seemed to be similarly grouped. There weren't any references to students in the prompts.