What exactly are the Lois & Clark Fanfic Kerth Awards?
After many years of reading and writing about our favorite Lois and Clark characters, we FoLCs (Fans of Lois and Clark) decided that having an awards ceremony would be a fun and terrific way to honor those Lois and Clark fanfiction writers who have moved and inspired us over the years with their talents.
In February/March of 1998, Leanne Shawler mentioned an idea she’d seen in another fandom — awards for fanfic. There was immediate enthusiasm on the L&C Fanfic List. The first step was to come up with categories of stories.
With some help from the list, Leanne Shawler and Pam Jernigan came up with 28 categories. Nominations were restricted to stories that had been uploaded to the archive prior to the end of 1997. Then Leanne very bravely offered to compile the nominations. That herculean task done, we had a list of nominees, and we were ready for voting to begin.
Various FOLCs helped with the voting process. Some set up webpages (you could find all the nominated stories through Genevieve’s site, and Peace set up both a voting form and a list of Kerth Nominees with short bio information on nominated authors) and some others helped Leanne to count the votes.
While votes were being counted, discussion turned to the possibility of doing a fancy awards show in real time, on IRC. Pam thought that was a very cool idea, and volunteered to coordinate the ceremony. Luckily for her, several FOLCs agreed to help out, most notably Erin Klingler, who helped immensely and ended up being the mistress of ceremonies for the show.
The first ever Kerth awards ceremony was held March 28th, 1998 with an enthusiastic crowd. At one point, over 70 FOLCs were in attendance.
The following year, Leanne bowed out of participating, so Erin took over as coordinator. She and Pam also added Kathy Brown (due to her position at the time of editor-in-chief of the L&C fanfic archive) to form the Kerth committee (K-Com).
We continued to run the awards on an annual basis, with lots and lots of help from lots and lots of FOLCs. After a few years, we also added Annette Ciotola to the K-Com, due to her position as webmistress of Annesplace and her general all-around techie genius. Wendy Richards and Hazel (and later Meredith Knight) formed the Kerth quiz team for lots of fun quizzes on the fanfic list.
In early 2002, Pam realized she was too busy with her real life to continue coordinating the IRC ceremonies, so starting in 2003, she turned that over to Annette. Also in 2003, we added KathyM as an independent vote counter to help Erin. In 2005, Erin and Kathy agreed that they, too, had done enough and were ready to ease out of their positions and let other FOLCs take over the job.
We were fortunate to have several brave volunteers, and so the new Kerth Committee will be Kaethel, Yvonne Connell, Tricia, and Annette, with support from Elena and KathyM. We expect a smooth transition and look forward to many more years of great awards.
written by the Kerth Committee
Erin, Pam, Kathy, Annette, Kaethel, Yvonne and Tricia
Would you like to know more about what happened during previous years of the Kerth Awards? Check out these sites:
Genevieve’s site: A detailed look at all the nominated fanfics, winners, and story descriptions
Pam’s site: An extensive look at everything that goes into the Kerth Awards ceremony
The Fanfic Archive: Has all the information from past years’ nominees, winners.