I like the idea with the questionnaire and would like to participate, always provided nothing unexpected happens. 

One point though: last time I found it a bit sad that even people who participated in the exchange often did not comment on fics. I have no idea at the moment how to improve this but I would love to have more reactions than last time, not just for myself but for all of us who put a lot of time and effort and love into writing the stories. And thank you for starting this again. 

Thanks for thinking of me. :-) Like last year, I will be the only unsurprised participant.

As for the length, last year we agreed on a minimum of words. Unfortunately that ruled out all kinds of poems. So I would like to suggest that we try and go without a limit this year.

How does everybody feel about that?

Awww, Schmiezi, I loved the fic exchange last year. For new participants: I'm definitely not a professional writer and had never tried to write fanfic. My hands were shaking when I sent it to Schmiezi. My heart beat the day it was published. And everybody is just so nice and supportive and friendly in commenting.
Till when do we have to decide, Schmiezi? Have to prepare for an exam and must think it over....

Not horror, no...
Just a bit... insecure maybe.
Yitzock, maybe you want to check last years fics. They are to be found in the fan fic section.
And may I mention that I rather enjoy late summer and golden autumn than having the old ginger bread, domino cubes and chocolaty santas.... Ugh. 

So right now it is in alphabetical order:
Mrshouse (maybe)
Schmiezi
SusiGo
Yitzock

Mrshouse, I haven't thought about a dead line yet. I would love to send the assignments in mid-October, so I guess you should be sure somewhen then. It would be great if you would take part again, btw.

Yes, you should.

:-)

I look forward to reading everyone's creations. 

*waving*  Hi Silver!  Welcome back.

I look forward to participating in this as a spectator

Found it!

For anyone who's new: you can't just copy paste your word file (or pages or whatever you're using) onto the forum, it needs to be converted to bbcode, which is a form of shortened html. Otherwise, your formatting goes to the dogs; you'll have no line breaks, no bold and italics etcetera. Basically, it'll be unreadable. So last year, we had these converters. 

This is the technical thread with a few options: http://sherlock.boardhost.com/viewtopic.php?id=5799

This is the two step method, I used eventually, thanks to Susi: 

What you do is, after you've finished writing your story (or while you're writing it) you make sure that you write all your bold, italics and underlined text with the html commands. Those commands can be found here.
http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_formatting.asp

Then you can convert to html here: 
http://document.online-convert.com/convert-to-html

You save the html file and now you can convert it to bbcode with this converter: 
http://www.seabreezecomputers.com/html2bbcode/
Note: do NOT use the source code to paste into the converter, you need the normal text from the html file. 

The bbcode cannot be saved, it's the html that you need to send to Schmiezi, however, you need to convert to bbcode in order to check whether it works on the forum. This can be done as follows: 

Start a new topic, create a title, and check your text with the preview function so no one can see what you're doing. 

When everything looks as it should, you can send your html file to Schmiezi so she can copy paste it into the converter without having to do any editing herself.