coaltide | This is Yuletide, everybody make a scene

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2020

This is Yuletide, everybody make a scene

I am the sock with the tear-away face

Low-effort with your gift and gone without a trace

I am the "who" when you call, "Who does an exchange without acknowledging their gift?"
I am the wanker blowing through your fics comments
I am the coalie dragging your letter at night
Filling your exchange to the brim with fright!

This is Coaltide!

Nominations: Tuesday 22 September to Thursday 1 October

Sign-ups: Friday 16 October to Monday 26 October

Assignments out: between 26 & 28 October

Default deadline: Friday 11 December

Assignment Deadline: Friday 18 December

Yuletide Discord for Hippos. Google Group for PHs. F_F wiki for history.

NYR Info | 2020 NYR Collection |

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cat herding skills

my cat walks on a leash

Totally agree, Coalie. Especially about the no doubt inevitable COVID-19 fic.

90 percent of modding is

1 - Determine X
2 - Post about X in no less than three different places
3 - Post X reminder
4 - Some participant, who MAYBE has the excuse of being a noob, right as X becomes relevant: "Wait, X? I thought C!"

Then hoping you built in enough buffer space at 1 to deal with 4.

AYRT. When I said "dickheads", I admit I was including "idiots" in there as well.

re: the first one, the person who trolled ff_d would have absolutely been in the clear if they didn't post a snippet of the fic here before the collection opened and admit they were trolling her.

So if anyone's thinking of socking up to troll the socktopus, just shut up about it until the collection opens.

I did on my sock, the last year I socked up. I had offered a number of characters from a fandom with a large cast that mostly breaks down into groups. I got someone requesting friendship fic set during a period that canon refers to but doesn't address, about three different characters who never interact in canon, have no reason to interact even during the requested time period, and have nothing in common; the wording of the request made it clear this person had extensive headcanons about these characters, possibly linked to RP. It was just baffling, and nothing about the request sparked any kind of ideas for how these characters could become friends, or why.

Yuletide is for shipfic only >:) No gen or & relationships.

The recipient had prompts (not great ones, but prompts) for their other fandoms. The one I'd offered was the third one, and went "I'm not really sure what I want here. I remember liking these two characters, though." (Recip's comment on the eventual fic made clear that this fandom had been added out of "I remember this canon with vague fondness" rather than any great enthusiasm.) No letter, no general likes or even DNWs, no fandom presence, nada.

The two characters requested were among the most popular in the fandom, which was small but extant and had quite a backlog of fic about these two, leaving me with very little untrodden ground. Looking for so much as a crumb of guidance, I prodded the mods for more questions, and recip nixed writing ship fic about them, which would at least have given me something to work with. I sweated and struggled and resented the entire time I was writing their boring gen.

There was also the time I matched to someone with a great prompt for my OTP, similar feelings to mine on the ship itself and the most recent installment of canon, and a history of reading and writing the ship in exchanges... and of kudosing and commenting on every fic for this ship in any given exchange except mine. It could have been nothing, pure coincidence, but I got neurotic about it and ended up defaulting.

They only wanted porn. I don't really write smut, but fine. The only likes they listed were extremish kinks that would not work with the pairing we matched on. As in canonically they couldn't do any of those things (or have sex at all). And they wanted a happy ending, which I couldn't really see for the pairing either. I did try my best, wrote something erotic that ended before there could be any problems. Other people seem to like the fic, don't know about the recip since they're a serial non-commenter. (I didn't know that beforehand, after that Yuletide I always check. I could have saved myself a lot of pain if I'd just gone full ODAO, which I would have had I realized they wouldn't even bother to say thank you...)

Reintroduce the 10 year rule or a form of it to account for activity/"only active at yuletide" fandoms

Eliminate hhertzorf's control freakery about canonizing new fandoms after yuletide season has begun.

Let's be nice and say by a good thing happening to them in meatspace that forces them to leave fandom entirely for lack of time.

Make it OR matching.

I'd +1000 on all of those, nonnie. Especially the crossovers being excluded from the count.

I was assigned someone who had written me DNW-skimming acewank in another exchange the year before. Their prompts for the one fandom we matched on for YT hit bang-on a major DNW of mine. I ended up defaulting within a week and it's still the only time I've defaulted.

Same. I'm in small fandoms. There's usually a handful of requests I could write for. Looking up which ones of those have letters posted and checking I I'd want to write for them or not takes at most 15 minutes, and that's a small price to pay for an assignment I will definitely love.

There's obviously a lot less sameanoning on this thread than the coalie above us is claiming there is. They're getting weirdly ragey over the fact that not everyone here shares their opinions.

My first Yuletide, I did the very stereotypical newbie thing and offered every fandom on the list I'd ever consumed, thinking I'd get a fun surprise. The good news was that I got a canon that I was reasonably familiar with and was easy to re-consume. The bad news was that my recip wanted a focus on a totally different aspect of the canon from the one I was comfortable with, and on a subject that would take a lot of research.

I buckled down, did my research, and produced what may be my favorite of the YT fics I've written -- not my best-received (although the recip loved it), but something long, complex, and intricate that was a major growth experience for me as a writer. If I had gotten an assignment I was more comfortable with, I think I would have been more complacent and probably not produced something nearly as good.

+1

And/or visible tags during the nomination period, with rolling acceptance so there actually are tags. The community spreadsheet effort is impressive, but just being able to see what's in and what's out would be a huge help.

Coalie, have you heard of

mistletoe_exchange?

Yeah, that's the only thing I'd change.

So, absolutely not a small fandom exchange in any shape or form.

Different anon.

I think 2000 fics is still a small fandom, tbh. Not micro-fandom, sure, but still very small by internet standards.

Yeah, I'd love to see crossovers go. I respect that the mods don't want to do any filtering on fic quality or content, but with crossovers, it can be authentically hard to tell how many of them are even really about all the tagged canons, or whether those canons are just mined for cameos or concepts (like all the His Dark Materials "crossovers" that are just daemon AUs). Huge pain in the ass.

Bold.

I mean, sure, but the intro post on their comm is so sparse I wonder how their modding will be? Did I miss it or does it not say what the assignment lengths are nor any eligibility/focus requirements?

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This is Yuletide, everybody make a scene

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