coaltide | The Coalies Are Back In Town

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2021

The Coalies Are Back In Town

Friday night they'll be dressed to kill
Down at Coaltide Bar'n'Grill
The receipts will flow and wank will spill
And if the coalies wanna fight, you better let 'em
That jukebox in the corner blastin' out my favorite song
The nights are getting longer, it won't be long
Won't be long 'til Yuletide comes
Now that the coalies are here again

Nominations: Mon 20 Sept to Thurs 30 Sept
Sign-ups: Fri 15 Oct to Sat 23 Oct
Assignments out by: Mon 25 Oct
Default deadline: Sat 11 Dec
Assignment deadline: Sat 18 Dec
Reveals: Sat 25 Dec

Yuletide Discord and Exchanges After Dark Discords for Namespace ~~drama~~ 18+ discussion. Google Group for PHs. F_F wiki for history. Universal App for all past Yuletides and any other exchanges (donate).

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Wouldn't this just result in kittyfic, though, unless you're running a single-fandom exchange? Your pinch hitter on retainer isn't going to know the random set of fandoms that need a pinch hitter.

I think the idea is that it would result in the opposite of kittyfic. Someone being paid then has the commitment (and potentially: resources) to get into the fandom and produce something of quality that isn’t ODAO let alone wikific. It only takes one dud for the mod to decide not to hire you again, and if the fic is REALLY bad they can get a post-deadline PH or hire someone else.

It's in!

I think it depends on the canons, with kittyfic being more likely if the request is all 1,000+ page doorstop novels in the style of James Joyce or untranslated One Piece-length anime/manga

I have two fandoms I know I want to request, but the next tier of options takes me over the fandom limit, which means I have to make Decisions.

What's your jam, coalies? Answer as many or as few as you'd like.

- Do you start writing... before signups close? Pretty soon after? Reasonably before the deadline? In the danger zone? Pinch hits only? EPHs only?

- What do you have on in the background? A music genre? TV? Silence? White noise? An alternate dimension in which you wrote in a cafe?

- Do you write... sober, drunk, tired, high, first thing in the morning, after exercising, after shower thoughts, before work...?

- Is there something you do only during this most festive time of the year? Write longhand? Crack out a certain program? Make a special drink?

- Betas: for fun, for real, or for someone else?

- It's not a Yuletide fic if you don't _______

- Pretty soon after though usually not my assignment. I try to get everything outlined/plotted in the first two weeks and then tackle them one by one.
- Absolute silence when writing.
- Sober. I've never seen a fic someone explicitly said they wrote while drunk/masturbating/whatever turn out well to my tastes. I really like writing first thing or just powering through all day and hitting 15k after working straight into the night.
- I get into at least two fandoms every Yuletide. Its also the only time I show up in namespace or beta for others.
- I appreciate betas and will always take someone up if they're willing but I'm secure enough in my writing where if I have to self-beta, the fic will still turn out well. I think people need less SPAG betas and more characterization/voice/pacing betas to help turn their fics from Cs to B+s and As.
- Not a Yuletide fic if you haven't canon reviewed multiple times. First one starts in "oh fuck can I do this" panic and finishes in "god I love this canon" and the rest are for you to relive your favorite bits just as much as to check voice/a small detail.

I start thinking very abstractly about requests I like during the letters phase but I usually let it percolate all the way till early December. Most of my treat writing is right around the week of the deadline up until reveals.

I usually loop a single track for each fic, or go with silence. I used to like plotting in a coffee shop and then going home to write.

I've never written tipsy but I have written on so little sleep as to be drunk. It helps actually get the words out and then the editing fixes the incoherency. After a run is also good for a calmer go at it. I really like holiday days where I can sort of peck during the otherwise hard to find daylight hours.

Yuletide is when I fire up a special word processor! Because procrastinating using my tools as an excuse is The Way.

I like doing a beta or two, and like to find one for myself as a social activity more than anything else. I never use betas outside of Yuletide and am confident in my own writing, but I love the community spirit and meeting new people. I've had some great ideas from jamming with a good beta.

It's not Yuletide if I'm not canon reviewing unnecessarily and researching unnecessarily details that 99.999% don't turn up in the fic!

- I usually end up writing a treat for someone pretty early on in the process. My assignment tends to get started immediately with canon review and then a meandering outline/writing process until I near the deadline, with a frantic finish. I then spend the next week or so writing treats.
- Absolute silence
- I tend to do a lot of research and note taking, more so than with other exchanges.
- I wish I could get fandom specific betas--I've really struggled to find people for the obscure fandoms. But if I could get someone who is familiar and can provide feedback on characterization/pacing/voice etc. I would and have definitely used them.
- Regret every single one of my life choices.

-Start writing: in November, but then get interrupted by RL and end up finishing in the Danger Zone.
-Background noise: silence, or café background noise (I have written a lot of fic hiding at the back of cafés), or every once in a while my brain decides that a fic actually does have a soundtrack and I play that on loop. (I don't bang on about this in author's notes or anything, though I may use a lyric for the title, but I use lyrics for titles for fics not written that way too.)
-When: either early in the morning at a café or late at night at home. If the latter, I may slowly make my way through a glass of wine as I do.
-How: I don't do YT differently to any other exchanges. I'm marginally more likely to do something weird formatting-wise if I have a recip/find someone to treat who's into that.
-Beta: I am enough of an Old that I remember having to beg astolat and co. specially to fix your typos for you if you realised you'd made one after uploading, so I always get my YT fics betaed. I used to offer on the post but after a couple of bad experiences with people crediting me after ignoring all my advice I now only beta for friends or via a sock.
-... write over 1000 words including all requested characters? (I don't have anything that I consider especially Yuletide-ish that I wouldn't do in other exchanges if it was relevant.)

> Request by name for worldbuilding in a fandom where worldbuilding was not nominated

didn't the mods say this was allowed?

ok but dewclaws etc are exactly why I obsess so much about DNWs. It's just the list of horrible things a sane person should think are opt-in but insane people think are opt-out is too long for me to DNW it all.

(I don't want to DNW "genocide AU" because the idea anyone would write unrequested holocaust AU for my boring fluffy fantasy fandom is insane, and yet, here I am, worrying about it.)

Bucket list?

Requests, not offers.

+1

It's actually faster for me to do it that way now. You just need two comma separated lists (fandoms and nominations) to put into the right fields on the edit page to get them into the tagset then a batch load list (Fandom,Character,Character,Character... with each fandom on a new line) for the batch load page to associate them all, and you can load hundreds of nominations at once with no limit on number of fandoms or characters.

I think you're massively underestimating how normal it is to reference coal in relation to anything to do with christmas and overestimating how many people even know coal exists. I'd drop that percentage to like 10% at best.

Because it's a both/and situation, "dnw kink" covers both "kinky sex including but not limited to bdsm" and "kinkster identity AUs"

If someone really does not want anything related to kink then it's not terribly vague to "dnw kink" although I'd personally go more detailed

Not a list of things against The Law Of Yuletide, just things we expect to see in letters this year, etc etc

The people that DNW kink also tend to be people that think sex on a table or really anything they don't personally like is "kink."

I wouldn't think anything of seeing that DNW. It seems reasonable!

- I usually start writing sometime between receiving my assignment and December 1. I've only ever seen a prompt I liked so much I had to start writing it right away once, and that person ended up being my assignment anyway, so a happy coincidence!
- I write best with either mindless TV or music in the background; I prefer both to be things I've seen/heard a bunch of times so they don't steal my focus away, but silence is way too distracting for me.
- I don't have a set writing routine - sometimes if I have a rough outline and word count, I'll split up how much I need to write every day to be done by deadline, and I try to evenly space it throughout the day. Otherwise I just fit it in around everything else as inspiration/will to write comes.
- Honestly Yuletide IS my tradition; I'm not much of a consistent fic-writer throughout the year otherwise.
- It's been a good few years since I was done far enough from the deadline to have time for a beta; I'm usually writing pretty down to the wire. But I try to grab at least a quick one for coherency if I'm able.
- ...obsessively doublecheck your recipient's DNWs/dislikes up until the last minute to make ABSOLUTELY SURE you didn't accidentally slip up and include something too close to them.

It's not a Yuletide fic unless I come up with an idea and write a rough outline within 24hrs of getting assignment and then don't actually write it until 48hrs before the posting deadline.

That seems very clear-cut. Honestly if you have no shippy requests DNW kink or sexual situations or what have you would be perfectly fine, too.

It's wanky to a) write people covid fic unrequested b) say that anybody at all writing or requesting or enjoying covid fic is a horrible person

Saying "I personally do not want to encounter covid fic" is not wanky in the least.

Of course, it's very useful to include some DNWs in your sign-up/letter, but I think at some point you have to realize there's always going to be crazy in the mix and yet the odds of actually rolling that crazy are extremely low. You don't have to obsess over the 2 participants who want to dewclaw it up when there are 1000 who are just going to write your boring fluffy fantasy. You just have to let it go and hope for treats or next year.

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The Coalies Are Back In Town

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