coaltide | The Coalies Are Back In Town

Entry tags:

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).

NYR Info | 2021 NYR Collection |

yuletide_admin |

yuletide

Flat / Recent | Top-Level (Last) | FAQ | Search

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Objectively: not at all. Plenty of people just c/p old requests and reuse them without changing anything, and that's fine.

Subjectively: personally, I'd say you should consider replacing at least one or two of your prompts with new ones, or adding a couple prompts or likes onto your existing list. If you match someone who's written for you before, it might be useful to them to have a little new material to work with.

Which is to say there are some people in my Yuletide-sized fandoms I've written for several times, and when they never change their prompts or likes, I feel like - I tackled all the good ideas this letter gave me over the last three times I wrote this fandom for you! Help me out here! But that's just me, and there are probably plenty of writers who could write great new fics using the same six prompts for eternity, so. YMMV.

If you had a really specific prompt that was filled - like, not just "x/z fluff", but like "x/z have a beach day and eat ice cream and then x almost drowns and z rescues them", maybe swap it out, or at least say something like "I love this scenario so much and could read a hundred versions of it."

If you had a previous fill for that set of prompts and it was disappointing, you should rework to try to avoid that again, especially if you match on the same person.

In the back story of the Teixcalaan series by Arkady Martine, which is nominated, there's a canon ship of emperor of massive space empire (m)/his senior advisor (f)/ambassador from small independent distant location (m).

They canonically met years before they got together: my best guess is that the ambassador met the emperor within his first year, met the senior advisor a couple of years later when she finished her military service and came back to the capital, and was quite fully in love with them both by year five of the twenty years he served as ambassador.

The ages when the ambassador got either of them into bed (again, 6-10 years after they met) were something like 30-31 for the ambassador, in her 40s for the advisor, and early-to-mid 70s for the emperor. There's a lot of political disagreements, intrigue, mutual manipulation, skulduggery, and even potentially murder (or accessory thereof) between the three of them, in addition to all the pining. There's every evidence they felt a lot of sincere affection for each other and depended on one another for mutual emotional support, too. And they collectively have one child (who becomes a more important character in book 2, but he appears briefly in book 1) who's a "90% clone" of the emperor (never revealed what the other 10% is) who was born around the time of the getting together.

All three characters are nominated and several fics were written for them last Yuletide.

This is the way. I personally also really like to be surprised when I get my gift, so I look at the number of offers for each of the fandoms I'm thinking about requesting. If one of my fandoms has a lot more offers than the others, I know I'll likely get matched on that one and it kind of ruins the surprise for me, even if I really want that fandom. So I try to only request 1) fandoms I want equally, and 2) fandoms that have about the same number of offers.

This is exactly my approach, too. Even if I want them all the same amount, knowing that I will almost certainly get X if I request X makes me not want to request it.

I'm the opposite: if there's one that's going to have a whole lot of offers, I happily assume I will probably get it, and then when I don't (so far, I never have), I am pleasantly surprised.

(IIRC, unless something has changed, the matching algorithm actually makes hardest matches first - it attempts to do as many 1-offer/1-request matches as it can - and then moves on to the easy matches for whoever is left. So your odds may not be as skewed as you think, as long as your other requests are *possible*.)

You are wrong (but perhaps lucky). It matches hardest first: but hardest PARTICIPANT, not the hardest fandom per participant. So someone with no popular fandoms gets priority matching. If you have a popular fandom, you are lower priority. That’s why a lot of rare fandom requests are double assigned and those who offer a popular fandom usually match on it. If your author knows multiple fandoms that you requested and writes something other than the popular fandom, that’s luck.

Yeah, thank you for this. It made me realize I should cut one from my letter.

I think I was basing it off the old Yuletide Archive matching algorithm, which started with that as the first criteria, but also had a step of prioritizing based on rarity : https://yuletide.livejournal.com/61558.html

Does the AO3 algorithm skip the second criteria? Is there a full explanation of it anywhere?

Honestly, I'm not convinced that even without the rarity step, having a popular fandom means you will match on it. If you have five difficult-to-match fandom and one common one, chances are still pretty good that you will be the best remaining match for somebody will all rares before it gets down to the commons.

I say it might be better not to have a reason, but if there is a reason, I agree with others there doesn't need to be detail.

That being said, I'd love if my noncommenting recip from X years ago would comment, even if it's just a brief thanks.

DC I seem to remember in a few past years there were A LOT of initial pinch hits that contained some of the most popular fandoms. I'm not sure what that means beyond it's not a guarantee anyone will be matched on them.

NAYRT anecdotally, anytime I have offered a fandom clearly more popular than my other offers, I have always matched on that fandom.

https://yuletide.dreamwidth.org/255652.html

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Howwwwww do people write so fast

nc

I think it's the result of matching harder participants first. You end up with the hardest people to match and then the people who are so matchable their potential authors aren't already taken by the hard-to-match participants that come out of the algorithmic matching without needing to be a pinch hit.

Initial pinch hits seem to be people who either literally have no potential authors or people who, despite requesting mid-sized or large-for-Yuletide fandoms, have no potential author because any potential author was already assigned to someone else.

They've had almost a year. How do you write so slow?!

The first page at least is going to be people who had their letters already written. They're not waiting for the post to go up and then feverishly writing their letter in a burst of speed, lol.

I mean I never have a damn clue what I'm going to request until the noms are all in, and then it takes me at least a week to comb through the noms! I usually swap out at least one request at the last minute based on the signup summary anyway, dunno how you people manage.

I'd add in a "I've gotten this before, but I want to read a million more versions!" If you got a fic you liked, maybe link to it? But no need to do that if it sucked.

Oh, I see what you mean! Well, I usually request what I nominated myself, so I start writing my letter as soon as I nominate and finish it when my noms are approved. My requests are set at this point. If I wanted to add fandoms, I'd probably ask my dentist (still mulling whether to have one this year, might not).

It's offers that are never set for me until almost the end of signups. That's heavily dependent on what people are asking for.

Uh, but if someone is rude to you, it's basic manners to explain the extenuating circumstances.

+1

And for me, there's a good chance that would still end up with a fic that scratches my shippy itch. It doesn't take much.

And I've always regretted it when I gave gen outs. People (fairly!) took me up on it . . . and I might still not have ended up with ship fic, but I think I would've had a better chance without those gen outs.

https://coaltide.dreamwidth.org/4801.html

Tis the season.

No. A "sorry I'm late!" apology is fine, but I really don't want to know what the situation was. I'm fine assuming it was something unavoidable.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Page 55 of 56

The Coalies Are Back In Town

Re: Stupid Questions

Re: Stupid Questions

Re: Tagset Sorting / Recs

Re: Stupid Questions

Re: Stupid Questions

Re: Stupid Questions

Re: Stupid Questions

Re: Stupid Questions

Re: Stupid Questions

Re: Stupid Questions

Re: Stupid Questions

Re: Stupid Questions

Letters post up now!

Re: Letters post up now!

Re: Letters post up now!

Re: Stupid Questions

Re: Letters post up now!

Re: Letters post up now!

Re: Letters post up now!

Re: Stupid Questions

Re: Letters post up now!

Re: Stupid Questions

Re: Stupid Questions

New Post

Re: Stupid Questions