coaltide | C.R.E.A.M

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2021

C.R.E.A.M

Coal ruins exchanges around me - spitey spitey fic y'all.

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Thinking about writing you multiple treats. Do you really mean you love all your fandoms or would that be daunting…

It's more fun if it's exact.

Something like "let you down (never)" which technically is still straight from the lyrics (and could connect directly to a fic named "gonna") seems ok but adding in additional words or deleting them is maybe only partial credit.

I LOVE ALL MY FANDOMS. I would love to get fics for them all!!

I love all my fandoms and it would not be daunting unless all your treats are 100k novels in which case yes I am a little terrified of you (but also flattered and delighted)

1. Pick some other people's fics or short stories of your target length that you think flow well, and try to figure out what they do. How many scenes do they have? How is each scene contributing to the plot or emotional arc, and how long is it? There's no one right way to structure a story, so try to pick a variety of fics with different degrees of plot, over different spans of time, etc.

2. Outline your story. This can very detailed or not detailed at all. Just a list of scenes and what you want to happen in each counts as an outline, even if you only have four scenes! In general, I find my fics flow much better when I know what's going to happen in them. I personally don't tend to write out an outline, but that in-my-head outline is very important!

3. Editing for sure, possibly with the help of a beta who can point to the trouble spots and maybe make suggestions on what to fix. Someone else reading your fic is going to have a very different impression of what works and what doesn't than you, who are seeing it from the inside.

Whereas generally speaking the people writing thousands of words of fic (instead of popping out a 1k minimum and done) are doing it because it's fun for them.

Generally speaking, maybe, but it doesn't apply to everyone. I don't particularly enjoy writing assignments in exchanges. I do exchanges for the gifts and the gifts only; the writing an assignment in return is a chore. But I also want to do it well and give my recipient a fic they enjoy because I know in turn what it feels like to get a disappointing gift, so I put in work and effort. Is it fun? Not really. But if I want to get good gifts, I feel like it's my duty to give good gifts and it generally works out (both in terms of exchange karma, and in being well liked enough that people write me treats).

My recip has nominated a fandom that has the potential to be WWII adjacent, and explicitly okayed the inclusion of Nazis and angst in the fic. I'm a yuletide newbie and I want to know how much wank I'm potentially letting myself in for if I write a yuletide fic that includes fairly dark but non-graphic holocaust references and a grim-but-not-despairing ending.

I'm assuming my recip would be OK but is there some etiquette I should follow in warning other readers?

Serious references in this situation are fine. It's flippant/insensitive and/or romantic references to Nazis that cause real trouble. Just tag it?

Go with our shared headcanons! Your disguise is about as good as Clark Kent's anyway so you might as well just roll with it.

That's totally fine and not at all wanky except insofar as any fic can be selected by The Claw.

Though if it's a canon that's only potentially as opposed to intrinsically WWII/Holocaust/Nazi adjacent (ie. it's All-of-a-Kind Family not "Where the Sky Is Silver and the Earth Is Brass") you might want to throw in a content warning in an author's note at the top just so people who come in expecting G-rated hijinks in the Lower East Side don't get blindsided. You're definitely not obliged to do anything more than that, and I'd actually advise against using the tags to warn - it's sensible to include tags like "WW II" or "Darkfic" that provide useful sorting information, but if you go into explicit detail about exactly what bad things are happening in the fic I think you risk attracting attention you don't want.

What is the meaning of the default deadline, ie what difference does it make if you default before or after it?

If you default before the deadline, you get no penalty. If you default after you have to write a 1k+ fic for any Yuletide request (referred to as a New Year's Resolution or NYR) and post it before you can sign up for Yuletide again.

Defaulting before it = you're fine to sign up next year, no make-up story required, AS LONG AS you didn't also default last year.

Defaulting after it = you'll need to write a full-length story that fills a Yuletide request (a New Year's Resolution story, or NYR) before next Yuletide if you want to sign up again. Taking a pinch hit or writing a full-length treat (kind of a pre-NYR) may also count for this, but you should probably double-check with the mods if you end up in that situation.

More details:
https://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletide2021/profile#ifdefault

This might be me, I nominated a couple WWII-related fandoms and explicitly okayed a lot of stuff.

Putting in anything that deals directly with canon - i e., expanding on a veteran's or survivor's canon backstory - would probably be fine. If it's a pre-war canon, giving a character who is likely to have been involved some war stories is also fine. Since they okay'd angst, having that get pretty dark would also be fine.

Mainly I would avoid a) sympathetic Nazis, which will likely get you wank even if recip likes it, and b) genocide porn. That is, non-graphic Holocaust references are probably fine, as is someone describing or remembering their experiences. Detailed fetishizing accounts of death camps and dying Jews I would only do for a specific request (and probably not even then.) "Savior" stories about someone heroically saving helpless Jews from the camps, likewise. And do your research for anything more than a passing reference.

I would warn for even minor Holocaust references unless it's an obviously inherent part of canon, though. People don't want to stumble into that.

Treats for all my fandoms would be amazing (and honestly I'd prefer that to six treats in the same fandom.)

Yes this is what editing is for!

Also agreed on finding stuff that does it well and look at it analytically.

What I learned from doing that is I worried to much. Obsessing over scene transitions in particular tends to just result in awkwardness, while a lot of my favorite writers just kind of let it be abrupt.

Also relatedly learn how to tell where a scene starts and ends. A lot of writers who are still learning start scenes way too early and end them way too late. Include only the part of the conversation or event that is truly needed for the story (even if, again, it seems abrupt at first.)

Finally: writing good complete stories in a few thousand words is a skill a lot of longform writers don't have. If you do, cherish it and be proud of it.

I'm not totally certain I understand what detailed fetishizing accounts would entail (and honestly, I *really* don't want to know other than staying away from it, so please don't tell me).

But it sounds like anything more generally acknowledging lots of people dying very horribly without going into detail, or describing it very indirectly (like references to smoke that the reader is expected to understand from context to be about crematoriums, that kind of thing), wouldn't qualify, right?

Honestly, either would be awesome! I wouldn't want you to feel any obligation to try to disguise yourself, I'd just be thrilled to realize I'd gotten a gift from you again, so if you want to use those delightful mutually established details, that would be awesome ... but tbh I would also absolutely love to read something based off other headcanons you've got that I don't already know about. Like, clearly your taste in headcanons for this fandom is fantastic, and there's every chance I'll adore your new take just as much as I adored your last.

/not helpful

Right, that would be fine. So would, like, a vet saying he was at a camp during the liberation and mentioning a few images that lingered or people he met and saying it was horrible beyond description, or a survivor doing the same thing. Trying to write your own version of "Night" as fanfic = probably no.

(I don't really know a good place to draw a line between those though. I requested a character who was canonically in a camp as a political prisoner, and while I would love a fic that deals with that more directly than canon, I don't really know how to do it well and without crossing lines. Which is why I didn't offer him, or prompt that directly.)

Yep, I also started participating in 2005 and I had to write a fic to participate. It was more or less like getting yourself cleared from a late default is now: you could pick any prompt from the previous year and write it for the NYR collection in order to be allowed to participate. (Once you were in, though, you were in - it was only a rule for first-time participants.)

I don't remember what year they stopped requiring this, and I really don't know why they even had this requirement. I suspect it was so that people would understand rare fandoms mean rare fandoms, here's an example, if there's nothing here you can write you won't be able to find things to write and request for the actual event.

+1

NEVER GONNA GIVE YOU UP

How's it going so far? Are you using it to work on Yuletide stuff?

and rabbits, lots and lots of rabbits

I am doing it on top of yt, as usual. It's nonfiction this year though, so using a different part of my brain.

I made word count yesterday! But my outline gets sparser from here.

The idea is that of it works we can patch together the whole song.

So like we could even have "Say it in", "Side", and "We both know". But it should stay in order.

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Page 154 of 173

C.R.E.A.M

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NaNoWriMo

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