One Wank After Another

[coalcube]

A blank assignment is a funny thing, isn't it? When you have it, you don't appreciate it, and when you miss it, it's gone.

Wednesday 10 December: Default deadline (9pm UTC)
Wednesday 17 December: Assignment deadline (9pm UTC)
Wednesday 24 December: Main collection works reveals (9pm UTC)
Thursday 25 December: Madness collection works reveals (9pm UTC)
Thursday 1 January: Author reveals, end of event (9pm UTC)

Mini-Challenges:

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Family Matters | Queering the Tide | Yuletide Madness Drabble Invitational | TransTide 
Chromatic Yuletide | Unconventionyule | Wrapping Paper | Babytide | MultiLingYule 

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Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I do live in constant fear that one year my Yuletide recipient will DNW em-dashes.

[(Anonymous)]

/coalie who said they default on DNW:italics

I think I could live with that one. I'd just have Word not replace the double dash by an em-dash.

My nightmare scenario would be DNW: present tense. Nope.

[(Anonymous)]

I suspect someone who wanted to DNW em dashes would be very unhappy to get double-dashes.

[(Anonymous)]

Ayrt

I genuinely wouldn't assume that. For all I know, they might have read one of these "AI uses a lot of em-dashes" posts and decided that em-dashes are evil.

Overall, I don't think there's much point in interpreting what DNW might mean beyond what they actually say. "DNW: em-dashes" says nothing about dashes, en-dashes, double dashes, colons or any other punctuation.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

Well it's all very hypothetical. But I don't have a lot of faith that the average person, even a writer, has a clear grasp of the difference between dashes, double-dashes, en dashes, em dashes, and whether it matters whether or not they're spaced.

And that goes double(dash) for the hypothetical person who thinks AI fic can be weeded out by banning em-dashes.

[(Anonymous)]

That doesn't work for me because I write on computers where -- doesn't get automatically turned into — so my brain counts that as an em-dash even though strictly speaking it isn't. I would probably just turn them all into parentheses even where that makes no sense though, so I'm not much better. And I never write in present tense in fic, so I'm perfectly okay with that one. If they DNWed third person, however, I would default instantly.

[(Anonymous)]

My nightmare scenario would be DNW: present tense. Nope.

I created for someone with this exact DNW once. It wasn't a hard request to fill or anything, but it still kind of irked me to have such a common stylistic choice be off-limits. There were a lot of things about their DNWs that, while not technically forbidding, were kind of a buzzkill and made the fic feel a lot more like a commission than I really enjoyed.

[(Anonymous)]

Instant default. Em-dashes, like semi-colons, will be pried from my cold, dead hands.