Entry tags:
Yuletide is Love
So Yuletide nominations are here. Just like I did two years ago, I want to encourage those of you on my flist who don't typically write fic to participate. This began as an attempt to encourage ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
futuransky in particular to sign up, but it grew beyond that as I wrote it and so I've made it a top-level post in my own journal instead of a comment in hers.
Before I start pimping, a note about process for those of you who don't know what Yuletide is: Yuletide is a ficathon, or a fanfiction exchange, which means that a participant writes a story for person A based on some beloved book, movie, play, TV show, or whatever, and has a story written for them (in a different fandom, in all probability) by person B. The process starts with the nominations, where books/movies/plays/TV/webcomics/epic poems/lyric poems/songs/albums/history/mythology/&c. get nominated in order to allow people to request and/or offer them later, which happens in the sign-ups. Then the matching algorithm does its work and you'll be emailed an assignment to write a story based on something you said you could. The stories get written and on Christmas day the archive goes live, and you'll have a story written just for you!
Okay, now on to the pimping:
First and foremost, Yuletide is love. It has a fun and appeal that other ficathons can't match, and is all but undescribable. I want to say "Call it the magic of the season" but I'm afraid that's too laden with Christian privilege even if I don't want to mean it that way.
I encourage my flisters who don't usually write fic to participate because I feel Yuletide is more accessible--because one is often writing for fandoms that don't really exist otherwise, one doesn't really need to grok fannish subcultures to write a well-received fic. Even for those of you who are just lurkers, readers, and/or participants in fandom in ways other than fic-writing, the fact remains that I think participants go into the archive with less defined expectations as to the types of stories they'll find. (The fact that in years past the architecture was set up so that one couldn't easily identify 'ship fic from gen fic probably helped that along. It'll be interesting to see what effect if any the move to the AoOO has on that.) Or as I wrote in 2007:
Because of the way the process is set up, you don't have to worry about not getting matched--the stats are shown as the sign-ups happen, and as long as at least one person has offered to write in at least one of the fandoms you requested, you will be matched. And with over 1600 people participating last year (and almost certainly more this year), and a deliberate push towards the end of sign-ups to ensure that all requests have offers in true Yuletide spirit, the chances of being stranded out in the cold are pretty much nil.
And if you do choose to be a little bit adventurous, you won't be the only one. Most of us who've done it at least once before know the shocked feeling one gets when one sees one's assignment and wonders, "Why did I say I could write that?" (And then we settle down and write it, and it turns out great.) Every year, massive amounts of panic and squee, in equal parts, overtake my flist, because we're all in this together.
And that's the best part of Yuletide, it's media fandom's normal fannishness pushed up to 11, in a huge outpouring of fannish love which needs to be experienced to described. Love for each other, for reading and writing, for all our obscure movies and books and plays and TV shows that don't get enough love the rest of the year, for being fans. Yuletide is love.
And of course, on Christmas day you get a story in a fandom you love written just for you.
futuransky in particular to sign up, but it grew beyond that as I wrote it and so I've made it a top-level post in my own journal instead of a comment in hers.Before I start pimping, a note about process for those of you who don't know what Yuletide is: Yuletide is a ficathon, or a fanfiction exchange, which means that a participant writes a story for person A based on some beloved book, movie, play, TV show, or whatever, and has a story written for them (in a different fandom, in all probability) by person B. The process starts with the nominations, where books/movies/plays/TV/webcomics/epic poems/lyric poems/songs/albums/history/mythology/&c. get nominated in order to allow people to request and/or offer them later, which happens in the sign-ups. Then the matching algorithm does its work and you'll be emailed an assignment to write a story based on something you said you could. The stories get written and on Christmas day the archive goes live, and you'll have a story written just for you!
Okay, now on to the pimping:
First and foremost, Yuletide is love. It has a fun and appeal that other ficathons can't match, and is all but undescribable. I want to say "Call it the magic of the season" but I'm afraid that's too laden with Christian privilege even if I don't want to mean it that way.
I encourage my flisters who don't usually write fic to participate because I feel Yuletide is more accessible--because one is often writing for fandoms that don't really exist otherwise, one doesn't really need to grok fannish subcultures to write a well-received fic. Even for those of you who are just lurkers, readers, and/or participants in fandom in ways other than fic-writing, the fact remains that I think participants go into the archive with less defined expectations as to the types of stories they'll find. (The fact that in years past the architecture was set up so that one couldn't easily identify 'ship fic from gen fic probably helped that along. It'll be interesting to see what effect if any the move to the AoOO has on that.) Or as I wrote in 2007:
Because the exchange focuses on "obscure" fandoms--from Homer to Shakespeare to Austen, from Orson Welles to Stanley Kubrick, from lyric poems to webcomics--it tends to have a more "literary" feel. The stories don't always "read like fanfic" (whatever that would mean), so if there's something about fan culture or the typical tropes of fanfiction that keeps you away, that needn't be a problem. And plenty of the fandoms are in the public domain, if that's been worrying you.Yuletide allows you to be just as adventurous as you want to be. There are the brave souls who offer to write anything, with the understanding that they'll probably need to procure and then mainline a whole new source before beginning to write. There are people who offer everything they've ever read or seen. There are people like me, who will offer almost everything but be very specific which characters they can write. (I usually offer mainly female characters, with the result that I get assigned requests with ask for "any" characters.) There are people who only feel comfortable offering a handful of fandoms. I think the minimum is something incredibly low, like three.
Maybe you shudder at the thought of writing a sappy sex story about Buffy and Angel (and fanfic has much more to offer than just that, but that's a different conversation for a different day) and run screaming from Mary Sues. (Maybe you have no idea what a Mary Sue even is.) Then maybe a Sherlock Holmes pastiche is more up your alley. Or a look at what a few characters from Shakespeare were doing off-stage. An introspective piece about Baudelaire's childhood. A revisioning of a beloved tale from your childhood.
Because of the way the process is set up, you don't have to worry about not getting matched--the stats are shown as the sign-ups happen, and as long as at least one person has offered to write in at least one of the fandoms you requested, you will be matched. And with over 1600 people participating last year (and almost certainly more this year), and a deliberate push towards the end of sign-ups to ensure that all requests have offers in true Yuletide spirit, the chances of being stranded out in the cold are pretty much nil.
And if you do choose to be a little bit adventurous, you won't be the only one. Most of us who've done it at least once before know the shocked feeling one gets when one sees one's assignment and wonders, "Why did I say I could write that?" (And then we settle down and write it, and it turns out great.) Every year, massive amounts of panic and squee, in equal parts, overtake my flist, because we're all in this together.
And that's the best part of Yuletide, it's media fandom's normal fannishness pushed up to 11, in a huge outpouring of fannish love which needs to be experienced to described. Love for each other, for reading and writing, for all our obscure movies and books and plays and TV shows that don't get enough love the rest of the year, for being fans. Yuletide is love.
And of course, on Christmas day you get a story in a fandom you love written just for you.
no subject
no subject
We're all be right here with you!
no subject
no subject