We did this last year, and it seemed to go pretty well, so let’s try it again!
For the folks who came in late, Yuletide is a Secret Santa-esque fanfic exchange. Basically you sign up by requesting 3-6 fandoms (and up to 4 characters, or any from the tagset) to get fanfic for, and offering to write for about 4-10 fandoms (and 2-8 characters, or any from the tagset). Then you get assigned to write someone else a 1,000 words or longer fanfic based on your offers (and someone is assigned to write for you based on their offers). There’s more to it than that; I really suggest you read at least the rules section on the exchange’s AO3 profile. (Note that you will need an AO3 account to participate, either signed up or just as a treater.)
Some notes:
- Please respect people’s wishes as to whether or not they’d like IF as a Yuletide gift. (If you are honestly not sure about this, you can check with a mod.) As such I would strongly recommend not signing up unless you can write 1,000 words or more of static fanfiction.
- If you can’t or don’t want to sign up for Yuletide, why not write a treat? Treats are extra stories written for Yuletide, and you can even write one if you’re not signed up! (You’ll still need an AO3 account, though.) I put up a post on the Yuletide LJ comm where people can specifically request IF treats; you can go through the comments there to see what people want, especially later in the week when people have finished their letters (like me).
- Be aware that that recipients whose writers pull out early don’t go out to the Pinch Hit list if they already have a treat. To avoid depriving people of other gifts, make sure the recipient you’re treating already has a gift from Yuletide 2015 (you can check for this on their profile) OR wait until this year’s Yuletide Madness opens up, sometime around December 20th-25th, and post it to there.
- Please remember to write someone’s requested characters in an acceptable way (i.e., writing them as the protagonist, deuteragonist, et al). Unless, of course, someone has requested “any”; then you can use any character from the tagset as you please.
- Don’t forget about format issues! You wouldn’t want to write a Windows-only game for someone who only has access to a Mac. Most everything these days has an online playable option, but Gargoyle’s getting up there in years, so be aware of that if you’re writing something with an unusual story file.
- Also, length issues: it can be hard to gauge the length of an IF work compared to a static fiction work, so try to overshoot the 1,000 wordcount limit by an extra 2,000-3,500 words or so, and/or go by playtime (10-15 minutes should be roughly equivalent to a 1,000 word fanfic unless you’re doing something weird). Also! If you’re using a format that will look like it’s under 1,000 words in the AO3 summary pane (say, you’re linking to a file offsite), please contact the mods beforehand so that they’ll know what the deal with it is. (Their email address is linked near the top on the Yuletide 2015 profile.) If this sounds like a big hassle for you, again, you can always wait until the Yuletide Madness collection opens, sometime after assignments are all collected on the 20th.
If you don’t want to write IF this year, but would still like to write fanfiction, there are a number of IF fandoms in the tagset. I’ll put them in a new post, because this one’s getting long.