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More Yuletide musings
You know, it seems like every year, there are some fandoms I offer to write because I'm wildly enthusiastic about them and they make me squee and bounce, and some fandoms that I offer because it's a book I really loved when I read it back in 1990, or a comic that's been running since 1954 of which I've read the 1986-89 issues only ... and invariably, that's what I'm assigned. XD I'm not really complaining, because I've found my assignments challenging and fun, but THIS year, "Self," I told myself, "don't sign up for anything you're not crazy about writing, okay?" And then, of course, I got to looking through the list of fandoms and going (as usual) "Oh! I've heard of that! I could probably write it!"
*reviews signup thoughtfully*
I keep wondering if I ought to come to my senses and delete some of these. Like, say, the series I stopped reading with book 3 because I'd lost interest in it. Or the one that I added because I thought the idea of fic for it -- I mean, the idea of fic actually existing -- would be hilarious, but it doesn't have any actual characters, and now that I'm looking at it, I'm thinking "... you know, trying to get 1000 words out of a series of unconnected jokes is probably a bad idea." On the other hand, winnowing my list down to my top 4 or 5 most squeeful favorites sort of feels like a cop-out. I dunno. (Okay, I think I'm taking that last one out. There's a difference between being challenged, and offering to write something that fills me with horror at the very idea. *edits*)
In other Yuletide-related stuff, I was pondering this post on Yuletide letters asking for no sexism/racism/etc in their fic. I've seen several people doing that this year, and I find myself agreeing that it doesn't sound like a terribly useful thing to ask for if you aren't specific. No one sets out to write sexist, racist, or homophobic fic, right? I think it's way more useful to specify what you mean: I wouldn't find "no misogyny" particularly helpful, but "Please don't shove the female characters into the background while the male characters get all the plot" gives me something to actually work with. (Which, incidentally, is more or less why I asked not to have canon couples broken up in my own Yuletide letter; I thought about getting more specific, but basically, it's not that I can't stand to read ANY story in which [x] and [y] are not together; it's that I hate the general trope of breaking up couples in order to shuffle the girl offscreen, which is almost invariably what happens. But I think that's a more useful way to phrase the request than just saying "No sexism" or even "Don't ignore the female characters", because a couple of my requests are for all-male characters and what is the poor writer supposed to do then?)
*reviews signup thoughtfully*
I keep wondering if I ought to come to my senses and delete some of these. Like, say, the series I stopped reading with book 3 because I'd lost interest in it. Or the one that I added because I thought the idea of fic for it -- I mean, the idea of fic actually existing -- would be hilarious, but it doesn't have any actual characters, and now that I'm looking at it, I'm thinking "... you know, trying to get 1000 words out of a series of unconnected jokes is probably a bad idea." On the other hand, winnowing my list down to my top 4 or 5 most squeeful favorites sort of feels like a cop-out. I dunno. (Okay, I think I'm taking that last one out. There's a difference between being challenged, and offering to write something that fills me with horror at the very idea. *edits*)
In other Yuletide-related stuff, I was pondering this post on Yuletide letters asking for no sexism/racism/etc in their fic. I've seen several people doing that this year, and I find myself agreeing that it doesn't sound like a terribly useful thing to ask for if you aren't specific. No one sets out to write sexist, racist, or homophobic fic, right? I think it's way more useful to specify what you mean: I wouldn't find "no misogyny" particularly helpful, but "Please don't shove the female characters into the background while the male characters get all the plot" gives me something to actually work with. (Which, incidentally, is more or less why I asked not to have canon couples broken up in my own Yuletide letter; I thought about getting more specific, but basically, it's not that I can't stand to read ANY story in which [x] and [y] are not together; it's that I hate the general trope of breaking up couples in order to shuffle the girl offscreen, which is almost invariably what happens. But I think that's a more useful way to phrase the request than just saying "No sexism" or even "Don't ignore the female characters", because a couple of my requests are for all-male characters and what is the poor writer supposed to do then?)
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I expect that most people have something fairly specific in mind when they write this -- perhaps they are sick to death of writers always portraying the female rival as a shrewish harpy, or don't want any damsels in distress in their fic, or maybe they hate WNGWJLEO, or whatever. But I'm thinking it's way more useful to spend a couple extra minutes figuring exactly what "misogyny" or "homophobia" means to you, in the context of the fandoms you requested, rather than just asking and expecting that the writer will have exactly the same interpretation of the word that you do.
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Thanks for linking to
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I wish they'd get the summary page to work somehow! I always loved tracking that so much (although, actually, I've been doing something along those lines by looking at people's Yuletide letters in the post in
I really don't see why they can't put up a static summary page (well, other than they're probably so overworked and overwhelmed anyway that they don't have time, which is fair ...) -- but there is no reason why it would have to refresh regularly or even be hosted on the AO3 servers at all; they could just dump the info to a googledoc or an LJ post every day or so ...