Getting ready for Yuletide

[sophinisba]

Yuletide has moved to the Archive of Our Own this year and that's taking some adjustment but is mostly awesome. The thing I love most personally is that it's now possible for us authors to edit our own stories whenever we need, and that doesn't affect the anonymity or give the mods extra work. It also makes me happy to know that lots of people are helping out with technical stuff at the archive so not all the work is on astolat and elynross.

And it means that anyone with an AO3 account can upload Yuletide stories, even if they didn't sign up for the original challenge. If you're interested in participating and don't have an account, you can request one! You can look at Yuletide requests from people who don't have a full-length story posted for them yet to see if there's something you'd like to write, even if it's just a drabble. Once those are all filled everyone's requests will open up. (Um, I'm still not actually writing, but I'm excited about it in my own way.)

Another thing that's neat about the archive is that people can put whatever tags they want on their stories. It's possible to see the fandom tags for the challenge so some people are looking at that to try to figure out which of their requests got written. I'm not doing that because I want to be surprised, but I have been looking at some of the other tags, including the Character of Color one where you can see a ton of new Mystery Works uploaded in the last few days.

I have a question for Leverage fans, since there will probably be a bunch of Leverage fics for Yuletide. I like Leverage pretty well but I've only seen the first season and the first six episodes of the second. But most of the episodes are pretty, you know, episodic, so I'd be fine reading fics without having seen the end, right? Or does something big and dramatic happen at the end of season two that will be ruined for me if I find out the wrong way? Is there an episode or two I should try to watch before I read fics, so that things will make sense, and that will be okay to watch without having seen all the other episodes?

Comments

[torachan]

Yeah, I'm really excited about Yuletide being on AO3. Another bonus to the move is that now if people are looking on Yuletide for a fandom, they can also click the fandom tag and see all fics in that fandom, not just the ones written for Yuletide. Plus even if a fandom hasn't been written for Yuletide, but is a Yuletide-level fandom or just generally a fandom that is less popular in LJ circles, it might get more notice on the archive. I am certainly noticing that it's my small fandom stuff that's getting more hits than large fandom stuff like SGA. Large fandom stuff had a better chance of getting noticed on LJ, but small fandom stuff tended to fall through the cracks and is much easier for people to notice on AO3.

As for Leverage, I think you should be okay for the most part. You might want to watch the mid-season finale, though, as it does introduce a new recurring character who may be in some of these fics. (But you could probably skip the episodes in between, because as you said, they're pretty episodic, so I don't think you'd be missing anything there.) Wikipedia tells me that was episode 9.

[sophinisba]

Yeah, I hadn't thought about that with the small fandoms but I think you're totally right. I haven't posted my other fics at the archive but when I go looking around there I do find myself clicking on the tags for small fandoms or for less commonly written characters and pairings, which can be so hard to find on LJ.

And yeah, it's really cool that now the Yuletide MASH fics will be linked to the other MASH fics, for instance, and the Yuletide Parker/Hardison fics with the other Parker/Hardison fics and so on.

Also also I forgot to say in the post that I hope lots of other challenges start using the AO3 because this ability for authors to edit is so helpful. Like we've kinda sorta had that the last two years of RemixRedux but there there's this rule that nobody's supposed to read the fics, even though everyone has access to them. So I have the willpower not to look but I understand other people not being able to resist. And also since there's a tradition of commenting and reccing at Yuletide I hope that makes a lot of people comfortable with commenting and reading and bookmarking at the archive in general and more people will start using it to read and not just as a place to store old fics.

Leverage: Is the mid-season finale "The Lost Heir Job"?

[torachan]

re: Leverage: yep, that's the one.

Victoria has said she definitely wants to use AO3 going forward for Remix and is considering importing all the previous years if it's feasible. It would be awesome if everything were together in one place, but even if it's just going forward, I'm excited about having remix there.

[sophinisba]

Yay, that's awesome news about the Remix moving!