Yuletide

[sophinisba]

Yuletide signups are up on the AO3! They will be open until…okay I guess we don’t get a deadline, maybe the 17th or maybe the 19th or 20th. If you’re not in a rush though you might want to wait a day or two so as not to pound the servers so hard. Apparently the form is huge and may take a long time to load. People seem to be having better luck with Chrome than other browsers. There’s more information at yuletide_admin. I have an extra AO3 invite code, so let me know if you need one. I have really enjoyed this challenge for the last three years and I highly recommend it. I'm excited that some of my friends are participating for the first time this year.

Don’t forget that you can also keep up with dark_agenda, who are running a subcollection within Yuletide 2010 to encourage and promote fics with chromatic characters and creators, and access_fandom has an informal challenge for Yuletide fics about characters with disabilities.

I’ve decided not to sign up myself this year for a combination of reasons, the biggest one being that I’m facing a lot of deadlines in real life right now and I don’t want to risk getting a difficult assignment and having fandom become another source of stress. (There’s a small possibility that I’ll cave though.) Normally I would power through on the strength of my Yuletide squee, but, um…

I’ve been more and more frustrated by the lack of communication from the mods recently, and in the last few days I’ve found myself disagreeing with my close friends so strongly that I couldn’t even figure out what to say to them. It was like we were looking at the yuletide comm and reading completely different posts. Are other people feeling this way? I think a lot of the disconnect has to do with the discussions we’ve been having in locked posts, past experiences with Vividcon and Fanlore and the AO3 and, idk, anime and American Idol and so on. So we end up with these completely different perspectives even though we agree on basic ideas like “Yuletide is awesome!” and “Modding is hard!”

I’ve calmed down a lot since Wednesday, but here’s what I saw at the time:

Most Yuletide fans: Yuletide is the greatest thing ever!
A few Yuletide fans: I love Yuletide too, but I see some problems. Since there are so many of us who care about Yuletide, let’s talk about how we can work together to make it better without making things harder for the mods.
Most Yuletide fans and Yuletide mods: Your concerns are not important and by talking about them where I can see you’re RUINING YULETIDE! Don’t you think the mods have enough work already? If you don’t like the way they’re handling things, STFU and GTFO.

From my perspective, the belittling of people’s concerns makes the Yuletide community (I mean the LJ comm but also the general interaction with other fans, the idea that I might get assigned to write for any one of them, etc.) an unpleasant place. Personally I’m not too fussed one way or the other about some large fandoms being part of the challenge because I’m not tempted to request or offer them, but I can understand why other people are bothered. It’s the shutting down of that conversation (and any other conversation about problems with the way things are currently done) that has harshed my (formerly massive) Yuletide squee.

On the other hand, it seems like a lot of people are seeing something more like this:

The good Yuledite fans: Whee, Yuletide!
The wankers: THE MODS ARE OPPRESSING ME AND I’M GOING TO STAND HERE SHOUTING UNTIL THEY BOW TO MY DEMANDS AND MAKE YULETIDE BE EXACTLY WHAT I WANT IT TO BE (LIKE GET RID OF THESE FANDOMS I DON’T LIKE).
The good Yuletide fans and Yuletide mods: Hey, let’s just concentrate on the positive for now so we can all have a good time! The mods are doing a lot of hard work already to make this great thing for all of us!

From that perspective, it’s the people who say, “Yuletide has some problems” who are making the challenge less fun. When the mods freeze discussions and delete posts they are really just trying to preserve a festive atmosphere and get through the challenge without a lot of wank and bad feelings. Maybe it doesn’t occur to them that they’re hurting other people’s feelings by doing so, or maybe it seems like a fair tradeoff to them, since in something this big they’re never going to please everybody.

Here are some posts that helped me breathe easier yesterday:

-astolat at yuletide: Nominations tomorrow; while you wait, sign-up process (Okay so the bit about how “we are always happy for useful suggestions for improvements to the nominations process (or anything else for that matter)” still rubs me the wrong way because, um, yeah. But it’s communication, with suggestions and polite discussion in comments, so yay.)

-dhobikikutti: Yuletide, AO3 and me

I do not think that without the impetus of needing yuletide to get off its old servers and code, we would have got so far, so quickly, in a website that provides so many tools to people running challenges, and participating in them. And because of the link between yuletide and AO3, I do see the challenge as even more of a community issue - since it is the community that is helping make the challenge possible.

-franzeska: The Highlight of the Fannish Year

One fic exchange should not be the highlight of anybody's fannish year. At the very least, the same damn fic exchange shouldn't be the highlight of everybody's fannish year.

I’ve been upset by the way some people have been saying, “If you don’t like the way Yuletide’s being run, go run your own fic exchange,” because, dude, I love Yuletide, and so do most of the people I see raising concerns. But this post helped me feel calmer about the idea that Yuletide doesn’t have to be for everybody, and maybe it’s not for me anymore.

-snacky: Yuletide needs a new tag line
THIS IS MY FAVORITE.

On Dreamwidth you can see the latest posts tagged yuletide. (I do wish this had inline cut tags like one’s reading list does.) I was using that to follow the wank but then it turned into more and more “Dear Yuletide Writer” posts and those are also cheering me up. Already this morning I found a request by someone I don’t know that’s uncannily similar to what I want from the source, and I might try to write that or something else, even though I’m not signing up. Last year I wrote two extra stories and the year before I wrote five and those were all a lot of fun, even though last year I also had people telling me that reading letters to get ideas for extra stories was Not In the True Spirit of Yuletide. *g* I guess there’s always something.

Comments

[trascendenza]

Wow, this makes me glad I don't follow the yuletide comm :/ I was waffling about signing up this year, but decided to in hopes of getting some super rare fic (I decided to only request fandoms in which I can't find any fic). I am somewhat wishing there were more large-scale small fandom exchanges, though, because it seems like there's almost too much pressure on this one to be everything to everyone.

[sophinisba]

Ha ha yeah, I stopped watching the member comm because it had already gotten so high-traffic and wanky last year, but I track the admin comm so I saw Astolat's note that she'd made a post at the other one and...yeah. It's a difficult thing, with so many people (including me) investing so much in this one fest, there's really no way it can satisfy everybody. I agree with Franzesca that we'd be better off having more people sign up for more small-fandoms fest, but I don't really see how any of them can get close to the scale of Yuletide, which is what you'd need to really pull off the tiny fandom stuff.

I don't know, this weekend I was feeling good about the fact that I'd written 500 words based on a great prompt I found in a letter, but then last night I was reminded of how much some people disapprove of that kind of prompt usurping and...yeah.

BUT I HOPE IT GOES REALLY WELL FOR YOU!