Dear Yuletide Author 2019

Lovely author, here is my theory about letters: how much detail people want in a letter is HIGHLY variable. Some people (such as myself) prefer if their recip gives LOTS of guidance on their wishes. Some prefer as little as possible so they can be free as a bird. Most are somewhere in between. So! Here's everything including the kitchen sink if you find it helpful, but feel free to ignore it if it is not helpful. I would rather get a story you were happy with than "well, she said she liked x, so I guess I have to do x even though I don't like x and/or am just not inspired that way."

I'm fairly easy to please; I've been doing ficathons for over a decade and am very rarely disappointed with my gifts. I write long and detailed Dear Author letters because I find such things helpful when I'm writing for other people; if you are like me, here you go! If your style is different and a detailed letter makes you feel hemmed-in, feel free to do what works for you.

The most important thing for me in a fic is that the characters are well-written and recognizably themselves. Even when I don't like a character, I don't go in for character-bashing. If nothing else, if the rest of this letter is too much or my kinks just don't fit yours, just concentrate on writing a story with everyone in character and good spelling and grammar and I will almost certainly love what you come up with.

One thing: I do have an embarrassment squick, which makes humor kind of hit-or-miss sometimes. The kind of humor where someone does something embarrassing and the audience is laughing at them makes me uncomfortable. On the other hand, the kind of humor where the audience is laughing with the characters I really enjoy.

Please no incest.

( Other likes and dislikes )

Formats I'm open to: Traditional prose, narrative poetry, in-universe texts.

Fandoms:

( Caprica )

( Random Harvest )

( Dirty Computer )

( Black Lightning )

( Rivers of London )

( My Fair Lady )

"it's officially yuletide if the coders have to get to work!"

Yuletide signups opened early today! ... and then had to close again due to technical difficulties.  I'm the one who found the bug, actually; you're only supposed to be able to offer ten fandoms (one of which may be a bucket offer, in which you can lump mulitple fandoms into one offer).  And it was letting you add more than ten offers (and requests, it later turned out) than was allowed.  So they've closed so the coders can poke around and figure out what the problem is.

The reason they have a limit of ten offers (one of which can be a bucket offer, so you can offer more than ten fandoms) has something to do with the way the code works on the back end and the way matching works, and apparently Bad Things happen if you try to have more than ten offers.  IDEK.  But there is a reason for it, it's not just random, so if it's not working the way it's supposed to they have to go in and figure out what's wrong.  They'll contact those of us who signed up in the initial open period if our signups have to be deleted after they fix the problem.

When they announced on the YT Discord that signups were going to have to close while they figured it out, Bonster remarked that "it's officially yuletide if the coders have to get to work!"

Yuletide, being fricking HUGE (both in the size of the tag set and the number of people participating) regularly pushes the archive software to its limits, so if bugs in the exchange part of the software are going to show up anywhere, they tend to do it in Yuletide, alas.  I don't grumble because I remember Yuletide pre-AO3, on the OLD archive, back in dinosaur days.

For all you young whippersnappers too young to have done Yuletide pre-2009, or who were simply in other corners of fandom, the old archive was a NIGHTMARE.  It was old and creaky and buggy and simply wasn't up to handling the strain of a thousand people trying to upload stories at the deadline.  So it would regularly crash on the day of the deadline, especially when it was getting down to the wire, which always made uploading your story really nail-biting.  Would it go through?  Would the site crash?  Would the site crash mean you didn't get it submitted in time?!?  And then, of course, you couldn't edit the fic yourself.  It had to be finished/in its final form when you uploaded it ... and if you found an error that needed to be fixed you had to go grovelling to astolat and ask her to manually edit the file.  She was nice about it the couple of times I needed it, but still.  Not something you wanted to be doing.  And then, when the archive opened, there was no "anon comment period" where you could comment and your name wouldn't show.  And comments weren't public.  So you had to save the email with a comment in it to keep the reply link until after the anon period was over, and if you accidentally deleted or lost the email with the link in it, well, that sucked but you weren't going to get to reply.  And I'm sure I've forgotten lots of fun bugs and quirks.  Given the state of internet technology, the number of users, and the tiny number of people working behind the scenes to run the ficathon and keep the archive up and running, I'm not complaining!  It was amazing it was as good as it was!  I'm just saying, I love the AO3 and we should all be grateful to the wonderful volunteers who do everything.