Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain
... oh, wait. I take that back. Peel back the curtain, Toto; it's time for Yuletide's reveal, complete with tiny fandoms, stories and maybe even a titch bit of meta thrown in.
My assignment was for blueinsideout for Reboot fic. I ended up with two stories for her, Electric, which is set just following episode 3.1.4 "Game Over," and An Eye for An-, which takes place during the time skip between episodes 3.1.4 "Game Over" and 3.2.1 "Icons." I was really luckymekosuchinae did a lot of drabbles in this fandom for her November drabblefest. They definitely got me in the mood. A new univese/sandbox was fun to play in. There was a lot to figure out though- like how time ran (if things run in nanoseconds, what is the equililant of a day? A night?). AndrAIa and Matrix both change a lot during the time skip, so that created some interesting side effects. I wrote all of AndrAIa's POV without any contractions since she speaks that way pre-time skip. To emphasize this, I made everyone else use contractions like they were going out of style. I wonder if that looked odd to anybody else, now that I think of it. Contractions are everywhere. Even by Yuletide standards I think this is a pretty tiny fandom. I recced the one other story from Reboot earlier this week; you should go read that one too! It's good. But, yeah. I was very grateful as many people did read it as they did. We're making a small fandom a little bigger, one reader, one story at a time!
The other work I did for Yuletide, was actually a Yuletide Maddness fic (Yuletide is 1000+ word stories and Yuletide Madness is anything less than that.) I wrote a story for the movie/cartoon strip Little Nemo in Slumberland. It's one of my favorite movies from childhood, so it was wonderful to write, though the mood is hard to get. Anyway, it's called Stay Up Late (You Don't Need to Dream No More)
This has been both my first year being active in fandom and so my first with Yuletide. I definitely would like to do it next year. It's a wonderful change of pace to read/write in different fandom sandboxes than usual. Writing something for someone else is motivating because you know there's one person who you make happy. Getting some story from a small fandom I loved (and BOY that was a good story) is fantastic. Though I never used the Yuletide chat, I still felt it was a great community to be in. You are brought into contact with a lot of cool fandom people who maybe you wouldn't have read/known before. Plus, there is so, so, so many great stories now out there.
I know that the move from the original Yuletide Treasure site to An Archive of Our Own was controverserial for reasons I remain largely unaware of, but personally, I really liked this archive site. The people at AO3 have obviously put a lot of time and thought into making this as organic, visually pleasing, and easy to use as possible. I especially liked featured like the tags option, the ability to have/identify pseudonames for authors who have changed names/ have multiply names, the option to put author note at the beginning or end, the collections and subcollections, and the gift!fic abilities are quite impressive. They seem to be intergrating Web 2.0 tools wonderfully. The AO3 site is run by a non-profit developed for and by fandom-people called The Organization for Transformative Works. This non-profit is why some people don't like AO3, I gather, but I found the group pretty interesting. I like the idea of fandom being more centralized because I like to read a lot of different things and meet different people via fandom, so this makes that easier. I also find their efforts to record the history of fandoms and academic work on fandom interesting. Same with their efforts to get legal protection to fandom creators/creations, though I am a little doubtful about how successful that can be. I spent some time archiving most of my fanfics onto my account there, the one exception currently is A Rose Bloomed which will follow when I get time. Don't think I'll stop posting on lj or ff.net quite yet, mostly because ff.net, ugly and ungainly though it often is, has authors and readers you wouldn't get anywhere else. But I like AO3 enough that I want my stuff there; it would be nice to eventually have that be the main fanfic stop for people. Um, if you did not participate in Yuletide but are interested in AO3, let me know. When I get invites I would love to give them to people who want them.
My assignment was for blueinsideout for Reboot fic. I ended up with two stories for her, Electric, which is set just following episode 3.1.4 "Game Over," and An Eye for An-, which takes place during the time skip between episodes 3.1.4 "Game Over" and 3.2.1 "Icons." I was really luckymekosuchinae did a lot of drabbles in this fandom for her November drabblefest. They definitely got me in the mood. A new univese/sandbox was fun to play in. There was a lot to figure out though- like how time ran (if things run in nanoseconds, what is the equililant of a day? A night?). AndrAIa and Matrix both change a lot during the time skip, so that created some interesting side effects. I wrote all of AndrAIa's POV without any contractions since she speaks that way pre-time skip. To emphasize this, I made everyone else use contractions like they were going out of style. I wonder if that looked odd to anybody else, now that I think of it. Contractions are everywhere. Even by Yuletide standards I think this is a pretty tiny fandom. I recced the one other story from Reboot earlier this week; you should go read that one too! It's good. But, yeah. I was very grateful as many people did read it as they did. We're making a small fandom a little bigger, one reader, one story at a time!
The other work I did for Yuletide, was actually a Yuletide Maddness fic (Yuletide is 1000+ word stories and Yuletide Madness is anything less than that.) I wrote a story for the movie/cartoon strip Little Nemo in Slumberland. It's one of my favorite movies from childhood, so it was wonderful to write, though the mood is hard to get. Anyway, it's called Stay Up Late (You Don't Need to Dream No More)
This has been both my first year being active in fandom and so my first with Yuletide. I definitely would like to do it next year. It's a wonderful change of pace to read/write in different fandom sandboxes than usual. Writing something for someone else is motivating because you know there's one person who you make happy. Getting some story from a small fandom I loved (and BOY that was a good story) is fantastic. Though I never used the Yuletide chat, I still felt it was a great community to be in. You are brought into contact with a lot of cool fandom people who maybe you wouldn't have read/known before. Plus, there is so, so, so many great stories now out there.
I know that the move from the original Yuletide Treasure site to An Archive of Our Own was controverserial for reasons I remain largely unaware of, but personally, I really liked this archive site. The people at AO3 have obviously put a lot of time and thought into making this as organic, visually pleasing, and easy to use as possible. I especially liked featured like the tags option, the ability to have/identify pseudonames for authors who have changed names/ have multiply names, the option to put author note at the beginning or end, the collections and subcollections, and the gift!fic abilities are quite impressive. They seem to be intergrating Web 2.0 tools wonderfully. The AO3 site is run by a non-profit developed for and by fandom-people called The Organization for Transformative Works. This non-profit is why some people don't like AO3, I gather, but I found the group pretty interesting. I like the idea of fandom being more centralized because I like to read a lot of different things and meet different people via fandom, so this makes that easier. I also find their efforts to record the history of fandoms and academic work on fandom interesting. Same with their efforts to get legal protection to fandom creators/creations, though I am a little doubtful about how successful that can be. I spent some time archiving most of my fanfics onto my account there, the one exception currently is A Rose Bloomed which will follow when I get time. Don't think I'll stop posting on lj or ff.net quite yet, mostly because ff.net, ugly and ungainly though it often is, has authors and readers you wouldn't get anywhere else. But I like AO3 enough that I want my stuff there; it would be nice to eventually have that be the main fanfic stop for people. Um, if you did not participate in Yuletide but are interested in AO3, let me know. When I get invites I would love to give them to people who want them.