Afterburn

[heavensqueen]

Have a Happy New Year, with lots of wank

Comments

What am I going to do now that coal is dying down?

[(Anonymous)]

Other than wait until next Yuletide, I mean.

Re: What am I going to do now that coal is dying down?

[(Anonymous)]

Guess which fandoms are going to blow up for the next yuletide and then quickly write a thousand and one 1001 word fics in each of them, making them ineligible.

Coal is dead! Long live Coal!

[(Anonymous)]

See you in a couple of months, bitches.

Holding on to NYR fics?

[(Anonymous)]

yes/no is it a dick move to write NYR fics and hold on to them for posting to the main 2015 yuletide collection, for maximum exposure?

I'm pretty sure that's how most of the stories in the >50,000 word range get done, especially if they're any good.

Re: Holding on to NYR fics?

[(Anonymous)]

No, I don't think it is. Source: have totally done this.

Yuletide aftermath... best? worst? still reading?

[(Anonymous)]

What it says on the tin. Your favorites, your anti-favorites, and things you plan to (maybe) read, but haven't yet.

Re: Yuletide aftermath... best? worst? still reading?

[(Anonymous)]

I still need to get around to reading the Mummy-Sharknado mash up. Also the Loki/Svadilfari one.

You Want What

[(Anonymous)]

So now that the fics are up, what didn't you get? What do you want more of? What popped into your head and you just can't shake it lose?

http://youwantwhat.dreamwidth.org/755.html

Re: You Want What

[(Anonymous)]

Did you (or someone) say that comm would be hosting a fic exchange at some point? Or did I imagine that?

Worst comment on a fic and of course it was from someone without an account

[(Anonymous)]

"Decent stories with Laura Kinney I had to leave a comment when I found one. It's not the best story, you tend a little much toward telling rather than showing so to speak in your explanations and in Jubilee's thoughts. Even so I found it to be quite sweet and I hope you will continue writing these characters'."

What. Why would you say that?

Re: Worst comment on a fic and of course it was from someone without an account

[(Anonymous)]

At a guess? To make sure the author didn't write in that fandom again. It's one thing to concrit when the author asks for it. But to comment like that on a gift exchange? Not cool at all.

Aw...

[(Anonymous)]

Now that reveals has happened I was hoping that writers would reply to at least some of the comments I've left, as I was really hoping to strike up some conversations and maybe make a new friend or two. But so far nothing, bummer.

Re: Aw...

[(Anonymous)]

Aww, that sucks. How many comments did you leave?

Why?

[(Anonymous)]

Why is it bad to comment, kudos or rec after reveal?

I'm still reading, and I still want to show my respect to the authors. It isn't like I know them anyway.

Re: Why?

[(Anonymous)]

Some of us feel it's more fun to do it before if we can. Personally, I love discovering treasures, and I love the thought of possibly reading stuff by my friends or of finding someone completely new. Just in general, I tend to read a lot more widely during the anon period, because I think it's more fun.

That said, feedback after reveals isn't BAD. Kudos and recs are always good! Comment away, coalie!

Big Yuletide Fandoms-- next year

[(Anonymous)]

What new or emerging fandoms do you anticipate people falling in love with in 2015? What soon-to-be-released media do you think will be big next Yuletide?

Re: Big Yuletide Fandoms-- next year

[(Anonymous)]

I'm sure some people will find a way to get the new Star Wars movie eligible. All they have to do is nom it under Star Wars: The Force Awakens and use characters who only appear in that movie.

Goodbye and thanks for all the wank!

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks, Heavensqueen.

thanks also to all those coalies who argued with me for several hours about when to post treats that one time.

and thanks to those coalies who helped me decide who to write treats for in Trick or Treat.

Summaries

[(Anonymous)]

what kinds of summaries make you want to click on a story? what ones make you want to burn the fic to the ground? are snippets of the fic better, or actual consolidations of plot?

Re: Summaries

[(Anonymous)]

If it's a snippet of a fic, it had batter be representative of what the whole plot is about.
The summaries that tend to get me are usually kind of cliff-hangery, clearly lay out character dynamics I enjoy, and/or talk about tropes I enjoy in an interesting or innovative way.
This is probably stating the obvious but any summary that says "sorry, I suck at summaries" is an automatic no, and I also have a special pet peeve for overusing "in which XYZ happens".

Rare Ship Swap?

[(Anonymous)]

Thinking about doing Ship Swap for the first time. Does anyone here have any past experience with the exchange? (Is it fun? Hard to be matched if you request something truly rare? Worth it in terms of readers/comments? Etc.)

Re: Rare Ship Swap?

[(Anonymous)]

I did it for the first time last year and found it really enjoyable. I matched easily enough and my comment/kudos are about the same as my fics with similar rarepair status. I'd recommend it.

NYR

[(Anonymous)]

Is anyone making NYR fic plans? I've never been interested before, but this year I'd really like to write a bunch of little things for this one small fandom. Cheerleading certainly wouldn't hurt. Maybe some kind of NYR pact?

Re: NYR

[(Anonymous)]

I've got four or so I'd like to finish, maybe by Valentne's day?

fandom_stocking

[(Anonymous)]

Anyone know what time they go live?

Re: fandom_stocking

[(Anonymous)]

From their DW journal in a comment I had to dig for because that's how fandom stocking rolls:

In theory the stockings go live on January 6th, but that may change to a later date (last year, for example, my province hit a cold snap and nearly the entire thing lost power so...delayed release *g*) but there'll be plenty of warning, in theory, should it be delayed.

Stalking a shitty recip, wondering about default penalties

[(Anonymous)]

I'm checking up on my recip who never commented on their gift when I noticed that they now have more gifts from other exchanges. When I looked back through their gifts seems like sometime in the last five months they've signed up for about 8 to 10 exchanges and looks to have only written a story or two.

I'm mostly wondering, what penalties are there in other exchanges for defaulting? Yuletide seemed pretty soft on punishment, are other exchanges the same?

Re: Stalking a shitty recip, wondering about default penalties

[(Anonymous)]

They're probably a sock? They leave the stories they don't care about on that account, and the ones they like/want to claim, they transfer over to their main. There's also the option that the storiea are in an Anon collection, or were orphaned.

tl;dr Chances are that if they did the exchange more than once and don't have stories to show for it then they didn't default.

Fandom of one

[(Anonymous)]

The one drawback of getting the story of your heart in a rare fandom is that you might be the only person to leave a comment. Has this happened to anyone else as a recipient? What do you do to get your author more love? Rec posts? Fandom primers? Tell people no canon knowledge needed?

As an author, does this affect what fandoms you offer?

Re: Fandom of one

[(Anonymous)]

I leave them the most squeeful, in-depth, long-ass comment ever. :D

And also I rec them.

Pettiness

[(Anonymous)]

My Yuletide recip who could never be bothered is apparently also in another exchange that I'm in. I'm gonna be so pissed if I leave my writer a nice comment and it turns out to be this person.

Re: Pettiness

[(Anonymous)]

Aw, don't let them ruin two exchanges for you, coalie. Leave as nice a comment as you feel inspired to leave. (If it does turn out to be them, you can always come back for some bonus passive aggression and edit something into your comment about what a lovely coincidence it is that you had them as a recip at Yuletide.)

FU RECIP

[(Anonymous)]

So I finally got around to stalking my recip's yuletide contributions, and hey, they wrote a few stories actually. Nice of them. And how fortunate for them that THEIR recip's left nice comments on the stories written for them.

And hey, recip, it's cool that you got back to them so promptly and made sure to thank them for commenting. What's that? You really appreciate those comments? From the people you specifically wrote a story for?

REALLY RECIP. YOU APPRECIATE THAT, DO YOU? LIKE IT'S NICE TO GET A THANK YOU WHEN SOMEONE GIVES YOU SOMETHING. I'M SO GLAD TO KNOW THAT YOU UNDERSTAND THAT.

F U C K Y O U.

Re: FU RECIP

[(Anonymous)]

Dude. I just checked... and I'm pretty sure we have the same recip, who I'd assumed was still in a holiday crisis. Holy crap. Who DOES that?

Yuletide 2014 Non-Commenters

[(Anonymous)]

I decided to post here the list of everyone who has failed to comment on their yuletide story. First, some notes:

Two and a half weeks out, the number of works in the main archive without a comment from the recipient is 154.* Out of 2684 total works, that's about 5.7%. (I didn't do madness, sorry.)

The actual number of recipients who didn't comment on their gift fics is 120.** There are a lot of repeat offenders on the list (as indicated) who received more than one full-length fic that they failed to comment on.

(Special mention here to Ghostie, madame_le_maire, and hapax_legomenon, who I noticed all got more than 3 fics for yuletide, and actually commented on some of them, but not others. I'm sure if the writers noticed this, it made them feel even worse about their recips not commenting. Like these guys just went through their wealth of giftfics and only said thank you for the ones they deemed worthy.)

Yes, I know there could be reasons for any or all of the people on the list to have not commented. They could have missed notifications, or fallen off a cliff***, or received a fic full of their dnws, or anything. They might still show up and comment at any time - in fact in the time it took me to go through the archive, a total of 2 recipients did show up to comment (I did one final check of all stories on the list right before posting. I also did a quick cross-check against the AFK post, none of the non-commenters seem to have posted there. Even that one poster who said they wouldn't be able to comment until the end of January managed to comment on Christmas day lol). I wouldn't be surprised if there were a few more stragglers over the following days.

I'm posting the list now, as is, purely for reference. Since coal has gone silent, it won't get lost and will stay here in the top post, easy to find for the rest of the year. It will be interesting, once yuletide starts back up again, to go through the list and see just how many of these people end up commenting after all.

(However, I seem to remember that the coalie who went through the 2013 archive also came up with about 5% comment fail so I don't imagine much will change between now and yuletide 2015.)

I also included a separate list for placeholder comments. It's probably incomplete; I know I must have missed some. I didn't actually read every single recip comment in the archive in full, these were just the ones I noticed while skimming. And some of these comments are actually perfectly nice and would have been fine on their own. I just noted any time I saw someone say they'd be back to comment again later, and then didn't.

The placeholders where people DID come back and comment again were much, much more common, for the record.

* This number doesn't count fics gifted to the yuletide fairy, or with no recip listed, of which there were several. Obviously they don't have recip comments, either, but for good reason.

** There was one non-commenting recipient I excluded from the list because the story they received was incomplete. The recip is jayjaybe, if anyone is curious. It looks like they didn't default, so I'm not sure what happened there or why they didn't get a pinch hit. Weird.

*** It's interesting that more than a few of these people have managed to reply to comments on their own fics, however, so at least we knows it's not the cliff thing.

Okay, now for the names!

Re: Yuletide 2014 Non-Commenters - A-K

[(Anonymous)]

http://archiveofourown.org/users/a_la_grecque
http://archiveofourown.org/users/a tattered rose (atr)
http://archiveofourown.org/users/acaramelmacchiato
http://archiveofourown.org/users/ag_sasami
http://archiveofourown.org/users/Alex130
http://archiveofourown.org/users/Alona
http://archiveofourown.org/users/amaresu x2
http://archiveofourown.org/users/anemptymargin x4
http://archiveofourown.org/users/Apricot
http://archiveofourown.org/users/arianrhod
http://archiveofourown.org/users/badgirlsdoitwell
http://archiveofourown.org/users/Bard
http://archiveofourown.org/users/basilmemories
http://archiveofourown.org/users/BatchSan
http://archiveofourown.org/users/BearHatter
http://archiveofourown.org/users/bellsdown
http://archiveofourown.org/users/bhaer
http://archiveofourown.org/users/blueyeti x2
http://archiveofourown.org/users/borrowedphrases
http://archiveofourown.org/users/CaitN
http://archiveofourown.org/users/camelonajourney
http://archiveofourown.org/users/carolinga x2
http://archiveofourown.org/users/cartographies
http://archiveofourown.org/users/cdocks
http://archiveofourown.org/users/chamilet
http://archiveofourown.org/users/chaoticrandomness
http://archiveofourown.org/users/Chosenfire
http://archiveofourown.org/users/Custodian (custodian) x2
http://archiveofourown.org/users/Cuits
http://archiveofourown.org/users/DanaCasey
http://archiveofourown.org/users/danaste x2
http://archiveofourown.org/users/demeter
http://archiveofourown.org/users/dickwhitmans
http://archiveofourown.org/users/dreamsonfire x2
http://archiveofourown.org/users/drumbot_beta
http://archiveofourown.org/users/dryadofthetrees
http://archiveofourown.org/users/dudavocado
http://archiveofourown.org/users/eak_a_mouse
http://archiveofourown.org/users/engmaresh
http://archiveofourown.org/users/fieldofyellowdandelions
http://archiveofourown.org/users/fire_and_a_rose
http://archiveofourown.org/users/fleurbleues
http://archiveofourown.org/users/florahart
http://archiveofourown.org/users/foxlives
http://archiveofourown.org/users/gabby_silang
http://archiveofourown.org/users/ghostie x3
http://archiveofourown.org/users/gigglecreek
http://archiveofourown.org/users/gingertime
http://archiveofourown.org/users/Greens
http://archiveofourown.org/users/GVSpurlock x2
http://archiveofourown.org/users/hapax_legomenon x3
http://archiveofourown.org/users/hecateis x2
http://archiveofourown.org/users/invisible_cities x2
http://archiveofourown.org/users/invisible_cities
http://archiveofourown.org/users/josie x2
http://archiveofourown.org/users/judas_river
http://archiveofourown.org/users/kawabiala
http://archiveofourown.org/users/KayleeFrye
http://archiveofourown.org/users/knowmefirst
http://archiveofourown.org/users/koze x2

[(Anonymous)]

Incidentally, I never got a notification that I had a Holly Poly gift. And some people didn't get notifications for Madness treats, at least. So it's possible some people never got that email.

But everybody knows when the Yuletide reveal is, jesus christ. If you can completely forget it (barring something devastating having just happened to you), then why are you even bothering?

[(Anonymous)]

The only way I can see a missing notification being an issue is if the person received more than one fic. In that case, if they didn't go to their "gifts" page, they might not realize they had gotten an additional story.

Dreaming of _coal

[(Anonymous)]

In my dream last night it was already time for yuletide and _coal again, but it isn't :(

Re: Dreaming of _coal

[(Anonymous)]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FX2d1LamXb0

Galentine's Day

[(Anonymous)]

Galentine's Day blows man.

Re: Galentine's Day

[(Anonymous)]

Why? What happened?

150 names on the banned list

[(Anonymous)]

Is yours there? 'Fess up!

Re: 150 names on the banned list

[(Anonymous)]

Shockingly later to the party, I know, but totally forgot this place existed.

Where can you view the banned list? And are there really 150 people on it? Juicy!

Are there 150 all up or 150 new names this year?

Late to the party

[(Anonymous)]

I read both Rivers of London + The Raven Cycle in the last month or so, and they were great! Up next, is Ancillary Justice. Thanks for reccing all of these things, y'all. My friends irl do not have the best taste in literature.

Does Rivers of London stay consistently good throughout the series, btw?

Re: Late to the party

[(Anonymous)]

I'm currently finishing up the third book (Whispers Underground) and I can report that it does indeed stay fantastic at least up to this point, with all sorts of interesting plots and characters and an overarching mystery about a Moriarty-type nemesis which is touched on just enough in each book to stay intriguing without dragging on. The Rivers (especially Lady Ty) remain major characters, as do many of the police characters introduced in the first book, and Peter is amazing and hilarious and Nightingale has all kinds of moments of awesome and yeah! I too was introduced to this series through Yuletide and I am so hooked.

[(Anonymous)]

Boooooo...

[(Anonymous)]

You rang?