"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'."
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.
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?
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?
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.)
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?
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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