andraste | Yuletide Nomination Dilemas

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Having finally settled on my three precious fandoms, now I have to sort out the character nominations. The Mysterious Cities of Gold is easy, since there are only four characters I really care about, but the other two are proving a challenge.

I mean, choosing four characters from The Secret World, which has dozens of people I would be interested to hear more about? Torture!

I have decided that my third slot should go to Monster by Bigbang. But deciding how to nominate characters is tricky - should I just use the stage names of the band members? And given that there are only four slots, which one do I leave out?

Yuletide: why so difficult?

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From:

andraste

I am supportive of your Yuletide enthusiasm!

First of all: you will need to sign up for an AO3 account. I've just sent you an invitation via e-mail.

After you have done that, go here.

Step One: you can add three small fandoms to the GIANT PILE OF TINY THINGS. If you've got a favourite game/movie/book/TV show/play/whatever that someone should totally write about, now is the time to nominate it. You can nominate up to four characters for each fandom.

(Also, if there's a fandom on the list that you want to write/request but your favourite character is not there, you will need to use one of your nominations to add them. For example: someone has nominated Red vs. Blue but didn't list Donut, so if someone wanted a story about him they'd need to put in another Red vs. Blue nomination with Donut attached.)

Step Two: Think of four requests. Here's a list of requests from last year so you can see the kind of thing people ask for.

(Important Thing That Causes Wank Every Year: The details field is optional. You don't have to write anything there - although some writers may suffer a stress-induced breakdown when faced with a prompt consisting of nothing but the fandom and some character names - and nor is your writer obligated to abide by the details. So if I requested X-Men with Wolverine and Shadowcat as characters and asked for a ballet AU, my assigned writer would have to write a story about Wolverine and Shadowcat but the ballet AU part would be optional. It is considered good manners to at least try to write the specific thing requested, but it's not compulsory.)

Step Three: The actual sign-ups, which are not open yet. You put in your requests and offer to write at least four fandoms. You can offer up to ten. (Important Thing That Causes Angst Every Year: don't offer something unless you're absolutely sure you can write it. Murphy's Law states that the fandom you threw in at the last second thinking 'oh, nobody will really ask for that!' will be the one you get.)

Step Four: Assignments are sent out. Most of the time, people only match on one fandom, so out of the four things your assignee requested you will probably only be able to write one. (On the other hand, sometimes you get lucky.) Panic is customary at this point. There is a traditional dance that involves running in small circles yelling 'WHY DID I SAY I COULD WRITE THIS?!'

Step Five: You write a story of at least 1,000 words and upload it to the archive. Eventually, the archive opens and everyone sends kudos and feedback and celebrates! (Usually it opens on Christmas Day, Australian time. Many is the Christmas afternoon I have spent browsing the archive after the rest of the family has fallen into a food coma.)

I think that's all the important stuff.