Selenay's Ramblings

Dear Yuletide Writer,

Thank you for writing for me. I'm sure you're going to write something amazing, so here are some thoughts and ideas that will hopefully help. My DNFs are pretty strong, but if there's something you want to do with these characters that I haven't suggested but it fits with the general themes of what I love, feel free to go for it! I've given some general stuff first and then I dive into the fandom-specific stuff.

Loves:

- Women rescuing each other
- Competency
- Cheesy tropes!
- Intense, passionate, world-shattering kissing
- Flirting, banter, humour
- Happy endings

Do not wants:

- Deathfic and sad endings
- Rape and dubcon
- Graphic violence, blood play, extreme kinks etc.
- Incenst, paediophilia, bestiality etc.
- Humiliation, adultery/cheating
- Character bashing


( Fandom specific thoughts beneath the cut )

I have a completed Yuletide draft that passes the bus test. Hooray! And with plenty of time for editing and beta-ing, which is particularly awesome.

Every year, I'm sure this will be the year when I end up defaulting, but every year I don't. This is my eleventh Yuletide and I'm still maintaining my record for not dropping out.

I'm slightly stunned that this is my eleventh Yuletide. Where did all those years go?

I am seriously considering doing some kind of tiny fic promptapalooza next week. Maybe. It might be a fun way to keep my writing muscles working for a while. It's something I used to do on Tumblr way back when I was actually using it and it was good fun, so if there's any interest, I'll do it.

Before I go any further, thank you for writing for me! We share at least one fandom, and that makes me happy.

Loves:

- Women rescuing each other
- Women having epic friendships
- Competency
- Cheesy tropes!
- Intense, passionate, world-shattering kissing
- Flirting, banter, humour
- Happy endings

Do not wants:

- Deathfic and sad endings
- Rape and dubcon
- Graphic violence, blood play, extreme kinks etc.
- Incenst, paediophilia, bestiality etc.
- Humiliation, adultery/cheating
- Character bashing

Specific fandom thoughts below:
( Read more... )

Dear Yuletide Writer,

First of all, an early "Thank you!" for writing a fic in one of my fandoms. That alone has made me happy. If you've already got the perfect idea, please, go ahead and write it! If you want to know more about what I love about these pairings and prompts I've been mulling, I've thrown some thoughts together below.

I'm happy with any rating you're comfortable writing for.

General likes: I am a total sucker for tropes: accidental marriage, fake dating, stuck in a cabin, baby on the doorstep, cheesy AUs, the works. Throw them at me! I adore competent women kicking ass, women bonding, get together fics and figuring out how to stay together fics. I read fic to get the happy endings that are often missing in real life and in canon.

Dislikes: Death fic, sad endings, BDSM and heavy kink, graphic violence, dub-con/non-con, character bashing, cheating/adultery.

( Holby City (Serena Campbell, Bernie Wolfe) )

( Custard Protocol - Gail Carriger (Primrose Tunstall, Tasherit) )

( Ghostbusters (2016) (Jillian Holtzmann, Erin Gilbert) )

( Cornetto 40 - love Commercial (Debbie, Maria Fernandez) )

( Persuasion - Jane Austen (Frederick Wentworth, Anne Elliot) )

I'm choosing not to look at how many days it is until Christmas, but it is starting to feel a bit Christmassy now. We've decorated at my office. I've started my advent calendar.

I'm trying to figure out how many Christmas-themed books I can read in three weeks. I'm feeling a need for a Dark is Rising reread and I've got a stack of cozy comfort books with Christmas in the title. I'm trying to resist the temptation to add The Domesday Book to the stack because I read it last year and it's not exactly cheerful.

And I'm halfway through the annual Box of Delights rewatch, which always makes me feel festive.

At church, we're embracing the advent season and it's lovely. I hadn't realised how much I missed the Anglican traditions around seasons until I spent a few years in a Baptist church that did its best to ignore all of the festivals except for Christmas Day and Easter Sunday. It's such a relief to be back in a congregation where I feel like I fit--all of me, not just the Baptist-appropriate parts.

Yuletide is starting to come together, too. My main fic is in its second draft and I'm well into writing a treat, which is most unusual for December 6th! Over the last few years, I've been doing NaNo and ending up feeling totally burnt out in December, so Yuletide has been a struggle. This year I'm excited about Yuletide again!

I chose not to do NaNo due to the horrific work deadlines and trying to get my Marvel Bang fic edited on time, but it's turned out to be a blessing in disguise. By the time I was through the worst of the post-work-and-Marvel-Bang burn out and starting to itch to write something, I still had loads of time until the Yuletide deadline. Maybe this is a signal that NaNo just isn't the right timing for me.

Provided this week doesn't go to hell, I'm on vacation on Friday until December 19th, which will be fantastic. Lots of time to finish recovering, to read books, to do Christmas baking, to veg out with the telly...I'm excited to have a vacation, even though we're forecasted to get out first big snow on Monday!

Dear Yuletide Author,

You've signed up to write for one of my beloved teeny fandoms so that already makes me adore you and utter little squeaky happy noises :-D Thank you!

I'm not hard to please, I don't think. A lot of my fandoms are femslashy this year, but if F/F isn't your thing, I'm a huge fan of female friendships and fics focusing on those.

This letter isn't as long and terrifying as it looks, I promise. I broke it all down into sections and put the general notes in their own bit, which is why it looks long, but honestly. As long as you don't include anything on my dislikes list, I'm probably going to be happy.

( General likes and loves )

( General dislikes )

( Think of England - K J Charles: Fenella Carruth, Patricia Merton )

( Uprooted - Naomi Novik - Agnieszka, Kasia )

( Jupiter Ascending (2015): Jupiter Jones, Kiza Apini )

( Jurassic Park (Movies): Claire Dearing, Ellie Sattler )

( Cornetto  )

I've been reccing Yuletide fics on my Tumblr (selenay936), trying to get as many read and recced as I can before the reveals. The recs are here.

If I have some time later in the week (and I'm terribly bored, which is unlikely) I might try to put together a big list here, but for now, use the Tumblr link :-D

Happy Holidays, everyone!

And I got the BEST Yuletide gifts :-) I can't believe I actually got fics in the tiny fandom that I'd been super hoping just to get one little thing in.

I got two!

skies above can't be stormy and Love-All are both based on this awesome little film, and my heart is filled with joy by them :-)

Hope everyone else is enjoy their day, and finding amazing fics in the Yuletide collection to read. Just don't forget to eat delicious food and watch Doctor Who, okay?

My co-workers and I have dubbed last week, Hell Week. It was not good. It was, in fact, very, very bad. A lot of work, a lot of frustration, a lot of overtime. But the end result is that all the sections of Project Chaos are now live, so we're now mostly working on support for the next month or so until our maintenance team takes over.

Woot!

Admittedly, I have to get up early on Sunday to work for a couple of hours, but hopefully it won't be all weekend. Or even all day. Famous last words, I know. The more meetings I'm in about this weekend's activities, the more I suspect it won't be as simple as everyone wants to believe.

Last Saturday was a very long day due to a ten hour-long deployment, and I spent Sunday trying to catch up on a bunch of chores that I didn't get to on Saturday due to all the working. I'd rather not have another all-work weekend.

Ugh.

As the days tick closer to NaNo, I'm really hoping that the level of overtime starts to drop. November needs to be a light and easy month at work so that I can put all my focus on the writing. I'm now incredibly glad that I had all my Big Bang fics in good shape by the end of September, so work didn't kill my hopes of publishing those on time.

There are so many teevees related things that I wanted to have the energy to comment on. So many. The Flash continues to delight me. Once Upon a Time is great. Agents of SHIELD is one of my biggest happies of the week (OMG, May and Phil dancing! So much new head canon and C/C plot bunnies!). NCIS and NCIS:NOLA are the perfect level of brain candy. Sleepy Hollow is squeeful. Scorpion is adorkable.

Let's not discuss The Arrow, okay?

The last two episodes of Doctor Who have been the strongest of the season. Wow, the Mummy creeped me out!

Squee with me in comments over it all, as spoilery as you want to be :-D

Lastly, yuletide is open for sign ups! *muppet flail* I love Yuletide. It's always so much fun. My biggest problem this year is trimming my requests down to six or under, which isn't a problem I've had in the past. Even if I restrict myself to fandoms where I only want female characters, I've got five requests. And my potential offer list is ridiculous.

On one level, there are characters who didn't get in that are making me regret not nominating. My traditional Call the Midwife request can't be done due to the lack of Cynthia. Nobody nominated Jessica Drew for Captain Marvel. But really, if they had been there, my request problem would have been even bigger.

I'm prepping my DYW letter. It's a little epic. Oops? It'll be better when I've trimmed out a fandom or two. Yuletide is such a fun and wonderful exchange :-D

(If anyone is wondering about new fic from me, keep your eyes peeled on Saturday. My first Marvel Big Bang fic goes live *and* the femslashex archive opens. This time of year is lovely and ficcish. I need to find more reading time to read all the lovely new fic being publish.)

I'm starting to count the days until my Christmas break. Due to my compressed work schedule and the plethora of federal and company holidays, I've managed to get a Christmas break that runs from 20th December to January 5th while only using five vacation days. In other words, I'm off work for nearly two and a half weeks over Christmas.

*flail arms*

So, I'm now counting the days until December 19th when I skip out of the office singing silly carols and relishing the idea of not returning for a very long time.

Not that I don't enjoy my job, I do, but it's been a long time since I had a break that didn't involve travelling or dealing with parents and parental expectations of what a 'vacation' is. Often both. My mother's idea of a good vacation usually involves getting lots of DIY jobs done around the house and travelling places to get administrative stuff done or shop for curtains. If I take a staycation when she's here, there's usually no chance that I'll get time to sit around reading books and fic or writing for hours on end or marathoning entire TV series.

Take a wild guess at what I've got planned for Christmas :-D

So, yes, countdown to vacation is started. Nine days to go!

I'm feeling ambivalent about my preparedness for Christmas. On the one hand, I've got the turkey (stuffed turkey breast, actually) ordered at the butcher's and the Christmas pud is in the freezer. On the other hand, I got as far as mixing up pastry and mincemeat but haven't actually made and frozen the mince pies yet. Nor have I ordered the Christmas presents.

I got three quarters of my Christmas shopping done tonight. Tomorrow I make mince pies and finish the shopping. When those things are done, I'll feel much happier about the entire thing.

Shockingly, my Yuletide fic may be the only thing I feel relatively calm about. I finished it last night leaving me with well over a week for editing, beta-ing, and re-editing. I'm even feeling fairly happy with it. Huh.

And I still have two weeks to get the big crackfic C/C fic edited for Christmas Eve posting :-D