prodigy | Reading

yuletidemods posting in

yuletide_admin

Assignments are out! You can find your assignment:

at your assignments page: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YOUR-USERNAME-HERE/assignments

at the sidebar of the collection

in your email.

You must write for one of your recipient's requests, including all of the characters they specified in that request (but see below). It doesn't have to be the fandom you offered.

Some recipients have selected several characters, but given permission for writers not to include them all using the Additional Tags checkboxes (the ones that start "My gift must…"). These tags are recent and we're still experimenting with their use, so please check through mods if you're not completely sure what your recipient means. You always have the option of including all the characters your recipient selected.

Your assignment is due at 9pm UTC on December 17. Note that this is an earlier deadline for 2025 as compared to the last few years and may be one calendar day earlier in your timezone.

Please click on that link right now! The date and time it shows may surprise you. Better to be surprised now than at the deadline!

Our reveals are earlier this year as well.

No Peeking (Or Squeaking) Until December 24th!
This is a secret exchange. Please don’t announce or hint what your assignment is. Don't say what you offered. Don’t reveal to your recipient who you are or what you plan to write for them. In fact, please don’t contact your recipient at all! You can send questions through the mods at yuletideadmin@gmail.com.

I have questions!!
Right! Send us an email at yuletideadmin@gmail.com, or, if your question won't give away what you offered or who you're writing for, you're welcome to comment here. We get tonnes of questions at this time, so please bear with us - it may take us a few days to reply.

Based on our survey about author questions and some internal discussion, this year we plan to include a questions for a few fandoms each time we contact a recipient, but we won’t necessarily include decoy questions for every single fandom. This may give the recipient a clue as to which fandoms they’re more likely to receive but should preserve some of the suspense!

Please don't ask us to poke your recipient to update a locked or placeholder letter until at least October 29.

When you send us a question about your assignment, please include your assignment link, which looks like: https://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletide2025/assignments/#######

Some of your questions may be answered by our next post when we reveal all requests. Please keep an eye on our admin community!

Pinch hits and all requests
The first batch of pinch hits will go out in the next day. In the next following days, after those pinch hits are claimed, we will make all requests visible and open the Yuletide Madness collection.

Check out the pinch hit community,

yuletide_pinch_hits, and sign up through Discord, a feed, or the Google groups mailing list to get immediate alerts for pinch hits. You don't have to be signed up to this year's round of Yuletide to claim a pinch hit.

The New Year's Resolutions 2025 collection is now closed.

Schedule, Rules, & Collection | Contact Mods | Participant DW | Participant LJ | Pinch Hits on DW | Discord | Tag set | Tag set app
Please either comment logged-in or sign a name. Unsigned anonymous comments will be left screened.

fennectik posting in

anime_manga

Been catching up on Vampire Princess Miyu as a way to go with the Halloween thing without doing too much about it. Its still haunting, and it has become one of my all-time favorites. I'm hoping to finally finish the series and the OAV which I also watched way back then on VHS.

(In fact, that was the first time I began watching it.)

I'm also watching episodes of Ghost Sweeper Mikami with the same goal of finishing it up as well.

Anyone here also watching Horror/Supernatural themed Anime this month?

Current Music: Culture Club- Karma Chameleon

mark posting in

dw_maintenance

Good morning, afternoon, and evening!

We're doing some database and other light server maintenance this weekend (upgrading the version of MySQL we use in particular, but also probably doing some CDN work.)

I expect all of this to be pretty invisible except for some small "couple of minute" blips as we switch between machines, but there's a chance you will notice something untoward. I'll keep an eye on comments as per usual.

Ta for now!

patrokla posting in

yuletide

Hello from this year's primary mod, Helen! Kat and Livi have largely stepped away this year, but are very kindly helping with some behind the scenes stuff. Most posts and emails will be from me :) This will be my first time doing a lot of the swaps process, so if you notice anything seriously awry, please let me know!

( 2025 schedule, links, and more! )

Questions? Check out the current FAQ. (Which will be updated this weekend to reflect international shipping issues!) If that doesn't help, feel free to comment here or email us at yuleswaps at gmail dot com!

Current Mood: determined
Current Location: under attack by hungry cats

qian

skygiants did a very kind post about this development, which made me think perhaps I should also do a public post about it on this, the social networking site on which I am probably most active ...

Anyway, my epistolary novella The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo is being republished by indie press Homeward Books and for the first time, it will be available in hard copy form! With a jazzy new cover featuring art by Kim Nguyen, it is SO cute and chic. Homeward Books are fundraising to put out their first two releases (Jade is the second) and you can pre-order both via the Kickstarter here.

yuletidemods posting in

yuletide_admin

Sign-ups for this year's event are now closed, with 1224 sign-ups. Welcome to everyone who's joined us for Yuletide 2025!

The Avoid Matching request form will remain open for another three hours for last-minute edits to your requests.

What will mods do now?
- Run matching.
- Contact participants who have no possible recipients, or where there's another matter to discuss.
- Update you on when assignments are likely to go out.

If we need to contact you, we'll use the email account associated with your AO3 account. (You can find it at Preferences -> Edit Profile -> Change Email.) We may also use this account later in Yuletide - for example, if your author has a question for you. Please check that you can access this email!

What should you do now?

Check and edit any letter you may have linked in your sign-up (please ensure it's complete by end of October 29th AT THE VERY LATEST, and consider adding it to the app and to the comments at the letters post). (If you didn't link your letter in your sign-up, it's too late now. Trust in your author!)

Please check your letter is accessible - log out of the platform where you have posted it and check that you can still view it, or ask a friend to. Tumblr in particular may cause issues with this and may require you to change your settings.

Keep quiet about what you've offered: Yuletide is anonymous until reveals.

Check that you can access your AO3-linked email.

Check out the pinch hit community, yuletide_pinch_hits, and sign up through Discord, a feed, or the Google groups mailing list to get immediate alerts for pinch hits. You don't have to be signed up to this year's round of Yuletide to claim a pinch hit.

Browse the promo post or even add a promotion.

Check that you're happy with your AO3 settings for treats / unassigned gifts - see an older post for more information. If your account is new, treats may be disabled.

Look forward to your assignments!

Congratulations to everyone who posted a story to the 2025 New Year's Resolutions collection, either as requested by mods or just because you wanted to fill a prompt. The collection will be open for roughly one more day, until we send out assignments - if you're planning to post, post soon! The NYR 2026 collection will open on January 1.

Schedule, Rules, & Collection | Contact Mods | Participant DW | Participant LJ | Pinch Hits on DW | Discord | Tag set | Tag set app
Please either comment logged-in or sign a name. Unsigned anonymous comments will be left screened.

kindness_says posting in

yuletide

[Update: Sign-ups are now live! New post here.]

Hello! A few people have been wondering in the Yuletide Discord whether we would have swaps this year... tl;dr it was dicey, but YES!

You may thank

morbane (even more than usual ;)) for following up on everyone's behalf; Livi and I had been having an extremely slow/distracted convo about it since early September, but as always, knowing people are waiting on us motivated me LOL. But neither of us will be your primary mod this year! It will be the lovely Helen (

patrokla), who started helping out last year. <3

Here is the lil statement I made in Discord, very slightly modified for DW:

Hi everyone! Official announcement (and thank you, Morbane, for playing go-between while we worked things out behind the scenes :)) -- yuleswaps WILL go forward this year, we hope, and we're sorry for the delay!

Indeed I (Kat/Kindness on AO3/kindness_says) had some commitments in Sept/Oct and did not think I'd be able to prioritize swaps this year, and Liviania/anialove is also pretty busy irl atm -- but Helen/patrokla (a great longtime swapper who joined our team last year) is stepping up to give it a shot in spite of their own busyness! We're meeting tomorrow in hopes of getting sign-ups open by the end of this weekend and matches out in early November so as to stay roughly on the usual timeline. Perhaps ambitious, but we will try!

If anybody else was interested in running swaps, Morbane absolutely was speaking for me that we're not offended, and please feel free to ~~DM me~~ comment or email (yuleswaps at gmail) if you're interested in helping out. ESPECIALLY if you are at all code-savvy/great at answering emails efficiently/bursting with ideas for future improvement. <3

You might hear from me again, or you might not! I will def be helping on the backend, for at least this year/as long as I can, and we really appreciate your patience if we're a little slow or clunky this year as we try to sustain/transition. I also apologize to anyone who didn't get fully covered after January (haven't done 2024 cleanup yet... will try if there's time)!

I have LOVED running swaps, well mostly I have anyway ;) for the past 15 (!!) years. Back in the day I did not read coal but was always charmed when friends occasionally sent me screenshots of anons thrilled about swaps, and I similarly really enjoyed skimming like...1-2 years' worth of this discord not long after Morbane emailed me (was very tempted to answer some super old questions but refrained lol). Your enthusiasm has absolutely been the thing to make all the time and headaches worth it.

<3 <3 <3

So that's that!

Love/candy/books/drinks always,
Kat

P.S. For any newer Yuletiders who are interested (or just confused as to what Yuleswaps is), ~~here is last year's sign-ups post, which links to our FAQ, etc. This year's sign-ups post will come soon, if all goes to plan!~~ here is this year's sign-ups post, which links to our FAQ (soon to be updated)!

Current Mood: fond
Current Location: now exiting limbo

yuletidemods posting in

yuletide_admin

Sign-up instructions
Collection
Letters post

Countdown to Sign-Ups Closing

Some notes/reminders:

If you don't select characters in a request, it's your author's choice which character or characters to include from the tag set. Please don't say you want a particular character more than others when you have not selected character tags.

Please check the additional tag you've selected makes sense for the characters you've selected. For example, "One or more characters (giver's choice)" doesn't make sense if you select several characters and you really want at least two to interact.

Please check you can access the email associated with your AO3 account. Mods may use this to reach out to you with questions.

If you are open to treats, feel free to say so - it isn't greedy! It's just letting people know that you haven't disabled the treat setting.

karios posting in

yuletide

Are you interested in text adventures, CYOA, Twine games, or other sorts of interactive fiction? Do you want to let your writer know you'd be happy to receive something along those lines? Are you looking for someone to write IF for? This post is for you.

(I copied and pasted this directly from last year which was also copy pasted from previous years. Let me know via comment or discord ping if any of the links broke or anything else needs editing.)

What is IF?

Interactive Fiction (IF) covers everything from text adventures through to visual novels, by way of all sorts of experimental works. It can be mostly a game, or mostly a story; it can be a way to immerse the reader, or to play around with the concepts of storyteller and audience; it can be an exploration of chance, or of fate; it can be a straightforward story, or something else entirely. From Healy's post:

[IF] is a term used for games which are made up primarily of text, like Adventure, Zork, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and other text adventures, or more experimental hypertext works like My Father's Long, Long Legs, or even visual novels. Interactive fiction these days is generally divided into two groups based on how you interact with the game: parser-based IF, and choice-based IF.

Parser-based IF, more commonly known as text adventures, are controlled by typed in commands, like "GET KEY", "OPEN DOOR", "GO NORTH", "LOOK UNDER BED", and stuff like that. Not every command you type in will work, though, so they're hard to get used to if you haven't tried them before. To make things easier, here's a card of most of the common commands. Some good parser-based IF to try first would be Ryan Veeder's So, You've Never Played a Text Adventure Before, Huh?, Admiral Jota's Lost Pig, Andrew Plotkin's The Dreamhold, and Adam Cadre's Photopia.

Choice-based IF is simpler; you just pick from a number of options. This can be done through hyperlinks and other clicky selections, though more rarely you may have to type a number from a list. Good examples of choice-based IF include Anna Anthropy's Star Court, Alan DeNiro's Solarium, the various games hosted by Choice of Games, and most every given visual novel.

Writing IF for Yuletide

IF is considered opt-in for Yuletide - please don't write it for people who don't want it. If you aren't sure whether it would be welcome or not, ask a mod to check with the intended recipient.

You are still required to follow the normal rules, such as focusing on requested characters (unless the recipient has said you needn't include them all).

It can be hard to figure out what word count an IF story really is - what you've written is full of code that doesn't count, and what your recipient sees may vary in length depending on their choices. If you're posting to the main collection, try to overshoot the minimum requirement a bit, just to be on the safe side. Say a minimum of somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 words. Or probably about 10 to 15 minutes play through.

If your post to the main AO3 collection is under 1,000 words (e.g. you're just linking to an online playable version elsewhere), please drop the mods a note so they know it isn't someone posting something under the minimum, and provide them with an estimated word-count.

If you're writing a treat, unless it includes over 1,000 words of text and you're also sure your recipient would be happy with it as a main gift, please post it to Madness

Your recipient does need to be able to access what you've created! Please link to a suitable IF interpreter if required, or if possible make a web-playable version.

Requesting IF for Yuletide

If you would be happy to receive IF this year, please leave a comment below, following this template:

IF Canons Nominated for Yuletide

Plenty of IF canons get nominated for Yuletide! While it's still important to ask before writing IF for someone, someone who consumes IF already will probably be more interested in getting it. (Some of these canons were adapted into other mediums, so it's possible that someone who's interested in one of those isn't at all into the IF side of things. Thus why it's important to ask.) Consider requesting or offering one of these if you're interested in IF for Yuletide. For 2025 moontyger thoughtfully composed a list of IF canons in the tagset, available here: Interactive Fiction in the 2025 Tagset!

Some IF Tools

A * means they can make web-based games.

Parser-based

Inform*: One of the biggest development tools for making parser-based IF. Has an English-like code. Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Quest*: Another big IF development tool. Has a click-and-point editor with the option to check out the code. For Windows and web.

TADS*: A long running engine for writing interactive fiction, though generally not as easy to use as Inform. The latest version can make web-based games, although they need to be hosted on a non-https address or on the IFDB.

Choice-based

Twine*: Very popular tool for making choice-based IF. Has a visual editor, with some code-y bits for variables and the like. Can be extended with some Javascript passages. Available for Mac and Windows, and Twine 2 is web-based. See this comment for more notes.

ChoiceScript*: Used by the fine folks over at Choice of Games. Uses simplified Javascript to make games. It's very stat heavy. Requires a text editor. See this comment for notes.

Ren'py: Engine for making visual novels. Uses a simple scripting language. Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and can make games for all those platforms.

Inklewriter*: A completely web-based engine for making CYOA-style games.

suzy_queue posting in

yuletide

Do you love receiving or writing end of year holiday stories? Are you prompting a snowed in Hanukkah celebration or an Australian New Year's beach party? Season's Treatings may be for you!

This mini-challenge is all about November, December and January holidays, traditions, and cultural celebrations big and small and all over the globe--and perhaps some fantasy worlds, who knows. If you want to prompt it, someone may want to write it.

When you comment, please include:

AO3 Name:
Letter Link (if applicable):
Holiday(s) Requested:
Fandom and character(s):
Prompts:

When you upload, tag it as Season's Treatings so we can all find them.

Current Mood: tired

metonymy

placeholder! letter TK, hopefully by 10/27

( signup below! )

rocky41_7 posting in

books

Last night I wrapped up another Julia Armfield novel, Private Rites. This novel is about three estranged sisters who are pushed back together when their father dies.

Very sorry I can't give this one a higher rating (I gave it a 3.25 on StoryGraph), because I loved the last Armfield novel I read, Our Wives Under the Sea, and this book shares a lot of similarities with that one. Our Wives Under the Sea was a meditative, slow-paced exploration of an evolving grief which hit me quite hard, but Private Rites comes off, if I can be excused for phrasing it this way, like it's trying too hard. Private Rites obviously really wants the reader to think it's Deep and Thoughtful and Literary, and it shows this desire too clearly for it to work, for me.

What does succeed in Private Rites is the frustrating and heart-breaking portrayal of three estranged sisters struggling with the legacy of a complicated and toxic father. Isla, Irene, and Agnes are not particularly likeable people, and even they muse over whether this can be tied to their strange and un-childlike childhood, or if it's just natural to them. Armfield so captures the feeling of being trapped at a certain age around family, the notion that they are locked into their view of you at ten or thirteen or seventeen and never update that view to reflect who you are as an adult and how you may subconciously regress to fit that view around them. She also catches the frustrating feeling of knowing you are reacting irrationally to a sibling and not being able to stop yourself and how much emotional history undergirds these seemingly outsized responses.

The slow apocalypse happening in the background of the story feels like it ties in well with the emotional state of the three protagonists; a drowning of the world that takes place a little at a time over many years until things become unlivable.

However, as mentioned above, the book ultimately does not succeed to me at being engaging. It is incredibly introspective in a way that comes off as navel-gazing. The "City" portions of the chapters felt especially like Armfield begging us to find the novel artistic and creative, which was unnecessary, because there's plenty here to stand on its own.

The ending also felt like a complete non-sequitur. The seeds for it were sown throughout the book, but not prominently enough that I cared when it came about. Instead, I felt cheated out of an emotional denouement among the three sisters, which is cast off in a coup by this last-minute, poorly-explained plot point.

I also felt like Isla gets an unfair share of grief, and it wasn't clear why she among the three of them was singled out to be exclusively miserable.

Do love the queer representation here; Armfield continues to excel in that.

On the whole, there is a lot of good meat here and it approaches grief from a completely different angle from Our Wives Under the Sea so that it doesn't feel at all repetitive if you've read that one, but it also drags more and I found the ending unsatisfying.

fennectik posting in

anime_manga

Dani Chambers who voices Becky Blackbell (One of my favorite characters in the series,) is taking time off voice acting for voice therapy as stated on a post she made on X:

"This isn't permanent but when my voice comes back I can pop back in," Chambers said. "I'm currently in voice therapy to work on getting back to my normal range. But for now, Becky (and other baby voices) will be voice matched."

The announcement came hours before Season 3 of Spy X Family premiered on Crunchyroll.

Meanwhile, Chambers will still be providing her vocal talents to other characters in the show. Alongside voicing Becky Blackbell in Spy x Family, Chambers has also been in the English dubs of Solo Leveling, Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, and several video games, including Pokemon Masters and Genshin Impact. - gamesradar

You can read more about it here:

Link

Current Mood: gloomy
Current Music: Chevelle - Hats Off To The Bull

spiralicious posting in

endings

( You're about to view content that a community administrator has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

spiralsheep posting in

endings

( You're about to view content that a community administrator has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

morbane posting in

yuletide

The MultiLingYule mini-challenge is for works in languages other than English.

Maybe there are very few fanworks in your first, second, etc language, and you'd love to connect with a fellow speaker who's also a fellow fan.

Maybe you're learning a new language and getting a gift in it would be a delightful way to improve your fluency.

Maybe you just want to talk about how much you love conlangs and invite someone to incorporate conlangs into your gift.

The possibilities are multi-ple!

MultiLingYule is an opt-in challenge similar to Crueltide and Interactive Fiction. Comment here to let people know

-if you are interested in receiving gifts in languages other than English
-what languages those are
-what you're prompting (link your letter; if you don't have a letter, you can link your prompts on the app after requests are revealed)
-any other useful notes.

With a Mod Hat On

On the requesting side: if you would be happy if a gift in a different language were your only gift, please also note this in the optional details of your sign-up form. This prevents mod panic when we go to check assignments and need to figure out if someone can actually read their gift!

On the creation side: unless someone has clearly indicated that a non-English work would suit as their only gift, gifts of that kind need be posted in Yuletide Madness, regardless of length. Works can only go in the main collection if they fulfil all the same requirements as an assigned gift.

Similarly, someone may be delighted to get a gift in a language you've just started to learn, and connect with you over enthusiasm for that language, but if you're posting a gift in the Main rather than the Madness collection, it should probably either be in a language you're fluent in or in a language you can call on fluent help for.

On the (tangential) beta side, people who can check text snippets, lines of dialogue, etc, in multiple languages are extremely valuable and appreciated, and if you can offer this service, please consider doing so when the beta post goes up.

yuletidemods posting in

yuletide_admin

Sign-ups close at 9pm UTC 24 October. We're more than halfway through sign-ups - if you haven't signed up, get in quick! If you have signed up, we're glad to have you. Please check all your details are correct.

If your sign-up includes a letter link, please make sure that link works for all viewers! In particular, if your letter is on tumblr, please set it up to be viewable for people who do NOT have tumblr. If you're using Google docs, we recommend linking a web-published version of your letter.

Pinch hits

Pinch hits are a major part of Yuletide. Pinch hits are writing assignments that need to be claimed by volunteers, and pinch hitters are the writers who claim and fulfil them. Currently, we publish pinch hit details on

yuletide_pinch_hits, but we also send out notifications of new pinch hits to members of the Yuletide Discord server who have taken on the "yulephs" role, and to anyone subscribed to the Google Group for Yuletide pinch hits.

If you're interested in helping out by taking on extra assignments, please check that you're signed up to receive notifications by one of these methods! We'll send a test message out soon.

Sign-ups

We've introduced some new features this year! You can now request up to 8 fandoms, and you may fill out a form (linked from the sign-up form) if there are people you would prefer not to match to. Beginning in 2023 we have also included an additional tag checkbox where you can specify whether you want all of your requested characters to appear, or if you’d be happy with particular combinations you specify, or any combination your writer chooses.

If you have questions about any of these, please email us at yuletideadmin@gmail.com! We'd like to make sure things go smoothly for you.

Requesting characters can be a tricky aspect of Yuletide, so just in case, here's a refresher:

If you select 2-4 characters in a request, you can only match to someone who offers them all, even if you’ve indicated in the additional tags that you’re happy with any one of them. If there are 4 or fewer characters nominated, and you’d be happy with a story about any of them, selecting no characters gives you the widest range of matches.

If you select no characters in a request, that means your writer may write about any nominated character or about the fandom world in general. Please only do this when you'd genuinely be happy with a story about any nominated character, or the world.

Schedule, Rules, & Collection | Contact Mods | Participant DW | Participant LJ | Pinch Hits on DW | Discord | Tag set | Tag set app
Please either comment logged-in or sign a name. Unsigned anonymous comments will be left screened.

alierak posting in

dw_maintenance

DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.

stonepicnicking_okapi posting in

endings

( You're about to view content that a community administrator has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

invisiblestring posting in

yuletide

A mini challenge for people interested in fics regarding characters being pregnant, having babies, and raising children. Can be for a single character or a ship, fluffy or angst, good or bad parents! The sky’s the limit.

To enter, copy/paste and fill out the following form:

AO3 Username:
Letter Link:
Fandoms:
DNWs (if any):
Prompts:

Profile

spilling all over with cheetah lupone

I'm a little man and I'm also evil, also into cats

May 2020

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
					1	2
3	4	5	6	7	8	9
10	11	12	13	14	15	16
17	18	19	20	21	22	23
24	25	26	27	28	29	30
31

Page Summary

Style Credit

Style: Early Edition for Five AM by winterfish

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Oct. 28th, 2025 03:23 pm

How we kissed and how we clung, remember? Darling --

We were foolish, we were young -- more than we knew.

Reading

2025 Assignments

Celebrating Halloween my way

Database maintenance

2025: One Swap After Another || SIGN-UPS ARE OPEN!

The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo, in print!

Yuletide 2025 Signups Closed!

yuleswaps 2025 announcement <3

Last Day to Sign Up for 2025

Interactive Fiction (IF) For Yuletide 2025

Season's Treatings mini-challenge

Dear Yuletide Writer 2025

Recent Reading: Private Rites

Spy X Family voice actor temporarily steps down

(no subject)

(no subject)

MultiLingYule 2025

With a Mod Hat On

Pinch Hits & Mid Sign-Ups Notes

Pinch hits

Sign-ups

AWS outage

(no subject)

Babytide 2025

Profile

May 2020

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags