A (HOPEFULLY) COMPLETE GUIDE TO YULETIDE STUFF BEYOND YOUR ASSIGNMENT
Yuletide doesn't have to be complicated.
1.) Write a fanfic of 1,000 words or more in a fandom of your recipient's choice, including all characters that they select.
2.) Turn it in before the deadline.
That's it. That's all you have to do. If you can tick those two items off your to-do list, then you're doing Yuletide right. Not everybody has the time or the inclination to get involved with the bajillion side-projects that have grown up around Yuletide over the years. You don't have to.
But if you want to, I've attempted to list them all below...
Let's start with your own personal involvement. As well as the essential two steps above, you might want to try:
Nominations
Before signups open, there is a nomination period. You can nominate up to six three fandoms for Yuletide. It's worth doing, because if nobody nominates a fandom, it's not eligible for Yuletide. Why risk the Tiny-Fandom-Of-Your-Heart being ineligible? Get your nominations in!
Letters
As well as filling in your request form, you may want to write a letter to the person writing your story. Anything in your letter is optional for the person writing your story, but a lot of writers enjoy getting a letter from their recipient. It gives them the chance to tailor-make a fic especially to match your preferences.
Some stuff you might want to include in your letter are 1.) What in particular is it that you love about this fandom 2.) What your favourite episode/chapter/arc is 3.) Is there something you'd particularly like to see explored in fic 4.) Do you have any squicks or triggers. (If you're not familiar with these terms, basically a squick is a topic that would make you nauseous and a trigger is a topic that might give you flashbacks/panic attacks.) 5.) The same details you gave in your request. It makes life easier for your writer if everything is in one place.
Some stuff you don't want to include in your letter are 1.) Detailed descriptions of the exact plot you want. (Suggestions are fine, but anything that paints your writer into a corner should be avoided.) 2.) Anything that might insult your author. (So don't say you want a story in Ghost Soup fandom because all the existing Ghost Soup fanfic sucks. Your author might have written most of it!)
You might hear these letters referred to as 'Dear Yulegoat letters' or 'Dear Santa letters', but everybody has their own preference as to terms, so the best way to address your letter is probably just "Dear Yuletide Writer".
Now let's look at the different ways of writing extra fics!
Treating
A treat is any story you write that wasn't assigned to you. Maybe you matched your recipient on more than one fandom and want to write them two stories? Maybe there's a Yuletide fandom that you never offered to write, but have subsequently fallen in love with and want to write for? Maybe you want to write an extra Yuletide story as an anonymous gift for a beta reader or friend? These are all ways of treating.
Pinch-hitting
Sometimes people aren't able to complete the challenge. Illness, work, family commitments, horrific writer's block and just spacing out and forgetting the deadline have all prevented people from meeting the deadline before now. But since the point of Yuletide is that everybody gets a story of 1,000 words or over in a fandom of their choice, somebody has to pick up the slack. Those people are the pinch hitters.
There is an email list on Yahoo Groups for people interested in pinch hitting. You can subscribe by sending an email to yuletide_pinch_hit-subscribe@yahoogroups.com with the word subscribe in the subject line or by going to the group itself if you already have a Yahoo account.
As people default, the mods will send out emails containing the story-less recipient's chosen fandoms. As soon as you see one you can write, hit reply. If you're the first to respond the mods will confirm it and you then become the new assigned writer for that person. Pinch hitters don't need to be signed up for Yuletide themselves.
Yuletide Madness
Once everybody has a story of at least 1,000 words in their chosen fandom, Yuletide Madness begins. Madness is when the mods make public a list of unfulfilled requests and drop the minimum word count requirement, allowing people to write Stocking Stuffers (short, last-minute treats.)
Reverse madness
Previously each participant could nominate six fandoms, but only request stories in four, so there were a number of fandoms each year which were eligible for Yuletide, which people wanted to write for and which people wanted to read, but which weren't included in the main challenge. In 2010 LondonBard and LadyAnneBoleyn suggested Reverse Madness. People commented on a post in the LJ comm saying which fandoms they nominated without requesting and then anybody who wanted to could write them treats in those fandoms. The new rules surrounding nominations will mean that there are fewer unrequested fandoms this year, but there are bound to still be a handful simply because people change their minds right up until the last minute, so Reverse Madness is likely to happen again in some form or another.
New Year's Resolutions
People who failed to complete a story in time for the Yuletide deadline may be asked by the mods to complete one or more NYRs before being allowed to participate in future Yuletides, but most NYRs are written for fun rather than as a penance.
A New Year's Resolution is any fanfic posted between January and October. They aren't anonymous like regular Yuletide fics, but otherwise they fulfil the exact same function as treats (and are often all the more appreciated by recipients for being unexpected.)
Now let's look at helping out. The ratio of Yuletide participants to Yuletide organisers is about a thousand to one. Those are some pretty incredible numbers when you think about all the work the challenge involves. Fortunately there are lots of ways that regular participants can help out and keep the behemoth that is Yuletide ticking over smoothly. We covered pinch-hitting, which is a big help, but there are other opportunities too.
Beta reading
If you're happy to edit another participant's fic, add your name to the annual beta post on the Livejournal community. It's useful if you mention things like what fandoms you're familiar with, how to reach you and whether your focus is spelling and grammar, characterisation, structure or all of the above.
The mods do their best to connect writers with suitably knowledgable people, but you can make their lives easier by adding yourself to the beta-reader list. (The hippo system is also a way of easing the mods beta-load, but we'll cover that later.)
Translation and [blank]-picking
Do you speak another language? Do you work in medicine or engineering or law enforcement or the movie industry? Do you live in a place where people might want to set their story or know a lot about a certain period in history? Then step right up, because Yuletide needs you!
Sometime people need more than just an editor, they need somebody who can edit in Latin or somebody who can suggest a sedative that will knock the baddy out for the exact length of time required by the plot or just remind them that the word fanny means something different in the UK to the US. If you have any kind of useful specialism add it to the list on the LJ comm so people know where to find you if they suddenly need a Britpicker.
Spreadsheeting
Yuletide generates so much information, it can be hard to find what you're looking for. In past years this has been eased by volunteers putting data into formats that are easier for people. In previous years Franzi has rearranged the list of nominated fandoms so that they were organised by media type for easier searching, Kristin has made a spreadsheet in Google docs with links to all the letters so people can search by fandom and LilacSigil created transcripts of the mods instructional screencasts for people who can't view videos.
If you see a big pile of data that you think would be more useful in a different format and nobody appears to be doing anything with it, just leap in!
Proxy upload
Sometimes it's not personal problems that stop people from uploading their stories in time, but technical ones. Maybe your ancient dial-up connection just can't cope with uploading your novel-length story? Maybe you were planning to upload it on your lunch break at work, but the office computers are now blocking AO3? Maybe you're moving house and worried you won't have internet during the crucial period?
Proxy uploaders are people with solid net connections who will upload stories for people that can't do it themselves. There'll be a post on the LJ comm where you can volunteer to be a proxy.
Nomination wrangling
Yuletide is an exchange for small fandoms, yet every single year somebody will nominate Harry Potter because they don't quite understand what Yuletide is about. (Although I sort of suspect that these days it's being nominated by regular Yuletiders out of some misplaced sense of tradition.)
The mods can't be familiar with every fandom ever, so for Yuletide to remain true to its original spirit as a small fandom exchange, people are encouraged to point out when they see large fandoms that have been mistakenly nominated.
When the post asking for info on nominated fandoms comes around, please remember the following things.
1.) The person who nominated it may genuinely have thought it was a small fandom, so please don't be dismissive or accuse them of trying to "cheat" at Yuletide.
2.) Try to provide the mods with actual information they can use to check eligibility. It's not helpful to say "Oh c'mon! Ghost Soup is a huge fandom!" (because then it's just your word versus the word of the person who nominated it and the mods will have to do a ton of digging to find out who's right) but it's very helpful to say "Ghost Soup has 13,000 fics on FFN, 400 of which were posted in the last week. There's also an active LJ community running it's own holiday exchange which 200 people have signed up for."
3.) Try to provide links or recs for the fandom in question. If somebody mistakenly thinks a fandom is rare because the fic isn't easily findable, help them out by showing them where to find it.
Feedback and reccing
Of course you'll be saying thank you for the story you receive as a gift, but it's nice to comment on all the stories you enjoy. Some of the Yuletide fandoms have less than five active fans and knowing that somebody beyond the recipient enjoyed a story can mean a lot to the writer. (If you can't think of anything to say AO3 has the option of leaving 'Kudos', which is a wordless way of saying 'I liked this'.)
Posting recommendations is another thing that's in the Yuletide spirit of getting small fandoms more recognition. You can do this in a set of Delicious bookmarks, in your own blog or on the Livejournal Community. (But as the community gets very busy during reccing season. It's kinder to people's friends lists if you don't make a post that only recs one or two stories. Large bundles of recs are the way to go.) A good thing to mention in your rec is whether a story can be enjoyed without knowledge of the canon. A well-written rec for a Yuletide story that doesn't need canon knowledge is often the impetus somebody needs to get involved in a new fandom.
Okay, let's talk community. Yuletide is a writing challenge, but the simple fact of having so many people trying to simultaneously complete the same goal means it's also a community. There are offshoots in various places, but you may want to try some of the following.
The Livejournal Community
The most official community after Yuletide_Admin! The Yuletide community on LJ is the preferred place for posting Yuletide icon sets, asking questions that you don't think require a mod to answer them, sharing links to writing resources, suggesting tie-in events and leaving any information that you want to persist for a long time like your letter or your offer to beta.
Because the LJ comm is such an established place for the Yuletide community it can be tempting to think you'll reach all the Yuletiders by posting there. Remember that you don't need an LJ account to be part of Yuletide and there are Yuletiders who do have LJ accounts that choose not to read it since the comm is fairly high traffic.
Even bearing that in mind, the LJ comm is the best way to talk to Yuletiders en-masse.
The Twitter Hashtag
If you're not a Twitter user, hashtags are basically more like conversational topics than a community. Yuletiders with Twitter accounts will tag their relevant tweets with "#Yuletide" and then everybody interested in the subject can use a search to see all the recent tweets about Yuletide in chronological order.
Because there's no way to claim ownership of a hashtag, you may find that other people are using the same hashtag to discuss other topics. (Last year the #Yuletide hashtag was around 70% people talking about the fanfic challenge, 20% people talking about some epic Christmas party in New York, 7% people talking about the holiday season and 3% some spambot trying to sell us all Christmas decorations.)
If a hashtag gets used frequently enough, it may trend. (Trending means it's one of the most popular topics of conversation on Twitter and appears on a Trending Topics list.) Expect the Yuletiders on Twitter to get excited if #Yuletide trends.
Yulechat
Yulechat is the name of the #Yuletide channel on IRC. You can access it in it's most basic form using a web browser, but to get some of the special features you'll need an IRC client. (There are lots of IRC clients out there. Three free ones I've used are MIRC, which is a standalone programme; Chatzilla, which runs inside Firefox and IRChon which is an iPhone app.) If you're using an IRC client, connect to irc.sff.net and join #Yuletide. If you're using the web interface, just click here.
Remember in the beta reader section, I said I'd explain about the hippos? They're another way of finding a beta. Want to go into the chatroom and see if anybody's prepared to beta a Ghost Soup fanfic? Whisper to a hippo and they'll ask the room for you, so you can remain anonymous. (The secret-keeping quality of hippos is how they got their name. There's a stuffed hippo in a video game called Die Anstalt which had a zipper for a mouth.) To become a hippo all you have to do is change your name from Bob to Hippo-Bob so that people know it's okay to send you beta requests. Using a hippo looks like this:
Writer to Hippo-Bobby (private): I have a 1.5k Ghost Soup fanfic that needs a beta.
Hippo-Bobby to Writer (private): No problem.
Hippo-Bobby to Chatroom (public): DANCE, DANCE, DANCE. EVERYBODY PAY ATTENTION! BETA REQUEST APPROACHING!
Snazzyboots to Chatroom (public): All heed the hippo!
Andrea to Chatroom (public): Okay, I'm heeding.
SummerRain to Chatroom (public): Me too!
Hippo-Bobby to Chatroom (public): There's a writer with a one and a half thousand word Ghost Soup fanfic. Who can beta?
SummerRain to Chatroom (public): Never heard of it, sorry. :(
Andrea to Chatroom (public): I'd love to beta that.
Snazzyboots to Chatroom (public): Somebody's writing Ghost Soup fanfic? Awesome! I can beta.
Hippo-Bobby to Writer (private): Andrea and Snazzyboots have both volunteered.
Writer to Hippo-Bobby (private): I'll message Andrea. Thank you.
Hippo-Bobby to Chatroom (public): REQUEST CLOSED. EVERYBODY RELAX!
Writer to Andrea (private): Hi I'm the Ghost Soup writer. What's you email so I can send you the fic?
Andrea to Writer (private): andrea@example.com
Writer to Andrea (private): Thanks
Another thing that happens in the chat is WOD Sprints. There's an online motivational tool called Write Or Die designed to stop you from procrastinating and help you increase your word count. The simultaneous nature of Yulechat means you can race against other people to write the most words in a short period, say 15 minutes. After the time is up, people post their wordcount for the sprint to chat. It's only for fun but making it into a small competition can help to motivate you.
On deadline day, Yulechat will nominate one person to visit the archive and report back to the room on how many fics have been uploaded, rather than having lots of different people hammering the server all at once for the same information. Like hippoing, anybody can be designated reloader by changing their username from Bob to Reloader-Bob. (The difference is that there's only ever one designated reloader at a time, while during busy periods you want a minimum of three or four hippos.)
In recent years, there have been Yuletide fanfics written about the people in Yulechat. You have to opt in to be included in the fics, but they're usually a lot of fun if you've spent any length of time in the chatroom.
Yuletide Nudge
Subtitled 'The Yuletide Procrastinators Mutual Support Group', this is another Livejournal Community. Nudge is ideal for the sort of writer who needs regular reminders in their friends list every day that there are "TWELVE DAYS TO DEADLINE! ZOMG!" or who needs more motivation or the comforting knowledge that there are other writers who haven't submitted their story yet either. It's run by i_phianassa and lignota and is usually at its busiest in December when the flailing and panicking (flanicking) over deadlines really starts to hit people.
As well as the main Yuletide challenge, there are also various unofficial side challenges that you can complete. Some serious, some silly. The main ones follow...
The Chromatic Yuletide Challenge
Also known as The Chroma-Challenge and Dark Agenda. This side challenge was set up to increase the racial diversity of Yuletide stories.
While any Yuletide story where the main character is not white is eligible for the Chromatic Yuletide Challenge and may be uploaded to the collection, there is a hierarchy that participants are encouraged to use. Emphasis is placed on writing for a language and culture that is not your own, ideally on writing for sources that are authentic, unproblematic depictions of another culture, failing that writing for realistic representations of a culture before reinterpretations of them and failing that writing for a problematic source in a way that fixes or addresses the problems in the original text.
Dark Agenda is maintained on Dreamwidth here. Some of the things they do to make this easier for people are maintaining lists of fandoms with non-white characters and creators, finding betas with appropriate cultural knowledge or who speak the relevant language, sorting the Yuletide Madness request list to prioritise requests for non-white characters and volunteering to be proxy uploaders for anybody writing about non-white characters.
The Yulechat Challenge
Compared to the laudable goals of Dark Agenda this one's pretty silly. Every year in Yulechat a different person will think of something to be the Yulechat challenge, then people try to include that thing in their stories in a plausible way. The last three Yulechat challenges have been 'Cows', 'Tentacles' and 'Explosions'. As you can imagine these are easier to include in some fandoms than others. The Yulechat challenge will usually get mentioned on Twitter and the LJ comm so that those without IRC can still play.
Comment sprees
Sometimes recipients are on vacation during the period when the stories go live and therefore can't thank their writer straight away. There are places where you can warn your writer that this is going to be the case, but it's still a little lonely for the writer while they wait. Comment sprees alleviate thisby making sure everybody gets feedback on their stories before the January reveal.
In previous years, the mods have provided a scoreboard listing the ten Yuletiders who've made the most comments on other people's stories and another for the top ten commenters who aren't Yuletide participants. The latter got a chance to add prompts to the New Year's Resolutions list, so potentially they could get a story in reward.
Since moving to AO3, the focus of the comment sprees has changed from being competitive to collaborative. Shortly after the stories go live, a list will be created of the stories that don't have any comments yet and participating Yuletiders will read and respond to those stories first, in order to reduce the list of commentless fics to zero in the shortest amount of time possible.
NYR challenges
There are three different challenges I'm aware of involving NYRs.
1.) To write one NYR every month during the coming year.
2.) To write NYR's in fandoms beginning with each letter of the alphabet.
3.) To place bets on the total number of stories that will be written for Yuletide that year and commit to writing a NYR for every incorrect guess.
All of the above stuff takes place on the internet, but some Yuletide tie-ins activities take place out in the real world.
The Candy and Book Exchanges
There's already been a post about this year's candy and book exchanges, so I won't go into laborious detail. Basically the candy exchange is an opportunity for Yuletiders to send a pack of their local candy out by mail and receive candy from somewhere else in the world in return. there's another exchange where it's books that get swapped through the mail.
The Kitten Exchange
I think Sleepfighter was joking when she said she may as well set up a kitten exchange as well, but who knows...
1.) Write a fanfic of 1,000 words or more in a fandom of your recipient's choice, including all characters that they select.
2.) Turn it in before the deadline.
That's it. That's all you have to do. If you can tick those two items off your to-do list, then you're doing Yuletide right. Not everybody has the time or the inclination to get involved with the bajillion side-projects that have grown up around Yuletide over the years. You don't have to.
But if you want to, I've attempted to list them all below...
Let's start with your own personal involvement. As well as the essential two steps above, you might want to try:
Nominations
Before signups open, there is a nomination period. You can nominate up to six three fandoms for Yuletide. It's worth doing, because if nobody nominates a fandom, it's not eligible for Yuletide. Why risk the Tiny-Fandom-Of-Your-Heart being ineligible? Get your nominations in!
Letters
As well as filling in your request form, you may want to write a letter to the person writing your story. Anything in your letter is optional for the person writing your story, but a lot of writers enjoy getting a letter from their recipient. It gives them the chance to tailor-make a fic especially to match your preferences.
Some stuff you might want to include in your letter are 1.) What in particular is it that you love about this fandom 2.) What your favourite episode/chapter/arc is 3.) Is there something you'd particularly like to see explored in fic 4.) Do you have any squicks or triggers. (If you're not familiar with these terms, basically a squick is a topic that would make you nauseous and a trigger is a topic that might give you flashbacks/panic attacks.) 5.) The same details you gave in your request. It makes life easier for your writer if everything is in one place.
Some stuff you don't want to include in your letter are 1.) Detailed descriptions of the exact plot you want. (Suggestions are fine, but anything that paints your writer into a corner should be avoided.) 2.) Anything that might insult your author. (So don't say you want a story in Ghost Soup fandom because all the existing Ghost Soup fanfic sucks. Your author might have written most of it!)
You might hear these letters referred to as 'Dear Yulegoat letters' or 'Dear Santa letters', but everybody has their own preference as to terms, so the best way to address your letter is probably just "Dear Yuletide Writer".
Now let's look at the different ways of writing extra fics!
Treating
A treat is any story you write that wasn't assigned to you. Maybe you matched your recipient on more than one fandom and want to write them two stories? Maybe there's a Yuletide fandom that you never offered to write, but have subsequently fallen in love with and want to write for? Maybe you want to write an extra Yuletide story as an anonymous gift for a beta reader or friend? These are all ways of treating.
Pinch-hitting
Sometimes people aren't able to complete the challenge. Illness, work, family commitments, horrific writer's block and just spacing out and forgetting the deadline have all prevented people from meeting the deadline before now. But since the point of Yuletide is that everybody gets a story of 1,000 words or over in a fandom of their choice, somebody has to pick up the slack. Those people are the pinch hitters.
There is an email list on Yahoo Groups for people interested in pinch hitting. You can subscribe by sending an email to yuletide_pinch_hit-subscribe@yahoogroups.com with the word subscribe in the subject line or by going to the group itself if you already have a Yahoo account.
As people default, the mods will send out emails containing the story-less recipient's chosen fandoms. As soon as you see one you can write, hit reply. If you're the first to respond the mods will confirm it and you then become the new assigned writer for that person. Pinch hitters don't need to be signed up for Yuletide themselves.
Yuletide Madness
Once everybody has a story of at least 1,000 words in their chosen fandom, Yuletide Madness begins. Madness is when the mods make public a list of unfulfilled requests and drop the minimum word count requirement, allowing people to write Stocking Stuffers (short, last-minute treats.)
Reverse madness
Previously each participant could nominate six fandoms, but only request stories in four, so there were a number of fandoms each year which were eligible for Yuletide, which people wanted to write for and which people wanted to read, but which weren't included in the main challenge. In 2010 LondonBard and LadyAnneBoleyn suggested Reverse Madness. People commented on a post in the LJ comm saying which fandoms they nominated without requesting and then anybody who wanted to could write them treats in those fandoms. The new rules surrounding nominations will mean that there are fewer unrequested fandoms this year, but there are bound to still be a handful simply because people change their minds right up until the last minute, so Reverse Madness is likely to happen again in some form or another.
New Year's Resolutions
People who failed to complete a story in time for the Yuletide deadline may be asked by the mods to complete one or more NYRs before being allowed to participate in future Yuletides, but most NYRs are written for fun rather than as a penance.
A New Year's Resolution is any fanfic posted between January and October. They aren't anonymous like regular Yuletide fics, but otherwise they fulfil the exact same function as treats (and are often all the more appreciated by recipients for being unexpected.)
Now let's look at helping out. The ratio of Yuletide participants to Yuletide organisers is about a thousand to one. Those are some pretty incredible numbers when you think about all the work the challenge involves. Fortunately there are lots of ways that regular participants can help out and keep the behemoth that is Yuletide ticking over smoothly. We covered pinch-hitting, which is a big help, but there are other opportunities too.
Beta reading
If you're happy to edit another participant's fic, add your name to the annual beta post on the Livejournal community. It's useful if you mention things like what fandoms you're familiar with, how to reach you and whether your focus is spelling and grammar, characterisation, structure or all of the above.
The mods do their best to connect writers with suitably knowledgable people, but you can make their lives easier by adding yourself to the beta-reader list. (The hippo system is also a way of easing the mods beta-load, but we'll cover that later.)
Translation and [blank]-picking
Do you speak another language? Do you work in medicine or engineering or law enforcement or the movie industry? Do you live in a place where people might want to set their story or know a lot about a certain period in history? Then step right up, because Yuletide needs you!
Sometime people need more than just an editor, they need somebody who can edit in Latin or somebody who can suggest a sedative that will knock the baddy out for the exact length of time required by the plot or just remind them that the word fanny means something different in the UK to the US. If you have any kind of useful specialism add it to the list on the LJ comm so people know where to find you if they suddenly need a Britpicker.
Spreadsheeting
Yuletide generates so much information, it can be hard to find what you're looking for. In past years this has been eased by volunteers putting data into formats that are easier for people. In previous years Franzi has rearranged the list of nominated fandoms so that they were organised by media type for easier searching, Kristin has made a spreadsheet in Google docs with links to all the letters so people can search by fandom and LilacSigil created transcripts of the mods instructional screencasts for people who can't view videos.
If you see a big pile of data that you think would be more useful in a different format and nobody appears to be doing anything with it, just leap in!
Proxy upload
Sometimes it's not personal problems that stop people from uploading their stories in time, but technical ones. Maybe your ancient dial-up connection just can't cope with uploading your novel-length story? Maybe you were planning to upload it on your lunch break at work, but the office computers are now blocking AO3? Maybe you're moving house and worried you won't have internet during the crucial period?
Proxy uploaders are people with solid net connections who will upload stories for people that can't do it themselves. There'll be a post on the LJ comm where you can volunteer to be a proxy.
Nomination wrangling
Yuletide is an exchange for small fandoms, yet every single year somebody will nominate Harry Potter because they don't quite understand what Yuletide is about. (Although I sort of suspect that these days it's being nominated by regular Yuletiders out of some misplaced sense of tradition.)
The mods can't be familiar with every fandom ever, so for Yuletide to remain true to its original spirit as a small fandom exchange, people are encouraged to point out when they see large fandoms that have been mistakenly nominated.
When the post asking for info on nominated fandoms comes around, please remember the following things.
1.) The person who nominated it may genuinely have thought it was a small fandom, so please don't be dismissive or accuse them of trying to "cheat" at Yuletide.
2.) Try to provide the mods with actual information they can use to check eligibility. It's not helpful to say "Oh c'mon! Ghost Soup is a huge fandom!" (because then it's just your word versus the word of the person who nominated it and the mods will have to do a ton of digging to find out who's right) but it's very helpful to say "Ghost Soup has 13,000 fics on FFN, 400 of which were posted in the last week. There's also an active LJ community running it's own holiday exchange which 200 people have signed up for."
3.) Try to provide links or recs for the fandom in question. If somebody mistakenly thinks a fandom is rare because the fic isn't easily findable, help them out by showing them where to find it.
Feedback and reccing
Of course you'll be saying thank you for the story you receive as a gift, but it's nice to comment on all the stories you enjoy. Some of the Yuletide fandoms have less than five active fans and knowing that somebody beyond the recipient enjoyed a story can mean a lot to the writer. (If you can't think of anything to say AO3 has the option of leaving 'Kudos', which is a wordless way of saying 'I liked this'.)
Posting recommendations is another thing that's in the Yuletide spirit of getting small fandoms more recognition. You can do this in a set of Delicious bookmarks, in your own blog or on the Livejournal Community. (But as the community gets very busy during reccing season. It's kinder to people's friends lists if you don't make a post that only recs one or two stories. Large bundles of recs are the way to go.) A good thing to mention in your rec is whether a story can be enjoyed without knowledge of the canon. A well-written rec for a Yuletide story that doesn't need canon knowledge is often the impetus somebody needs to get involved in a new fandom.
Okay, let's talk community. Yuletide is a writing challenge, but the simple fact of having so many people trying to simultaneously complete the same goal means it's also a community. There are offshoots in various places, but you may want to try some of the following.
The Livejournal Community
The most official community after Yuletide_Admin! The Yuletide community on LJ is the preferred place for posting Yuletide icon sets, asking questions that you don't think require a mod to answer them, sharing links to writing resources, suggesting tie-in events and leaving any information that you want to persist for a long time like your letter or your offer to beta.
Because the LJ comm is such an established place for the Yuletide community it can be tempting to think you'll reach all the Yuletiders by posting there. Remember that you don't need an LJ account to be part of Yuletide and there are Yuletiders who do have LJ accounts that choose not to read it since the comm is fairly high traffic.
Even bearing that in mind, the LJ comm is the best way to talk to Yuletiders en-masse.
The Twitter Hashtag
If you're not a Twitter user, hashtags are basically more like conversational topics than a community. Yuletiders with Twitter accounts will tag their relevant tweets with "#Yuletide" and then everybody interested in the subject can use a search to see all the recent tweets about Yuletide in chronological order.
Because there's no way to claim ownership of a hashtag, you may find that other people are using the same hashtag to discuss other topics. (Last year the #Yuletide hashtag was around 70% people talking about the fanfic challenge, 20% people talking about some epic Christmas party in New York, 7% people talking about the holiday season and 3% some spambot trying to sell us all Christmas decorations.)
If a hashtag gets used frequently enough, it may trend. (Trending means it's one of the most popular topics of conversation on Twitter and appears on a Trending Topics list.) Expect the Yuletiders on Twitter to get excited if #Yuletide trends.
Yulechat
Yulechat is the name of the #Yuletide channel on IRC. You can access it in it's most basic form using a web browser, but to get some of the special features you'll need an IRC client. (There are lots of IRC clients out there. Three free ones I've used are MIRC, which is a standalone programme; Chatzilla, which runs inside Firefox and IRChon which is an iPhone app.) If you're using an IRC client, connect to irc.sff.net and join #Yuletide. If you're using the web interface, just click here.
Remember in the beta reader section, I said I'd explain about the hippos? They're another way of finding a beta. Want to go into the chatroom and see if anybody's prepared to beta a Ghost Soup fanfic? Whisper to a hippo and they'll ask the room for you, so you can remain anonymous. (The secret-keeping quality of hippos is how they got their name. There's a stuffed hippo in a video game called Die Anstalt which had a zipper for a mouth.) To become a hippo all you have to do is change your name from Bob to Hippo-Bob so that people know it's okay to send you beta requests. Using a hippo looks like this:
Writer to Hippo-Bobby (private): I have a 1.5k Ghost Soup fanfic that needs a beta.
Hippo-Bobby to Writer (private): No problem.
Hippo-Bobby to Chatroom (public): DANCE, DANCE, DANCE. EVERYBODY PAY ATTENTION! BETA REQUEST APPROACHING!
Snazzyboots to Chatroom (public): All heed the hippo!
Andrea to Chatroom (public): Okay, I'm heeding.
SummerRain to Chatroom (public): Me too!
Hippo-Bobby to Chatroom (public): There's a writer with a one and a half thousand word Ghost Soup fanfic. Who can beta?
SummerRain to Chatroom (public): Never heard of it, sorry. :(
Andrea to Chatroom (public): I'd love to beta that.
Snazzyboots to Chatroom (public): Somebody's writing Ghost Soup fanfic? Awesome! I can beta.
Hippo-Bobby to Writer (private): Andrea and Snazzyboots have both volunteered.
Writer to Hippo-Bobby (private): I'll message Andrea. Thank you.
Hippo-Bobby to Chatroom (public): REQUEST CLOSED. EVERYBODY RELAX!
Writer to Andrea (private): Hi I'm the Ghost Soup writer. What's you email so I can send you the fic?
Andrea to Writer (private): andrea@example.com
Writer to Andrea (private): Thanks
Another thing that happens in the chat is WOD Sprints. There's an online motivational tool called Write Or Die designed to stop you from procrastinating and help you increase your word count. The simultaneous nature of Yulechat means you can race against other people to write the most words in a short period, say 15 minutes. After the time is up, people post their wordcount for the sprint to chat. It's only for fun but making it into a small competition can help to motivate you.
On deadline day, Yulechat will nominate one person to visit the archive and report back to the room on how many fics have been uploaded, rather than having lots of different people hammering the server all at once for the same information. Like hippoing, anybody can be designated reloader by changing their username from Bob to Reloader-Bob. (The difference is that there's only ever one designated reloader at a time, while during busy periods you want a minimum of three or four hippos.)
In recent years, there have been Yuletide fanfics written about the people in Yulechat. You have to opt in to be included in the fics, but they're usually a lot of fun if you've spent any length of time in the chatroom.
Yuletide Nudge
Subtitled 'The Yuletide Procrastinators Mutual Support Group', this is another Livejournal Community. Nudge is ideal for the sort of writer who needs regular reminders in their friends list every day that there are "TWELVE DAYS TO DEADLINE! ZOMG!" or who needs more motivation or the comforting knowledge that there are other writers who haven't submitted their story yet either. It's run by i_phianassa and lignota and is usually at its busiest in December when the flailing and panicking (flanicking) over deadlines really starts to hit people.
As well as the main Yuletide challenge, there are also various unofficial side challenges that you can complete. Some serious, some silly. The main ones follow...
The Chromatic Yuletide Challenge
Also known as The Chroma-Challenge and Dark Agenda. This side challenge was set up to increase the racial diversity of Yuletide stories.
While any Yuletide story where the main character is not white is eligible for the Chromatic Yuletide Challenge and may be uploaded to the collection, there is a hierarchy that participants are encouraged to use. Emphasis is placed on writing for a language and culture that is not your own, ideally on writing for sources that are authentic, unproblematic depictions of another culture, failing that writing for realistic representations of a culture before reinterpretations of them and failing that writing for a problematic source in a way that fixes or addresses the problems in the original text.
Dark Agenda is maintained on Dreamwidth here. Some of the things they do to make this easier for people are maintaining lists of fandoms with non-white characters and creators, finding betas with appropriate cultural knowledge or who speak the relevant language, sorting the Yuletide Madness request list to prioritise requests for non-white characters and volunteering to be proxy uploaders for anybody writing about non-white characters.
The Yulechat Challenge
Compared to the laudable goals of Dark Agenda this one's pretty silly. Every year in Yulechat a different person will think of something to be the Yulechat challenge, then people try to include that thing in their stories in a plausible way. The last three Yulechat challenges have been 'Cows', 'Tentacles' and 'Explosions'. As you can imagine these are easier to include in some fandoms than others. The Yulechat challenge will usually get mentioned on Twitter and the LJ comm so that those without IRC can still play.
Comment sprees
Sometimes recipients are on vacation during the period when the stories go live and therefore can't thank their writer straight away. There are places where you can warn your writer that this is going to be the case, but it's still a little lonely for the writer while they wait. Comment sprees alleviate thisby making sure everybody gets feedback on their stories before the January reveal.
In previous years, the mods have provided a scoreboard listing the ten Yuletiders who've made the most comments on other people's stories and another for the top ten commenters who aren't Yuletide participants. The latter got a chance to add prompts to the New Year's Resolutions list, so potentially they could get a story in reward.
Since moving to AO3, the focus of the comment sprees has changed from being competitive to collaborative. Shortly after the stories go live, a list will be created of the stories that don't have any comments yet and participating Yuletiders will read and respond to those stories first, in order to reduce the list of commentless fics to zero in the shortest amount of time possible.
NYR challenges
There are three different challenges I'm aware of involving NYRs.
1.) To write one NYR every month during the coming year.
2.) To write NYR's in fandoms beginning with each letter of the alphabet.
3.) To place bets on the total number of stories that will be written for Yuletide that year and commit to writing a NYR for every incorrect guess.
All of the above stuff takes place on the internet, but some Yuletide tie-ins activities take place out in the real world.
The Candy and Book Exchanges
There's already been a post about this year's candy and book exchanges, so I won't go into laborious detail. Basically the candy exchange is an opportunity for Yuletiders to send a pack of their local candy out by mail and receive candy from somewhere else in the world in return. there's another exchange where it's books that get swapped through the mail.
The Kitten Exchange
I think Sleepfighter was joking when she said she may as well set up a kitten exchange as well, but who knows...