sigerson | Reading

We Sold Our Souls
by Grady Hendrix

This horror novel centers around Kris Pulaski, a rust belt kid who started a metal band, Durt Wurk, with four friends. They spent 10 years playing in small venues, putting out a couple of albums, and touring. Just as they were on the cusp of success, their lead singer Terry decided to go solo, offering the other band members a gig as his supporting band under a contract that reduced them to Terry's employees. Kris rejected the contract, and is now stuck back in the rust belt with a dead end job in a hotel. When she makes a couple of discoveries about the band's breakup, Kris begins to suspect that those contracts weren't a normal business deal and money and creative rights weren't the only things on the table.
I loved this horror novel. It was so fucking metal. Kris is a great character - she's stubborn, a bit abrasive, ground down but not defeated. She never truly stopped believing in her music and its power and worth, and she doesn't give up. Hendrix really delivers on the scares, with a couple really chilling scenes and a nice variety of kinds of horror. I loved all the metal, blues, and rock references. Hendrix also weaves in some great themes around how late corporate capitalism sucks the creativity out of people, and the way music can be the way out.

Current Mood: cold

yuletidemods posting in

yuletide_admin

All Yuletide requests are now visible:
-at karanguni's app
-at the Yuletide 2025 collection on AO3
-in a spreadsheet
-in a text doc

Please check back later for pinch hitter prompts.

Enjoy!

Both the main Yuletide 2025 collection and the Yuletide Madness 2025 collection are open for posting works. Before posting your assignment, or posting a treat to either collection, please read the notes below.

( Posting, and to Which Collection )

Bonus!! Decoy questions/author questions

A few weeks ago, we made a post about the questions we send to recipients when authors need to clarify something about their recipients' preferences.

As a result of that poll, in a situation where an author has a fandom-specific question, we will now send questions for at least 3 fandoms in a person's requests, but will not generally make up extra/decoy questions for their full set of fandoms.

You suggested that curious authors could make up (some of) their own extra questions. While that could be helpful - if you want to - we ask you to keep the following things in mind.

Clear questions are the best questions. Several times in the past we've received extremely confusing questions and it turned out a participant thought they needed to disguise what they were asking from the mods. Please do not.

Avoid excessive detail, especially about plots you don't plan to write. Don't ask your recipient "Would you be interested in a story where they time-travel to meet five different generations of their ancestors, and also there are capybara zombies?" unless you are contemplating such a plot (and maybe not even then) - because you may make your recipient hopeful about something that won't arrive.

Avoid being disingenuous about things that are actually clear to you. Try to ask about points of reasonable ambiguity. If you ask your recipient things like "You said you don't want any mention of hospitals, but is it okay if a character has a headache?" you could stress them out by making them wonder if they need to re-write their DNWs, or by making them wonder if you have wildly misinterpreted other parts of their requests. Decoy questions require a little creativity… but not too much. Save most of your creativity for the actual writing.

And again - you are not obliged to provide decoy questions! If you need to ask your recipient something, all we need from you is: 1) what information you need, and 2) who you are. That's great! We can take care of the rest.

kenjari

As the Crow Flies
by Karen F. Williams

This sapphic romance with gothic and paranormal elements was mostly enjoyable. Samantha is a 40-something successful mystery author who has a pet crow and a terrific friend in her new extended family member, Liz (sister of Sam's new sister-in-law). When Liz helps Sam find a match for an antique bookend, they end up meeting the Laraways, Gwen and her niece Isabel. Sam and Gwen quickly hit it off and soon develop a relationship. Liz is instantly smitten with Isabel, but Isabel is slow to recognize her own attraction to Liz. Gwen's property is haunted by a restless spirit with mysterious intentions, adding a spooky sub-plot.
I liked a lot about this book. Despite the present-day setting, the dialog and plot often felt like a witty and snappy 1930s film. I enjoyed that old-fashioned element, and the characters were all interesting and fun. I also liked the several scenes in which the characters, particularly Sam anad Gwen, had fairly abstract, intellectual conversations. A romance with older characters is something I always enjoy, since it is not terribly common in the genre. Sam and Gwen are both women who have accomplished a lot professionally and are fairly assured in their lives and senses of self. It's nice to have characters who know what they are doing and have the kind of self-confidence that comes from being older.
Some aspects were less enjoyable. Sam and Liz were at times fairly crass and catty in their conversations with each other, in a way that wasn't entirely fun. I also found Liz a bit too pushy and impatient in her pursuit of Isabel. Their romance could have been a really great slow burn to contrast with Sam and Gwen's more instant connection. I didn't love the way the ghost sub-plot played out for reasons that would be spoilers.

Current Mood: apathetic

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.

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!

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.

fox

[watch this space]

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.

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.

kenjari

The Invited
by Jennifer McMahon

This eerie horror novel largely concerns Helen and Nate, a young couple building a home on a plot of land in semi-rural Vermont. Living out of a decrepit trailer on their land while they build the house, they soon learn about Hattie, a woman who lived on their land in the early 20th century. Thought to be a witch by the locals, she was hung and then thrown in the the nearby bog. According to town legend, she buried a valuable treasure shortly before her demise and now haunts the woods and the bog. Helen and Nate are soon to find the truth of all of this, as she becomes compelled to research Hattie's family and history and to incorporate some local salvaged materials into the house and he becomes nearly obsessed with an albino deer glimpsed around their property. In the process, they befriend Olive, a local teenager still reeling from the disappearance of her mother. Weird things begin happening in the house and on the property and to Olive, and things get more dangerous the closer they all get to the truth.
This was a very compelling and fascinating book, with a mystery at its center and a lot of creepy goings on. I loved the inversion of a major horror trope: instead of inheriting or buying a haunted house, Helen and Nate manage to build one from scratch instead. McMahon does a great job of weaving together the present and the dark past that presses on it. The story focuses more on the effects of the haunting on Helen, Nate, and Olive than it does on the haunting itself, which makes it less scary than a typical horror novel, but I did enjoy this different angle on the haunted house story. Plus, Helen, Nate, and Olive are all so relatable and sympathetic that I really enjoyed spending time with them and seeing how the haunting affected them.

Current Mood: drained

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.

kass

Dear Yulewriter,

Thank you so much for writing me a story. Write something that makes you happy, and it will make me happy.

In general I am a big fan of chosen family, happy endings, people being good at things, people helping each other be better together than they were apart, theology of all kinds, wit and banter, and kindness. I'm happy with anything (any situation, any rating) that feels right to you given the characters at hand. I'm open to AUs or to going deeper into the worldbuilding of any of these canons.

Please, no betrayal or unquenchable grief or people being awful to each other or despair. There's enough of that in RL (especially these last few years.) On Yuletide morning I want something that makes me smile. Thank you kindly.

Most of this note is my standard Dear Yulewriter letter -- these are the things I've been saying year after year, and I've been doing Yuletide since... 2003 I think? but this year I am really struck by the extent to which I want to see these characters get to experience joy. Maybe because the world has been difficult, in a variety of ways, for the last several years in a row? Anyway: this is just to say, thank you for figuring out how to bring these characters some sweetness.

In closing: yay Yuletide! Yay you! Thank you so much!

There's nothing below the cut that wasn't also in my Yuletide sign-up, but I include my requests here for anyone who's curious or maybe wants to write an extra treat.

Kass

( The Naturalist Society by Carrie Vaughn; the Toby Daye series by Seanan McGuire; Murderbot / tv show. )

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July 2019

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A little plus a little makes a great heap

Reading

Book Review

2025 Requests + How and Where to Post fics + Author Question Update

Book Review

2025 Assignments

Database maintenance

Yuletide 2025 Signups Closed!

dear Yuletide writer

Last Day to Sign Up for 2025

Pinch Hits & Mid Sign-Ups Notes

Pinch hits

Sign-ups

Book Review

AWS outage

Dear Yulewriter

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