on overcommitting

[melannen]

Yuletide letter is basically done now! If you saw the blank version and were saddened, be comforted that it is now quite full of blathering.

...that was kind of exhausting, gosh.

Also I signed up for NaNo, but I'm going to just cheat with 'finish wips' again as usual, although I am going to try to make half my wordcount on original works, we'll see if that goes. Anyway, if you want to watch me lose you can add me on the site, I'm melannen there as usual.

Meanwhile I am trying to get the second quarter of the Night in the Lonesome October crossover finished & posted by Halloween, we'll see. I'm getting to the point where I need to put feelings in it. ;_; writing is hard.

Also this weekend I have tentative plans to go to a used book sale in Baltimore, hang out with friends and watch Muppets and give comics to trick-or-treaters, and then on Sunday go eat leftover candy with fangirls. I'm trying to decide if I should try to squeeze "Finally watch The Martian" in there somewhere or if that would be a bad idea and I would fall over.

I'm also seriously thinking about doing ChessieCon in Baltimore at the end of November. I never did get around to writing up CapClave, did I? It was sufficiently fun that maybe doing a slightly larger one with more guests I care about would be worth it, anyway.

Comments

[beatrice_otter]

I do my Yuletide (indeed, all Dear Author letters) the easy way: copying and pasting from previous years. A section on general likes and dislikes (the same for all ficathons) and then a section for each fandom. And since, in Yuletide, I tend to request a lot of the same fandoms (I keep requesting a fandom year after year until I get a story in it) I keep a document with my letter for each fandom I've ever requested.

Makes things a lot easier.

[melannen]

I've considered it, but I link to my yt tag rather than a particular post in my signup, so if they want to see earlier letters I don't really even need to copy-paste. (That's what I did last year, just linked to the tag and said 'if you want to know more, there are ten years' previous letters in the tag' and it worked just fine afaict.)

But... I don't have a nice clean list of likes and dislikes, as is probably evident from my letters. It's all relative. And things change from year to year - three (and a half, if lost_library counts) of my requests this year were redos, and while most the stuff from previous requests was still valid, I found that I had different stuff I wanted to say - I did almost directly copy some of the 'this is what this fandom is' stuff, but when I got to what I wanted from the fandoms, I ended up deleting everything I copy-pasted and starting over.

And figuring out that stuff about myself and what I'm looking for and what I like and why, and how it's changed and hasn't, and then how to phrase it so it'll work in a letter, is really as much the point of the exercise as giving guidance to my writer. ^_^ Because tbh my writer doesn't need any guidance - I only request yt fandoms where I would genuinely enjoy any well-written fic in the fandom at all - so if I didn't want to write the thing for myself I wouldn't bother with one at all.

...it's still exhausting.

[zlabya]

I'm just planning on trying to write *one* fanfic for NaNo.

I'm going to ChessieCon--I loved it last year. Very friendly people and some cool panels. Also lots of filking and music in general. Sunday last year about 20 of us were listening to Maugorn play everything from rock music covers to humorous songs, and doing fabric work--knitting, crocheting, quilting and a couple of spinners too.