It's beginning to look a lot like

I have my santa_smex assignment and it is love. I can't decide whether I should write the pairing that will make everyone know that it's me or the pairing that no one will guess. Or one of the other pairings. Or see if I can plausibly work in more than one. (I don't like "everyone is gay" but sometimes it can work.) Whee! Except I can't tell anybody about it, which I really want to do.

And I shall break my rule and paste in for you a bit of chat from a few weeks back:

kestrelsan: so, question for you, only because I've seen it mentioned a couple of times recently - are we still steadfast in our no-Yuletide or other holiday story writing rule?

prillalar: um

kestrelsan: LOL
kestrelsan: say YES

prillalar: I already signed up for a holiday thing

kestrelsan: ohhhhh

prillalar: I thought it was just Yuletide!

kestrelsan: you get no cookie

So, I have no cookie. But I get to write some smut and that has less carbs anyhow.

Message to intrepid author who drew my name: I'm really easy. The most important thing for me is that you write a story that you like and are happy with. So don't worry too much about shoehorning in any of the stuff I asked for. If the boys are in character and the story is interesting, that's all I ask. (That said, the "other sports" thing is something I really, really like.) I like things more R than NC-17 and that's about it so far as what you need to know.

I think that people sometimes shoot themselves in the foot when they are too specific in challenge requests. It's good to give some ideas about what you like as a starting place, but if someone has to write to a grocery list, they probably won't be doing their best work. If you want something that specific, you might want to write it for yourself.

Does fanfic turn into a pumpkin at midnight?

bethbethbeth has a great post on feedback. Not one of those tedious ones where people seriously disucss whether or not feedback is a responsiblity, blah, blah, blah, but rather, one where everybody posts about their feedback neuroses and just how pitiful and needy we all are, refreshing the comments again and again, just in case one person out there loves us.

Anyhow. Something people keep mentioning is trying not to post "at night" or "in the middle of the night" (which I assume means "in the middle of the night in North America") because then people won't read the story. This puzzles me. When I read my flist, if something interests me and I don't have time to read it right away, I open it in a tab and read it later; I don't just skip it. And I go through my whole list every day. If someone posts in the middle of the night, I'll see it.

I can see not bothering to read somebody's post about their aspidistra or how they really hate that new barrista at Starbucks because you have too many posts to go through in the morning and not enough time. But do people really do that with fic? Do you do that with fic?

If I don't get many comments on a story, I just assume that people didn't like it, not that there were time-zone difficulties. Have I been wrong all these years?

Please tell me so I can have one more thing to stress over. Unless, of course, you don't ever see this post because it's the middle of the night where you live.