dear yulebat.

'Tis the season, clearly. By which I mean, Yuletide is upon us!

(I have been participating in Yuetide every single year since it started. I feel so old school.)

SO. Dear Yulebat,

Basically, you are awesome. Because there is nothing about the fandoms I requested that I don't love. (Except the Dating Plan. If this is the fandom we matched on, you know of what I speak. But anyway.) More importantly, there are no characters in any of these fandoms that I don't love with an all-consuming passion, because seriously, THEY ARE ALL AMAZING AND BRILLIANT AND SPARKLY. Yes, even the dumb ones. I don't care, I love them all.

So here are some quick and dirty things that I like and don't like in fics in general:

LIKES: witty banter, wacky hijinks, random shenanigans, everyone being a BAMF in their own particular way, long plotty fics, quick incisive character studies, romance, friendship, TEAMS, gen, ensemble casts, happy (or realistic but generally hopeful) endings, boys being boys, girls kicking butt and taking names, first time fic of any rating.

DISLIKES: torture porn, excessive angst, excessive schmoop, mpreg, hardcore kink, kid!fic, character bashing of any kind, humiliation, death!fic.

But really, my dear Yulebat, I'm pretty easy. As long as you avoid the "dislikes" list, write whatever suits you and the fandom and the story you want to tell, and I will LOVE it. Sure, I'm a fan of happy-ish endings, but if you want to break my heart instead? Go right ahead and shatter it into a million pieces, it's all good. The "likes" list are by no means mandatory in any way, write what you want, I have complete faith in you. Why? Because you love the same fandom I do, because we matched on it, and that means you have preemptively won Yuletide. :D

I have nothing fandom-specific to add that wasn't on my sign-up form, but for posterity, here it is: ( Sports Night, Mairelon the Magician, The Sting )

ARGH.

So my parents were in town last night, and they stayed at my place. This morning, after I'd left for work, my mother used my laptop to google my office location so that they could meet me for lunch. I had 20+ different tabs open, mostly fics I'd seen linked someplace and wanted to read but hadn't had time for yet, accumulated over several weeks(/months?). My mother knows about my fanfic habits, I really don't care what she sees open. She did the google search, then wanted to get back to whatever I'd had open to start with so as not to have interrupted anything. To find the tab I'd had open? She systematically went through and closed every. single. tab. Then couldn't figure out which page I'd been looking at anyway, so she closed Firefox entirely. And Safari, which had a set of work-related tabs open. And Word, with my performance report.

Every single fic I'd had open waiting for me? Gone. No idea where I'd found them in the first place. The one I was reading this morning I'd opened recently enough to show up in my recent history, but none of the others. Or the rec lists I was slowly working through and therefore had open tabs for. I only bookmark things I know I'm going to go back to multiple times; for short-term "oh I'll get to this later" fics, I just, y'know. Save a tab.

GODDAMNIT MOTHER.