Holmestice is getting geared up for Winter 2018!

[holmesticemods]

Can you believe it?!?

As always, Holmestice is an anonymous gift exchange for all Holmesian fandoms and all kinds of digitally-hostable fanworks.

As with the last three rounds, we'll be on Dreamwidth again, and we WILL be keeping the option to post your work to AO3 instead of having it hosted on Dreamwidth. (The same as this summer)

Sign-ups will be on DW; matching will be done by hand behind-the-scenes; works will be announced on DW and made anonymously visible a few per day throughout the posting period; the individual works themselves will be on Dreamwidth, AO3, or both, depending on the creator's preferences.

NEW! Holmestice is branching out to various social media sites in an attempt to engage more of fandom! This means we are planning on mirroring all announcement posts to Tumblr and Twitter. We will also make announcements to the original LJ Holmestice community (for those of you who watch that). Oh and for you on Pillowfort (both mods are), here's a BRAND NEW community/fort: Pillowfort Holmestice We will NOT post works or direct links to works on those sites and communities, but instead will simply link back to DW with entreaties to come read and access the works here and on AO3. We are happy to reblog/retweet though so just shoot us an email or message if you'd like us to do so.

Please let us know what questions you have!

The schedule for this next round:

September 17 - sign-ups open
October 1 - sign-ups close
October 8 - matches sent
November 21 - assignments due
December 1 - posting begins
December 14 - posting ends
December 21 - creator reveals

As usual, any help in advertising the community would be wonderful! Here are two existing banners you can use:



<img src='https://holmesticemods.dreamwidth.org/file/72959.jpg' alt='Holmestice Fanworks Exchange (detail of "Westminster," de Nittis, 1878)' title='Holmestice Fanworks Exchange' />


<img src='https://holmesticemods.dreamwidth.org/file/73130.jpg' alt='Holmestice Fanworks Exchange (detail of "Westminster," de Nittis, 1878)' title='Holmestice Fanworks Exchange' />


And of course if you would like to make your own promotional graphic for the exchange, we welcome that!

Please feel free to comment here on this post with your thoughts, hopes, dreams, and wishes. We're looking forward to this coming round and hope you are, too!

Comments

[orchid314]

I’d love to join for this round, but I won’t have email/Internet access from October 1-13. I’ll be back online on the 14th. Would it still be possible to participate in the exchange?

[sanguinity ( as admin)]

That should be fine, especially if you don't leave your sign-up to the last minute: we'll want to look at it before you leave, so we have a chance to ask any questions that might come up during matching. The only other thing it should affect is your ability to confirm your assignment, and we'll just know not to expect an assignment-confirmation from you until the 14th/15th.

Thank you for checking, and we're excited to have you with us this round!

[orchid314]

Thank you! I'll definitely submit my sign-up on the early side of the open period.

[starfishstar]

***YES.***

That is all. :-)

[trobadora]

Excellent! I was just thinking how much I was looking forward to this the other day.

[write_out]

I've been looking forward to this! I appreciate the extra bit of time for writing too, so thank you!

[pipmer1]

I'm in!

[luthienberen]

I think I will give this a go. :)

[rachelindeed]

Whee!!

[tazlet]

Had a great time in the last one and would love to play again.

Newbie

[hpswl_cumbercookie]

I have never done this exchange before. How does it work?

Re: Newbie

[rachelindeed]

Hi Cumbercookie! The mods will probably come by soon to answer your question as well, but I'll just offer an answer as someone who's participated here several times :)

The basic idea is for you to anonymously create a fanwork (a fic, art, podfic, vid, or graphic) as a gift for someone, while at the same time someone else does the same thing for you. So the first step is to fill out this rather detailed questionnaire which will be posted on this comm in a few days. It will ask you about what you'd like to create and what you'd like to receive. This is to make sure that everyone gets to create and receive gifts that match up with their interests and preferences. The idea is to tailor your requests to let the person you're matched with know what you like and also what you don't like, which increases everybody's chance of enjoying both the work they create and the one they receive! The questionnaire comes with a lot of pre-written options that you can select from and/or erase, but it's also open to anything you want to write in, so don't feel like you have to just stick with the suggested answers in any category.

So, you'll be asked which versions/adaptations of Sherlock Holmes you'd be happy to work with. If there's only one version that you like, that's totally fine, just say that. The same goes for what characters and ships - if any - you like. If you only like one pairing, that's easy, just say what it is. If you have a lot of ships you enjoy, list them all! If you don't like pairings and want gen fic, that's also fine. And if you like a bunch of different adaptations, you can mention as many as you want. No adaptation is too obscure for Holmestice! But just be aware that if you state a fondness for a relatively rare adaptation or pairing, the mods will do their best to match you on your more rare requests first if they can, rather than on your more popular adaptations/pairings, because they want to encourage a diversity of creations. So just make sure that if you list something on your preferences questionnaire, you really would be happy creating or receiving a gift about that thing!

Once everybody fills out their request lists, the mods will read through them and match everyone up, and then send out emails telling you who you'll be creating for. You go read their request list, make something you think they'll like, and keep it secret! On the due date about six weeks later, you turn in your creation to the mods or post it anonymously on AO3 in the Holmestice collection. Then over the month of December the mods will gradually reveal all the new fics and art, etc., still keeping everything anonymous. Everybody reads and comments and tries to guess who made what! The Guessing Post is always hilarious :) Then there's a big reveal post where the creators are all announced, and after that everyone can cheer and take credit for their stuff and post it wherever else they want.

And that's basically Holmestice. It's very welcoming and fun. I hope you'll join in if it sounds like something you'd like!

Re: Newbie

[hpswl_cumbercookie]

Thank you so much for the in depth description. This definitely sounds like fun. Is length a big deal?

Re: Newbie

[holmesticemods]

Hi there! Mod chiming in. Everything Rachelindeed said is correct! You can take a peek at the sign-up post we used for the previous round: https://holmestice.dreamwidth.org/468217.html - this round will be the same with minor edits for dates.

Length is a minimum of 1,000 words and we do have minimums for other media as well. We get entries of all sorts of length though so as long as it meets the minimum, the sky is the limit!

Just one note in addition to what Rachelindeed said, your signup posts are editable throughout the signup period. It's not unusual to go back and edit/adjust based on things you see in other people's posts! Once the sign-up period closes we match based on what's in your signup then!

Re: Newbie

[sanguinity ( as admin)]

Hello, hpswl_cumbercookie! I'm one of the mod team, and how lovely to have you considering joining us! rachelindeed did a beautiful job summing up, so I'll just add a link to last round's sign-up instructions plus a selection of sign-ups, in case you want an advance look at what questions we ask and what a finished sign-up might look like. We'll post a fresh sign-up post when we open sign-ups in a few days; it'll be largely the same as last round's, although we may tweak a few things.

We do have minimum length requirements: 1,000 words for fic and podfic, and 1 minute in length for vids. Art doesn't have a minimum, mostly because we've never figured out how to express one. (If you'd like to get an idea of what kinds of things people have done for art, you can check out the art tags for 2018 and 2017. Or other years, of course! Here's the complete list of tags.)

What else can we help with?

[graycardinal]

Quick OT ping to the mods: see moderation queue (Steed to Peel: "We're needed!").