A Holmesian Solstice

What is Holmestice?

Holmestice is a twice-yearly digital fanworks exchange for the Sherlock Holmes multiverse. The name derives from the fact that the schedule for the exchange revolves around the Summer and Winter solstices. All versions of Sherlock Holmes media are welcome (movies, television shows, books, comics, radio dramas, etc.). All characters, pairings, and ratings are welcome. All media types that can be exchanged digitally (fic, art, vids, podfic, graphics) are also welcome.

The exchange is modeled on a "Secret Santa" style exchange. Participants sign up by offering to create works of specific media types in specific Sherlock Holmes universes with specific characters and/or pairings, ratings, and genres. Along with their "offer" participants will also make a similar list of "requests" for the gift they will receive. Requests and offers should be fairly general – they serve as guidelines for a broad category of works you would enjoy making or receiving, rather than the commission of one precise work. You are welcome and encouraged to provide additional prompts and specifics in your request, in case the person assigned to create for you wants more ideas to explore, but your gift-maker is only required to match a fandom, pairing/characters, rating, and genre, and to likewise abide by your listed "do not wants" (if provided).

After sign-ups are closed, the moderators match requests and offers, assigning every participant a specific person to make a gift for.

Care is taken during the matching period to ensure that participants are matched on topics, 'verses, pairings, and characters that they offered, but creators are encouraged to find further inspiration in their match's signup. Stories and podfics are required to be a minimum 1,000 words in length with length/quantity requirements also set for videos and graphics. All works are required to undergo an editing process (i.e. a "beta read"). Authorship of the works should be kept secret from other participants. When complete, participants submit their works to the AO3 collection or directly to the moderators.

Moderators gradually publish the works to the community between the first day of the month of Holmestice (June and December) and the 15th. When all works have been published, the community is welcome to speculate and guess who made what work. Authorship is not revealed until the solstice (the 20th or 21st, depending).

The exchange mods want to ensure that participation in the exchange is available to as many people as possible. Although we primarily host on Dreamwidth and Archive of Our Own, we can accommodate participants who do not have accounts with either service. If you are new to fandom exchanges and have more questions, please contact us, we are more than happy to help! holmesticemods@gmail.com