Meme thingy: Fandom Secret Santas

[pensnest]

ephemera asked me for this, and as she has been closely involved with much of my Secret Santa experience, one way or another, it seems entirely appropriate.



I am entirely in favour of these!

Well. The obvious one I've been involved with is the popslash secret santa, but I'll get to that in a moment. First, a memory from probably my first Christmas as a popslash person: someone organised a Christmas card swap, where we were assigned a recipient and had to send a card (and optionally a gift) as though from the boy(s) of her/his choice.

My recipient for that one was ephemera, and she'd signed up for Chris and Lance, and Nick. I happened upon some shark's tooth earrings in a local rock* shop, which became her gift from Nick. "Lance" and "Chris" prevailed upon their bandmates to share recipes (from memory these were Fatone chicken, Mississippi corn bread, Better Than Sex Cake, vegetarian pot stickers and some kind of fruit cobbler). This turned out to be the gift that keeps on giving. For ephemera's birthday the following year I wrote a threesome story involving Chris, Lance, Joey and their recipes. And subsequent to *that*, the cake became Death Cake, because anything larger than a tablespoonful is undoubtedly a deadly weapon, and it has been presented and eaten at every Camp Sparkle we've held.

Well. I've not been involved with other Secret Santas, including Yuletide, though I much appreciate the incredible richness of fannish happiness covered by that exchange. And I like things like the granting of wishes, and so forth. But the popslash secret santa is a thing of beauty.

I wrote my first story back in 2005, the year I found the fandom, and was a little surprised by all the posts bewailing the writer's fate. My assignment was perfect for me—an author whose stories and style I was familiar with, my favourite pairing, and a friend who had some nice ideas for little extra Things I could include. It went very well. What was this SeSa Angst?

Ahaha. I found out the following year, when I had to write my least favourite—and to that point, untried—pairing. For Torch. SeSa Angst, indeed. I managed also a pinch-hit, which was much less angst-filled! There's something about just having to grab an idea and go with it that is quite liberating after weeks of fretting.

Don We Now Our Gay Apparel, as the challenge was called, finished in that year, 2006, but those of us who still carried the popslash torch couldn't bear the idea of being without our Christmas challenge, and Make The Yuletide Gay was born amidst much excitement. I know it must have been a hell of a challenge for nopseud and her Head Tech Elf, who did a tremendous job. Of course, there was DWNOGA to point to as the spec, which must have helped.

I should note that the MTYG pre-test involved five of us who actually wrote stories in order to check that the system worked. We even had a Lousy Defaulter who required a pinch-hit. Four of us were sitting about in nopseud's house scowling over laptops all afternoon (I seem to recall that turps had to participate at a distance). It might be thought that actually writing stories to submit was going a bit far, but whatever. It was fun, and produced a bunch of unsurprisingly cracked stories.

I wrote two actual MTYG stories that year, and had a lot of fun with both, since I had a useful mutual friend for the main story, and for my pinch-hit I managed to make use of an embryonic AU idea I'd been saving for just such an occasion. There was a bit of a wobble when I realised my recipient liked angst—I don't really know how to do angst—but in the end I just went with what I could do, and it worked. There is a lot of worry about what to say in 'Dear Santa' letters, and in prompts, and I still don't know what is the best course. A specific prompt can be really helpful in getting the author from "I have to write a story with a happy ending" to "I have to write THIS PARTICULAR story". But I usually tell my Santa to write a story she wants to write, because if she can put her heart into it I'm likely to enjoy it whether it's what I asked for or not.

And MTYG proved a great success. It's kept going in a splendid way, and it has been noticeable how long many ex-popslashers have been willing to come back to write a SeSa story, even though they've not been participating in the fandom for the rest of the year. A fandom challenge that basically has been going for thirteen years, even with a change of 'ownership' in the middle, is damn impressive.

There is, of course, enormous potential for SeSa Angst, as I discovered. Sometimes you get an intimidating recipient, or one with a locked journal and no mutual friends. Sometimes you get a pairing you find difficult—though after a few years of it I found I rather enjoyed writing pairings I hadn't done before, and it became more difficult to do a 'repeat' pairing. Sometimes it's something else: like the year I got a request for post-apocalyptic vampires with romance, which filled me with horror and yet, when combined with an informative post I randomly happened to read, turned into a story I'm very proud of. Another year, I had a request for a high school AU involving two pairings of boys who could not chronologically speaking have attended high school at the same time. I did an angel/devil setup with that one, and again was very proud of it—although it was the only time that my recipient did not bother to participate in the challenge. As I was by this time on the Elves team, I knew she'd defaulted on her own story. And she sent me no feedback—I suspect she never even read the story, which I resent to this day!

As a recipient, I've been extremely fortunate. Only in my very first year did I receive a story which was really disappointing. In every subsequent year, my author made a definite effort to please me, and in consequence, succeeded. Many of them have *delighted* me. I'm not sure I've managed to convey my pleasure adequately with my feedback on my own stories—usually I'm just a bit too excited to get it right. I hope my authors have felt that pleasure and relief that comes with receiving satisfied feedback from their recipient. I have done my best to contribute to the festive cheer by sending feedback on every story I read—not sure that I managed to send feedback to *every* story in the DWNOGA years or at the beginning of MTYG, but these days MTYG has shrunk to something it is certainly possible to cover in its entirety.

The best thing about DWNOGA and MTYG is, of course, receiving happy feedback from your recipient(s). Which I did, every year except the one with the defaulter. It is enormously disappointing not to get feedback from the recipient, and I know it has happened to so many authors, and I never understand it. How is it hard to say thank you, even if you don't like the story? There is always *something* you can say. Okay, I can think of a couple of stories in the past that have been quite the challenge, but it can be done. There seems to be, across fandom, a general agreement that One Does Not Criticise Gift Stories, which I think is a good approach—after author reveals, maybe, or once the gift season is well over, it's not unreasonable, but for something like Yuletide where feedback is public, it seems right not to include criticism. (There are probably worthy exceptions. There always are. Ah, well.)

And you know, running a challenge like this is a hell of a thing. There's always *something*. I am in awe of nopseud, who basically runs the MTYG challenge (other Elves help, but she very much shoulders most of the burden), writes her own story, and betas for I don't know how many of the participants. Sometimes things go oddly smoothly. Other times, a bunch of people fall out at the last minute and there is frantic scrambling for pinch hits. There was one year when I wrote a very last-minute pinch-hit—actually for ephemera— because something quite peculiar had happened, but in the event we didn't need to use it. We've had some very… let's say, strange things occur, and there's always something new to disconcert a poor moderator.

But what would Christmas be without the story pressure? I don't know. Producing a story at a very busy and somewhat pressurised time of year is... I dunno, it feels like essence of fandom, somehow. Christmas without it would be a lot less exciting, I think. And a lot less fun without a bunch of fresh stories to read.


* as in, chunks of stone