check in day 2
2 Dec 2025 21:20![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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writethisfanficToday I
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1 (33.3%)
edited
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posted
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0 (0.0%)
researched
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planned
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had a cheeky break
0 (0.0%)
dealt with life
2 (66.7%)
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Admin Post: GYWO 2026
2 Dec 2025 15:00![[admin post]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/entry/admin_post.png){kind=small}
gywomod posting in getyourwordsout- Read our 2026 Pledges & Requirements post. (Coming December 12.)
- Make a pledge via the GYWO 2026 Pledge Form.
- (optional) Request membership to the GYWO Dreamwidth community and/or GYWO Discord server. (Links to both are included in the Pledge Form.)
- Have patience! New members for 2026 will be added to the community on January 1, 2026.
The community is manually moderated and most of our moderators are in GMT -5, so please bear with us and know we'll add you to the community (and post 2026 tracking materials) as soon as possible on January 1st.
Comments are disabled on this post so the mods can focus on getting 2026 materials prepared, which will likely answer many of your questions. If you have a burning question, start by checking out our website, or you can email gywomod at gmail. (You can DM or leave a comment on the
gywomod journal, but an email usually gets a faster response).Check-In Post - Dec 2nd 2025
2 Dec 2025 19:05badly_knitted posting in get_knittedHello to all members, passers-by, curious onlookers, and shy lurkers, and welcome to our regular daily check-in post. Just leave a comment below to let us know how your current projects are progressing, or even if they're not.
Checking in is NOT compulsory, check in as often or as seldom as you want, this community isn't about pressure it's about encouragement, motivation, and support. Crafting is meant to be fun, and what's more fun than sharing achievements and seeing the wonderful things everyone else is creating?
There may also occasionally be questions, but again you don't have to answer them, they're just a way of getting to know each other a bit better.
This Week's Question: Does anyone have any plans for making Christmas gifts or cards?
If anyone has any questions of their own about the community, or suggestions for tags, questions to be asked on the check-in posts, or if anyone is interested in playing check-in host for a week here on the community, which would entail putting up the daily check-in posts and responding to comments, go to the Questions & Suggestions post and leave a comment.
I now declare this Check-In OPEN!
no subject
2 Dec 2025 12:19segfaultsurvivor posting in addmeAge: 30's
I mostly post about:
I write about my learning journey from zero (not really) to masters in Computer Science, with the goal of getting formal admissions into a program under 2 years. I have a lot of IT applied experience, but now I want to be able to master the material and also for myself learn as much as I can about the topics of programming systems, Linux, and math. For math, I really do know very little. I would very much like to improve that.
My hobbies are:
I like to play video games, take walks, and exercise. My favorite games right now are Lord of the Rings Online and Guild Wars. I also play retro games and am going through the Harvest Moon series on the original DS.
My fandoms are:
I don't invest a lot of energy into fandoms. But I like Linux. I think that counts.
I'm looking to meet people who:
Journals about goals, dreams, and ideas. I do enjoy reading about criticisms, first draft essays, and general naval gazing.
My posting schedule tends to be: daily/weekly/monthly/sporadic/etc
Sporadic with a weekly update on what I'm learning.
When I add people, my dealbreakers are:
I want to avoid negative spaces, so if you are constantly ranting about how terrible things are, I understand. I'm going to put a positive energy in my journal.
no subject
1 Dec 2025 23:40southernmedicineThanksgiving came and went. Hopefully all of you had a nice one, or if you don't celebrate, hopefully you had a restful Thursday. I spent mine with Blair's family, and wow, there were like 40 people there and five different tables laden with food. The event had to be held in their garage, where there was enough space to lay out that many tables.
I made maple bacon pecan blondies and a big bowl of elote to contribute to the feast, and both were generally well-liked, which made me happy.
Blair and I went Black Friday shopping, and actually had a great time. It was bustling enough at the mall to feel like a festive event, but not so crazy that it was stressful. We finished our Christmas shopping, and I got a few clothing items that were on super sale. We had dinner at a nearby hole in the wall called The Hungry Peddler, and then rounded out the night by getting our Christmas tree and a bunch of ornaments and lights, then coming home and setting it all up.
Saturday, we got a winter storm. It snowed all day long, from early morning to late night, without stopping. Waking up on Sunday was almost a little surreal for me, seeing absolutely everything covered in pristine unbroken white. We didn't go anywhere on Sunday, preferring to stay in and be cozy, and avoid what was sure to be hazardous driving.
All in all, it was a pretty great Thanksgiving weekend. It's getting a lot colder though, and my Southern Californian body is finding it hard to withstand, even indoors (we haven't run the heat at all, because honestly, we haven't really needed to in this apartment building). I'm just glad I had the foresight to buy myself a proper winter coat last week before The Big Chill set in.
When I got home from work this evening, we curled up on the couch; Blair with her presentation preparation, me with a stack of holiday cards. I've got them all done and filled out! By December 1st. Fancy that. If you'd like a holiday card from me and you haven't spoken up yet, do please let me know. Either comment here and I'll message you, or you can feel free to message me.
penaltywaltz posting in wipbigbangIf you opted for a December date (either originally or rescheduling during the posting period), you will hae until whenever I wake up on January 1st to either post your fic/art or email us at wipbigbang@gmail.com to drop out. I will be posting the info about the mini bang around midnight and then fingers crossed I will actually go to sleep before the sun comes up, and then I will post anything still waiting to be posted when I wake up and then posting will officially be over. Within the next week or two I will post the 2025 masterlist as well as both the 2024 Big Bang masterlist and the 2025 Mini Bang masterlist (both of which I started to compile but lost access to the files and just got access back this week).
If you had a posting date in September/October/November and didn't email us about rescheduling for December, you are still more than welcome to post in December as well! We had a lot of people who claimed dates who didn't post or alert us, so you still have time to post before you get banned for not posting. Post at any point in December by posting your Bragging Rights (found at https://wipbigbang.dreamwidth.org/210584.html) to the Tumblr (either by submitting them or tagging our blog in your post) or Dreamwidth. You must include the Bragging rights in the template or I won't reblog your post.
I will also go through the posting date claims form to see who signed up and didn't post or drop out in time. I will alert participants who are banned from being WIPBB authors/WIPRB artists for the 2026 round via the mod email, and will kee a list of emails to cross-check against the 2026 sign-ups. If you are banned and you submit a sign-up, your sign-up will be deleted and you will be reminded of your ban. Sign up again after the reminder and I will ban you from participating as a WIPBB artist/WIPRB author in the 2026 round as well.
quillpunk's Holiday Wishlist 2026
1 Dec 2025 21:28quillpunkOkay! Holiday wishlist time! (Somehow, it is already that time of the year again, OTL.)
Fandom Tree gifts. Find my Fandom Tree here. I'm asking for fics, icons, art and podfic. The fandoms I've requested are f:9-1-1/9-1-1 lone star, f:abo desire, f:all for the game, f:black adam, f:collector movies, f:dc comics, f:devil wears prada, f:dune, f:even if i fall into a ghost story i st, f:eye candy, f:meet you at the blossom, f:outlast, f:strangers from hell, f:the attic. Honestly, any of my requested mediums would be so fun! :D
Comments on my fics. I write a lot of rare pairs/small fandoms, so the comments are usually pretty slim pickings. Any and all comments would be deeply appreciated! <3
Dreamwidth Points/Paid Account Time. My Paid Account expires at the end of January, and not gonna lie, I've been over budget pretty much every month this year. I love my icons (some of which are fabulous gifts that I adore) and don't want to lose access to them. So even the minimum amount of points/months would be absolutely amazing!
Bookbinding material. As you might be aware, I've been getting into bookbinding this year! (I'm actually writing this post while taking a break from working on my fanbinding of The Gold-gilt Path by khthonicEcho, which is my first fanbind that isn't a simple single-signature pamphlet.)
Problem, there is so much stuff to acquire.
I've gotten the bare basics (this is part of the reason I broke my budget so much, ngl), but things like cool endpapers, pretty paper for the exterior of the book, and of course, bookbinding cloth, are all on the wishlist. (Fair warning, as I'm very new to this, I can't attest to the quality of any of them, or that it is precisely what I need. Especially with the papers, I'm not certain the ideal thickness for the different uses. So I'm just kind of muddling ahead.)
I've been having so much fun with bookbinding. I have a whole spreadsheet of fics I wanna bind! So you can find my bookbinding material wishlist here on Throne. Material for bookbinding would be so delightful! (Throne is basically an amazon wishlist, but more private so it doesn't give away my address. I'm very Internet Stranger Danger paranoid, which is the big reason I'm not posting this to holiday_wishes.)
Books. Obviously, there's books on the wishlist. This list is also on Throne! I think if there weren't any books on it, I'd be dead. Or in a coma. I'm always going to want books 😅
There are a couple of different books on the list, but they're all gay. They're also all books that are on my 'to buy' list (which is going to take forever to make my way down, lmao), so I'm very interested in all of them. I've read all the authors before, so I'm reasonably certain I'll enjoy them :D
The other reason my budget took a nosedive this year is because, when Amazon messed with the ability to download ebooks, I made the decision to no longer buy anything on kindle. However, I read a lot of indie MM romances from authors that only publish on Amazon. (KU isn't available in my region.)
I get why they do this, but it does mean I'm forced to shell out potentially significantly more money for a paperback, as opposed to if I just got the ebook. I don't necessarily regret this, though I did also have to buy a new bookcase this year. ...That's probably not related.
Anyway! So books. I love books, I love gay books, and I have a deeply profound urge to Own All the Self-Indulgent Gay Romance Books(TM). That's probably not very realistic unless I suddenly become immortal, but one can always hope! So anything from my book wishlist would be so lovely. <333
And... I think that might be everything. Is that everything? DW Points, fandomtrees, books, bookbinding material, comments...
Oooooh, okay, I thought of one more! (It's low-key funny I almost forgot this, it's been slipping my mind so much, lmao.)
Buy/gift my book to somebody. You might be aware that I wrote and published a book this summer. It's only available as an ebook on Amazon/in KU, which is like the exact same thing I just complained about. In my defense... I didn't have the energy to publish it wide, so I just stuck it in KDP Select, and now that it's there I don't have the energy to mess with that. I'll try to put up a paperback at some point --- I've honestly just been forgetting it, lol. (Also in my defense, I've just been forgetting a lot of things this year.)
And that really is everything! I'm pretty sure, anyway. I'm gonna return to my bookbinding now. I'm trying to cut a cardboard for the cover, and oh boy, it is so hard with just a cutting knife. But I shall prevail!
Happy Holidays, everyone! <3
check in day 1
1 Dec 2025 19:41lilly_c posting in writethisfanficToday I
wrote
1 (25.0%)
edited
1 (25.0%)
posted
1 (25.0%)
sent to beta
0 (0.0%)
researched
0 (0.0%)
planned
0 (0.0%)
had a cheeky break
1 (25.0%)
dealt with life
0 (0.0%)
Discussion: We're in the final month of the year (how?) are you planning to keep the pace you've worked at all year or are you winding down for the year?
Check-In Post - Dec 1st 2025
1 Dec 2025 19:05badly_knitted posting in get_knittedHello to all members, passers-by, curious onlookers, and shy lurkers, and welcome to our regular daily check-in post. Just leave a comment below to let us know how your current projects are progressing, or even if they're not.
Checking in is NOT compulsory, check in as often or as seldom as you want, this community isn't about pressure it's about encouragement, motivation, and support. Crafting is meant to be fun, and what's more fun than sharing achievements and seeing the wonderful things everyone else is creating?
There may also occasionally be questions, but again you don't have to answer them, they're just a way of getting to know each other a bit better.
This Week's Question: Does anyone have any plans for making Christmas gifts or cards?
If anyone has any questions of their own about the community, or suggestions for tags, questions to be asked on the check-in posts, or if anyone is interested in playing check-in host for a week here on the community, which would entail putting up the daily check-in posts and responding to comments, go to the Questions & Suggestions post and leave a comment.
I now declare this Check-In OPEN!
Five Things AuroraT Said
1 Dec 2025 14:38![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
ao3_news_feed
Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with AuroraT, who volunteers as an administrative volunteer for Open Doors.
How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?
I'm an administrative volunteer with the Open Doors Committee, which helps import at-risk digital archives to AO3 in order to preserve fanworks that might otherwise be lost. I'm responsible for project management, walking an archive and its archivist through our lengthy import process. We put a lot of effort into keeping track of the metadata for each work and respecting creators' privacy, so a lot of what I do involves managing spreadsheets and communicating with the archivist, other committees in the OTW, and other teams in the Open Doors Committee. I also write documentation for the committee, updating or writing down our procedures and information about the archives I'm managing.
What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?
There's a lot of variety in what an import project requires, so my weeks tend to vary a lot. Sometimes, I'll spend one of our weekly meetings working on a single task, such as preparing the documents we need to initiate a new import or cleaning up a spreadsheet. Other times, I'll jump around from task to task: emailing a different committee, discussing a procedure change with other admin volunteers, responding to feedback on documentation I wrote, creating the AO3 collection where we'll add the works we imported, answering a ticket from a creator wanting to claim works we previously imported, and so on.
What made you decide to volunteer?
I'm a huge supporter of the OTW's mission to preserve fanworks and fight censorship, and I had been watching calls for volunteers for positions I was qualified for in order to contribute to those efforts. I'd recently gotten much more into fanwork preservation when I began working at a library with a zine collection, where I was managing cataloguing and shelving a backlog of donated zines. Project management and working with spreadsheets is a lot of fun! When I saw the application for the administrative volunteer position, it seemed in line with my interests and skills, so I applied.
(Coincidentally, and unbeknownst to me when I applied, the library I was working at is one of Open Doors' partner institutions for our Fan Culture Preservation Project, which helps connect donors with physical fanworks to libraries and archives with zine collections. Some of the donations I was processing were facilitated with the help of Open Doors!)
What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?
It's absolutely task management. Our process for importing an archive is over a hundred steps long and some of those require a lot of prep work and communication between people. And that's not even including documentation or other administrative work! Thankfully, through the miracle of digital checklists and automatic reminders, as well as the detailed procedure instructions Open Doors has written over the years, it's not too difficult to keep on top of everything. Plus, I have my lovely fellow committee members to help out when I need it :)
What fannish things do you like to do?
I read a lot of fanfiction these days, especially longfics—the one I'm currently reading is over 430k words long and still being published. I also really like to leave long comments on the fics I read. It's a lot of fun to get that sweet, sweet AO3 email that the author responded to me! Recently, I started writing fanfiction for the first time in several years. Joining a new fandom really helped get those creative juices flowing.
Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out previous Five Things posts.
The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.
December: Fix-Its
1 Dec 2025 17:16trope_mod posting in trope_of_the_monthThe theme for December is Fix-Its. If there's something in canon you think needs fixing - whether that's a character dying, a pairing getting/not getting together, or just a really stupid plot point - now's your chance!
Posting guidelines are here, and if you have any recs or prompts you'd like to share, you can leave them in the comments using the templates below:
For recs:
For prompts:
This theme will last until 31st December.
no subject
1 Dec 2025 16:09quillpunkwell, i defaulted on fffx. i've just been unsure about my assignment from the very beginning. like i got it and was like, oops. maybe i should have actually checked the requests in the fandom before i offered it. orz. i totally missed the whole swap thing too, my brain was just full of fog. and with the check-in, yeah. i defualted. i feel bad about it, but it is what it is. at least i did manage to turn in something for ficinabox.
also, i'm working on putting together my holiday wishlist. i still don't have the courage to post it on holiday_wishes, so i guess this is a tradition at this point. it'll be much the same as usual, but also! i'm planning to add some bookbinding stuff to my throne wishlist (it's basically just an amazon wishlist, but more private so it doesn't give away my address). i've been getting really into it: i just finished a notebook in my bookbinding workshop class (separate post coming about that at... some point. orz.) and i definitely want to keep going with this. i'm gonna bind so many fanfics, just watch me.
but alas, i've also spent like 400 bucks on bookbinding tools and such this year (tbf, like a third of that was the laser printer) and i don't think i can afford to keep throwing so much money at it. but the pretty cloth...... temptation, i tell you. so much temptation.
anyway, more proper posts about the aforementioned hopefully coming soon(ish) <3
Reading Wrap-up 11/25
1 Dec 2025 07:28vamp_ress posting in booknookPurcell, Laura: Bone China. Bloomsbury. 2019.
I've been reading her books for a few years now, picking one up every autumn. She's a contemporary author, but she writes in the vein of gothic fiction - there are a lot of remote mansions and haunted castles in her books. Bone China features a remote manor on a cliff, an unreliable narrator and the question of what is truly happening and what is actually only taking place in the protagonist's head. Purcell is really good with the psychological horror. If that's your kind of thing you should definitely check her out.
Moreno-Garcia, Silvia: Mexican Gothic. Del Rey. 2020.
This was my first time with a novel by Moreno-Garcia. I felt that thematically, this was all over the place. Apart from the fact that it's horror it also tried to tackle themes like racism, classism, eugenics and mysoginy, but it didn't spend enough time on any of these themes to make it worthwhile. Additionally, this has a historical setting (the 1950/1960s) even though this is never fully realised and you wonder why the author chose to take this route (probably only to constantly talk about the dress the protagonist was wearing, I don't know). And when we got to the bottom of why the house was "haunted" I basically got off the plane - this is a personal thing of course, but I found this rather silly instead of terrifying. What I really liked was the gothic vibes she managed to evoke while describing the house. The atmosphere and the creepy dreams (that only get creepier as the story progresses) were my highlights.
Tremblay, Paul: Horror Movie. HarperAudio. 2024.
Tremblay simply has the best audiobook productions and this was top-notch as well. If you want to give this novel a try, do yourself a favour and consider the audiobook! I can't say that I fully bought into the "haunted set" idea and most of the characters felt flat and hardly realised, but Tremblay is really good with mixed media. There are several POVs and a screenplay in this. But the novel wasn't overly scary or frightening.
Feito, Virginia: Victorian Psycho. Audible Audio. 2025.
As a project this is very well done and successful, but as a book on its own I find it forgettable. As the title says this marries American Psycho to a Jane Eyre-like plot. The language was the most interesting thing about this, because just like in American Psycho the narration starts off very tame and proper only to get more unhinged as the story progresses. I think that progression was the highlight of the novel and very well done. On the other hand, it was riffing off what Ellis has already done decades ago, so I'm not sure how much of the credit (besides the idea of the Victorian setting) can really go to Feito. In the end, mostly a fanfiction remix even if it's executed extremely well.
Kröger, Lisa & Anderson, Melanie R.: Monster, She wrote! The Women Who Prioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction. Quirk Books. 2018.
Let's start this by saying that this is a beautifully done book. It was quite obviously typeset before the pandemic and before paper became scarce and expensive - there's a lot of free and waste of space here and it's wonderful to see a book "breathe" like that. Happens rarely enough. Sadly, this nonfiction read didn't fully give me what I had expected. Yes, I filled up my TBR because the authors truly manage to find a lot of hidden gems. But I had definitely expected more literary criticism, more in-depth analysis. In the end, this was pretty much snorkeling just below the surface.
Doerr, Anthony: Cloud Cuckoo Land. Scribner. 2021.
I only read this because Ben from Ben reads good gave this a glowing review. Half an hour into the (German) audiobook of 16 hours I thought this would be 16 hours of pure torture. In the end, it wasn't quite that bad, but I can't say that the book and I had a successful time with each other. The "hook" - the Greek epic connecting all the different timelines was as silly as the title suggests and had I known that this would fully be shouldered by kid and teenage protagonists I would have opted out before I even started. I just didn't care for any of it. Okay, that's not true. I cared for the poor beasts of burden who died somewhere in the middle - but even that was mostly the author emotionally manipulating the reader, so I don't know what to make of this.
Check-In Post - Nov 30th 2025
30 Nov 2025 19:01badly_knitted posting in get_knittedHello to all members, passers-by, curious onlookers, and shy lurkers, and welcome to our regular daily check-in post. Just leave a comment below to let us know how your current projects are progressing, or even if they're not.
Checking in is NOT compulsory, check in as often or as seldom as you want, this community isn't about pressure it's about encouragement, motivation, and support. Crafting is meant to be fun, and what's more fun than sharing achievements and seeing the wonderful things everyone else is creating?
There may also occasionally be questions, but again you don't have to answer them, they're just a way of getting to know each other a bit better.
This Week's Question (courtesy of
ysabetwordsmith): When learning a new art or craft, do you prefer level-grinding the basics, skipping ahead to the cool techniques, or a mix of both?If anyone has any questions of their own about the community, or suggestions for tags, questions to be asked on the check-in posts, or if anyone is interested in playing check-in host for a week here on the community, which would entail putting up the daily check-in posts and responding to comments, go to the Questions & Suggestions post and leave a comment.
I now declare this Check-In OPEN!