Greetings from your friendly neighbourhood elves! (Hopefully of the Tolkien variety rather than the tiny and twee North Pole type. ^_~)
So, it's that time of the year again: time to sign up for the Lord of the Rings Secret Santa exchange! Slash, femslash, het and gen, fic and fanart; you can request it all, so why not join in? Sign-ups will run from now until
November 16th.
Previous years' stories and art can be found, as usual, via
the website (up until 2009) or the
lotr_sesa community (up to 2014). The 2015 and 2016 stories can be found on the
AO3.
Please note that this is an FPF challenge. (i.e. Fictional, not real people fiction/RPF.)
We're always open to all the Peoples and Ages of Middle-earth, which means that characters from The Hobbit are welcome too! There is one minor change to the signups this year:
we have created a tag set in order to streamline the matching. If you find an error in the set, please let us know! If you feel that a character should be added, contact the mods and we will see if we can accommodate the request.
When signing up, either start typing the name of the character (a dropdown menu will appear) or click the "List 107 characters" button to display all the available tags (which have been stripped down in the interest of clarity: for example, Fingon is listed as just Fingon instead of Fingon|Findekáno).
The Rules (2017):
1. Your story (or fanart) is due December 17th 11:59 pm Pacific Time (you can check what that is in your time zone here) and will go online December 24th -- please post it to the community (and nowhere else, until January 1st) and we will make it public on Christmas Eve.
2. Naturally, it'd be better if you didn't talk too much about your fic/art beforehand in places where your recipient could see it. Also, as a matter of fairness, please make your story more than 500 words (1000 is better). For fanart we'd expect you to spend at least a couple of hours on your work.
3. Please only sign up if you plan on actually fulfilling your end of the bargain. If you're going to be late or cannot complete your assignment, please let us know so we can discuss alternate arrangements. In addition, there will be a pool of emergency replacement writers/artists, so that everyone who signs up gets their gift.
4. Signing up: the sign up form can be found here (or here if the main link gives you an error message). If you need help with signing up, please don't hesitate to contact the mods.
5. This year's timeline (2017):
- Signups: November 6th to 16th.
- Assignments sent out: On or near November 17th.
- Assignments due: December 17th.
- Stories/art revealed: December 24th.
- Author/artist names revealed: January 1st.
6. When you're done, please add your story/art to the collection on AO3. All gifts will be revealed on December 24th.
That should be it. Assignments will be sent out shortly after signups close, hopefully on or very shortly after November 17th, giving you approximately four and a half weeks to finish your assignment. We realize that it's not possible that everyone gets to write their OTP, but we'll do our best to make sure you don't have to write something that squicks you, so be sure to let us know your preferences.
Have fun -- and spread the word!
