Blue Christmeth

The Blue Christmeth 2019 AO3 collections have been de-anonymised, so everyone is now free to share and talk about their works! (Quick mod note: please thank your writer/artist for your gift if you haven’t already!) Check out the main exchange here and Blue Christmeth Madness here. Huge thanks to everyone who participated this year. We may be a small fandom, but it’s so encouraging to see this challenge thriving more than six years after it was established.

The Blue Christmeth 2019 collection is now open! Check your AO3 email for a link to your gift, or check out all the new fanworks here!

Happy New Year! Several people have already uploaded works to Blue Christmeth - well done! For everyone else, this is a friendly reminder that the deadline is 9:00 p.m. UTC/GMT on Sunday, January 12th. No extensions will be granted this year, so please make a note of what time the deadline is for you! (Here’s a handy time zone converter.) However, you will able to edit your work on AO3 after submitting it, so it’s totally fine if your story is finished but needs some formatting tweaks or a spelling/grammar check.

If you’re struggling with your assignment, you are free to default at any time— there’s no penalty and no questions asked. Just hit “default” on AO3 and/or send me an email.

Blue Christmeth Madness

Blue Christmeth Madness is back! Whether you want to write/draw a gift for a friend or just saw a prompt that inspired you, now’s your chance to choose any of this year’s requests and go wild. There’s no minimum word count, and you don’t have to be signed up to regular Blue Christmeth to take part. The AO3 collection is here, and it’ll be open for submissions right up until all the challenge authors are revealed on Sunday, January 26. Have fun!

2019 Prompt List

Two weeks to go until the Blue Christmeth deadline! Assignments are due at 9:00 p.m. UTC (click here to see what that is in your time zone) on Sunday, January 12, 2020. There’ll be another reminder post a week from now, and I’ll be sending an email to Blue Christmeth participants so that no one gets caught out by the deadline. 

Blue Christmeth assignments are out! Check under “My Assignments” on AO3 to find yours (you should also receive an email from AO3). You have until 9:00 p.m. UTC on Sunday, January 12, 2020 to finish your assignment— that’s just under seven weeks away. I’ll be posting deadline reminders towards the end of the writing period, and anyone who needs to default, at any point, may do so without penalty. Remember, Blue Christmeth is an anonymous exchange, so please don’t reveal who you’re writing or making art for until creator reveals on January 19th!

NOTE: last year there was an issue with a few people being sent incorrect assignments after AO3 failed to save the changes I’d made. I’ve triple-checked the matching page to ensure this doesn’t happen again, but just in case, it would be super helpful if everyone could email me ([email protected]) with their AO3 name and the name of the recipient they’ve been assigned to, so that I can confirm that everyone’s been matched up correctly. 

Sign-ups are open for the seventh annual Blue Christmeth, a Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul fanwork exchange! If you’re interested in joining in but aren’t sure how it all works, here’s a detailed walkthrough.

Signing Up

Blue Christmeth takes place on Archive Of Our Own. To sign up for the exchange, log into AO3, go to the Blue Christmeth 2019 collection page, and click “sign up”. You get to make four separate requests (prompts) and one offer. Each request needs to have at least one character associated with it - when you start typing a name in the “characters” field, it should autofill with a name you can click on. You can also add up to three pairings in the “relationships” field. In the “Description” box, you can write any kind of prompt you like for your chosen characters/ships, or leave it blank. Here’s a sample request:

(NB: some characters and pairings won’t autofill when you type them in— this is likely to happen with minor characters or rarepairs that haven’t been added to AO3 yet. If you want to select a particular character or pairing and it isn’t coming up, just message/email me and I’ll add it to the tag set.)

The “offers” section works the same way— you can select 3 to 20 characters and up to 6 pairings you’re willing to write/draw, and put any extra details in the “description” box. This is the place to mention any limits you’d like me to know about, such as “I’m okay with dark and violent prompts”, “I’m not comfortable with anything super explicit”, or “I’ll write about characters A & B in a platonic relationship, but not as a pairing”. Because Blue Christmeth is a small exchange, I can look at each offer individually and take these details into account when matching people. The requests part of your sign-up will be visible to everyone, but your offers will be kept hidden and only collection maintainers will be able to see them.

You can edit your sign-up as much as you like until sign-ups close on November 22nd, so it’s no problem if you want to add/remove characters or change your prompts entirely. After that, everyone will be assigned a gifter and a recipient, and you’ll be sent an assignment by the end of the 25th.

Request Rules

Your requests can involve any canon characters from Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, and/or El Camino. Your prompts can also involve any canon or non-canon relationships between those characters.

Your prompts can be as G-rated or as explicit as you like, but at least one of your four prompts MUST be gen (not focused on a romantic or sexual pairing). It’s fine if your gen prompt is about a non-sexual relationship or friendship. This rule is in place so that both shippers and non-shippers can enjoy Blue Christmeth. Please respect the spirit of the rule and make sure that your gen prompt is actually gen, not just a shipping prompt without a ship tag!

While there’s no hard-and-fast rule against prompts involving crossovers and fandom-based AUs (e.g. “Breaking Bad characters in the Star Trek universe”), please consider that the person who gets your request may not know anything about the other fandom, and may have to choose one of your other prompts to fulfill.

Fulfilling Your Assignment

This part is easy— when you upload your finished work to AO3, just check the box next to “Does this fulfill a challenge assignment?”, and select your assignment in the field next to it:

Please make sure that these boxes are checked before you hit “post”! Otherwise, your work will not be submitted to the Blue Christmeth collection, and everyone will be able to see it as soon as it’s uploaded to AO3.

Tip: if you’re nervous about associating your draft work with your assignment before it’s complete, you can just treat it as a normal AO3 draft and leave the boxes unchecked until it’s 100% done and ready for your recipient to see. This is what I usually do with my own assignments.

Deadlines

Assignments are due on Sunday, January 12th, 2020, at 9 p.m. UTC (find out what that is in your time zone here). Anyone who has not submitted a gift by the deadline will be defaulted and their assignment will be sent to a pinch-hitter. No extensions will be granted this year, so please keep the deadline in mind during the writing period. I will send reminder emails to all participants two weeks and one weeks before the deadline. There are no penalties for dropping out, so if January 12th is approaching and you know you won’t be able to finish on time, contact me and I’ll find a pinch hitter to take over your assignment.

Reveals

Everything submitted to the Blue Christmeth 2019 collection is hidden until reveals on January 19th. At that point, everyone will be sent a link to their gift, and the works will be visible on AO3 for everyone to read, but creators’ names will remain hidden until January 26th. It’s not a hard-and-fast rule, but please do try to leave a comment on your gift to show your Blue Christmeth Dealer your appreciation!

Miscellaneous Q&A

Q: How many of my recipient’s prompts do I need to write/draw?

A: Just one!

Q: Are participants matched in pairs (as in, A writes for B and B writes for A)?

A: Usually not, although it can happen.

Q: Are late sign-ups allowed?

A: If you’ve missed the deadline by a few hours and still want to sign up, message/email me and I’ll let you in. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to allow new sign-ups once matching has begun.

Q: I’ve been sent my assignment, and it doesn’t match what I offered / I don’t think I’ll be able to fulfill it.

A: If this happens to you, please get in touch ASAP and we’ll talk about it.

Q: I have another question!

Thank you for asking about this. In previous years I’ve gone by the honour system (as in, I have not asked anyone to state their age), but I share your concern about minors getting matched to NSFW prompts. To be clear, it’s none of my business what people under 18 choose to write or read outside of Blue Christmeth, but I’m not comfortable with the thought of minors being asked to create explicit content in an exchange that I moderate. 

I don’t want to exclude younger fans from the exchange, so my first instinct was to request that anyone under 18 lets me know that they’re under 18 when they sign up, but I feel like this would cause more problems than it solved: in order to prevent minors getting sent NSFW fic/art, I would have to contact anyone who matched to them and say “just so you know, your recipient is under 18″, which has obvious (and not good) implications for privacy and safety. 

Blue Christmeth is back! Sign-ups for the 2019 Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul and El Camino fanwork exchange are open now, November 4. Come and join us!

HOW IT WORKS Blue Christmeth is a Secret Santa-style gift exchange for both writers and artists. When you sign up on AO3, you tell us what kind of gift you’d like to receive (your requests) and which characters you’d like to write/draw for someone else (your offer). When sign-ups close, everyone will be matched to a recipient and assignments will be sent out. You’ll have six weeks to write a fic of at least 1,000 words or create a finished piece of fanart for your recipient. When everyone has a gift, all the works will be revealed for everyone to enjoy.

FURTHER INFORMATION Check out the AO3 collection for full details, rules and FAQ! There will be tips and reminders here on @bluechristmethmods throughout the sign-up period.