#blayesnetwork

♡ for one of my best friends, @colinford

Specifically a big thank you to my fellow Braven shippers. Thank you guys for accepting me into your circle, and for giving me a place to turn when the rest of the fandom was batshit crazy. Thank you to my fellow anti-Clarke and anti-bellarke friends for helping me feel like I wasn't screaming into the void.

Welcome to our Ravenbell New Year Fanfiction Exchange!

You asked, we deliver – let’s have a New Year Bellamy/Raven Exchange! The rules are shamelessly lifted from No White Saviors Allowed Exchange that took over this blog many years ago.

Now, just to be sure we’re all on the same page: an exchange is a challenge in which you list a few prompts for fanworks you’d like someone to write or make for you, and also agree to fulfill at least one prompt from someone else. The mods will choose for whom you’re writing, based on the prompts and all the additional information we ask for in your sign-up sheet. This is how exchanges usually work, but in this one, there is a catch. Each of you will have two assignments: one will be sent by the mods, the other you’ll pick yourself. In order to complete the challenge, you need to submit them both! Minimum length requirement is 500 words for each piece, so you’ll be writing at least 1000 words in total.

1. Schedule

Sign-ups start: November 2nd

Sign-ups end: November 16th

Assignments sent: November 23rd

Posting: December 28th

2. Sign-ups

In order to sign up, you have to submit [this form] In the form you have to give us: your email address*, 3-5 prompts you’d like filled for you, a list of things you really don’t want to find in the fanfic you receive, and a list of things you’re not willing to do in the fanfic you write.

All stories you prompt need to be focused on Bellamy and Raven – together or separately. We are keeping things simple. You can have stories about just Bellamy, just Raven, Bellamy and Raven as a couple, or Bellamy and Raven in a polyamorous relationship with other people involved as well. You can’t have stories in which Bellamy and Raven are involved with other people but not each other.

Please try keeping your prompts as varied as possible to give the mods some wriggle room – as much as possible when we’re all writing the same ship…

*Your email address will not be published anywhere; we just want to have a way to contact everyone in case someone inevitably changes their url in the middle of the challenge.

3. Assignments

3.1. The one from the mods

On November 23rd (or maybe a little earlier), you’ll get an email with the details of the fanfic you will be writing. In the email, you’ll find the name of your prompter, a list of 3-5 prompts (choose at least one!), and a list of things your prompter doesn’t want you to include in the story (please respect them all). We’ll ask you to confirm that you’ve received the email. From that moment, you’ll have a month to work on your prompts.

3.2. The one from the list

On the same day assignments are sent, we’ll post a full list of prompts submitted to the challenge. As your second assignment, you can choose anything from the list, apart from your own prompts. You have free reign, no matter what you said in the sign-up. Your second assignment can be a fanfic, but it doesn’t have to. Feel free to go into graphic, gifset, meta, podfic, fanart, fanmix – anything you like. All we ask is that you provide captions if you produce any fanwork that includes images.

THIS IS A SECRET EXCHANGE, SO WE ASK YOU NOT TO TELL ANYONE WHAT YOU’RE MAKING. We want everyone to have a surprise. Well, apart from the beta reader. You can tell your beta reader. Which brings us to:

4. Beta readers

You can have a beta reader to help you work on your fic. In fact, we encourage you to find one. It can be anyone you want. If you have trouble finding a beta reader, please feel free to advertise by making a text post titled “beta reader wanted” and tagging it “ravenbell exchange”. If this doesn’t work, please send us a message. We’ll help.

5. Posting

You post your work in our dedicated collection on AO3 (there will be a separate post about this in December). We then encourage you to post a link to it on tumblr and tag “ravenbell exchange”, but if you can’t (because, for example, you don’t use tumblr), that’s fine as well. What’s most important is that everything is in the AO3 collection. If you don’t have an AO3 account, we can help you register for one. All stories have to be rated and contain warnings (if applicable).

If, for your second assignment, you chose something that doesn’t fit comfortably on AO3 (for example a gifset), it is, of course, okay to only post it on tumblr.

All works have to be posted on December 28th – not a day sooner or later. To make everyone’s life easier, we’re accepting a very simple rule: if it’s December 28th anywhere in the world, you are free to post.

6. Treats

Treats are additional fanworks you can create once you’re done with your two assignments. You can post them any time you wish, starting from December 29th, following all the posting rules from point 5. You can use the same list of prompts you’ll be using to pick your second assignment.

7. “Dear Author” letter

Aka something you don’t have to do, but you totally can. A “Dear Author” letter is a tumblr text post titled “Dear Ravenbell Exchange Author” and tagged “ravenbell exchange”, in which you can say all the things you want your assigned writer to know about you or your prompts (think: general likes and dislikes, favorite things in fanworks, a few sentences about each prompt etc). It can also include a list of additional crossover prompts (for details about this, see point 8) You can post a “Dear Author” letter at any moment between now and November 9th. If you’re not sure how to write a “Dear Author” letter, please try looking at how they’re done in popular multifandom exchanges (for example Yuletide, Rare Pair etc), or in previous challenges hosted on this blog.

8. Crossovers

As a rule, we don’t allow crossovers, because matching crossover prompts for an exchange is hell on wheels. However, there is a way to get one. In your “Dear Author letter (see above), you can include a section titled “Crossover Options”, and make a list of as many crossover prompts as you please. If your assigned writer decides that they like your crossover prompts better than your regular prompts they found in their assignment, they can opt to write you a crossover instead. However, that’s absolutely up to them, and you’re taking a chance here. Your crossover prompts will also be up for grabs for people writing their second assignment.

9. Questions

Pairing: Bellamy Blake x Raven Reyes

It’s not something I wrote now, but it’s something I found on my docs and it’s clear I once had the intention to finish it. That will obviously never happen but I figured it could become a nice oneshot and we all know Bellamy and Raven need more love. I miss them.

my hands can stretch across the world, but only reach for you

“You with me?”

It’s a simple question and there is a simple answer to it as well. When Raven says it, it’s a promise.