Erostober 2025

[tweague]

So, 'tis (approaching) the season for whumptober, kinktober, flufftober, and goodness knows what else. I've really got more than enough else to write at the moment, but I quite fancied doing some more short-form low-stakes fic to go with the longer stuff I've been working on for FiaB, so I've decided to have an extremely casual go at Erostober 2025. Whumptober always looks great, but I find I tend to get swamped over-explaining the background of the whump and so get too bogged down for daily posting; and the kinktober prompts really didn't spark anything much for me this year. The Erostober prompts were a great blend of primarily smut/kink stuff (never apologise, never explain = me getting less bogged down in superfluous context), with additional daily options of a lighter, fluffier option, or a darker, more whumpy one, which I really appreciated. (Even though so far, I have admittedly mostly written smut.)



Technically speaking it's a classical mythology / epic cycle fandom challenge, but the mods were fine with my pinching the prompts table for my own nefarious purposes. I'm sure I won't manage to post every day throughout the month, but I've got a handful under my belt already, and I've been having a blast with the freedom of just writing pure goblin-brain idiocy. It'll be mostly WEJverse, but I've got at least one Max Carrados oddment in there so far, and I might even break out the Ted Scott if I'm feeling particularly punch drunk by late in the month.

I haven't decided yet whether to post them here initially, and then archive them to AO3 later, or to post straight to AO3 under the Goblin Brain imprint. (The primary disadvantage to the latter is that I don't know what happens in Yuletide if a fandom is eligible at nominations time but has over a thousand fics before assignments go out, as is very possible with all the daily challenges, exchanges etc falling due in October - we only need about another 60 fics on AO3 to go over 1000! I don't imagine they'd kick us out of yuletide for it, but I wouldn't like to risk it :S Would love to hear if anyone has views on this. I'd also love to hear what people's thoughts are for the best format for posting this sort of challenge there - I know people often use a single AO3 work to archive all the short works they produced for a daily posting challenge, and that seems a great way to keep shorter oddments of fic contained; but on the other hand, some people find it frustrating if they're trying to find or avoid a particular trope, tag or pairing, and they can't work out which part of a multi-part work like that contains the thing they do or don't want, since the tags for each chapter go onto the full work. All things considered, I think there's something to be said for both methods, I just wondered if anyone had any strong views on the subject.)

Comments

[philomytha]

The Yuletide limit isn't 1000 fics, it's 1000 complete fics longer than 1000 words, and we've got 711 of those, so it's not an immediate concern. But they don't chuck fandoms out, once it's in it's in for that exchange, even if someone did manage to post 289 more long fics in the next week. Either way, you don't need to worry!

[tweague]

Ah, thanks for the correction, that is indeed a much more comfortable margin 😂 Okay, I won't fret so much about flooding the AO3 section with nonsense next month.

[sweetsorcery]

Basically, what philomytha said. They haven't yet started approving nominations, but I can't imagine that many fics going up that fast, even in Biggledom. :D

Re: posting a bunch of fics for the same "event" - how about posting them individually but as a series? That way they're all separate, with their own set of tags, but are also gathered up into a themed set; someone could pick and choose or read all one after the other. Also, series are quick and easy to post.
Or alternatively, each ficlet could be a chapter of a single work with a chapter note up front listing the tropes/tags/pairing.

[tweague]

I can't imagine that many fics going up that fast, even in Biggledom :D

Though we do try our best :D

Oooh, yeah, posting as a series might be a sensible compromise - I feel like the prompts I've written so far are mostly long enough and different enough that it'd feel odd posting them as chapters of the same fic, I was just a bit anxious about posting them separately because I feel like no one needs to see me that often in the archive for a month 😂 Ah well, I'll see how I feel in a few days...

[black_bentley]

With last year's Whumptober fills I did a single multi-chapter work, and just stuck any warnings for specific fills in the notes at the start of the chapter so anything people didn't want to read could be skipped over - that would mean that even if you've got multiple fills that are over 1k it'll still only count as one work for Yuletide accounting purposes! From an AO3 browsing perspective I do probably prefer those sort of daily prompt posts done as a single work, rather than having to scroll through lots of separate ones, but that may well just be me :D

[tweague]

I think I've probably decided to do a faintly annoying mixture of the two, just to make sure that no one is happy with the format 😂 Some of the ficlets are long enough and polished enough that I think they'll do for standalones, so I'll post them as individual works; some are much shorter snippets, and I'll probably group them together into chapters of a single Erostober work, using the first chapter to give an overview of the prompts + which fandoms/pairings/tags appear in which chapters. Hopefully that'll avoid plonking loads of choppy bits and pieces onto the archive, while still allowing people to navigate it to their prepared characters or pairings easily. Thanks for your input!

[black_bentley]

I think that works perfectly - my fills last year were all just snippets, so there was nothing that I could really have posted as a standalone. But if you've got Actual Fics in there it makes sense to put those ones up individually!

[sholio]

I'm actually with BB in that I generally do mine as a chaptered fic - I have several older promptfill collections like that, and I've been meaning to get my short Biggles fic into one for, uh, years - and I tend to prefer as a reader to have it all grouped like that if it's for a single fandom.

But I also think you should do you, and Philomytha's right that you're unlikely to run Biggles over the Yuletide limit in just one month!

Edit: Also, I'm happy to see people doing the monthly challenges! I will be Whumptobering for at least part of the month ...

[tweague]

Thanks for your input :D I think I've probably decided to do a faintly annoying mixture of the two formats, posting the longer and more polished fics as standalones and the shorter ones to a collection - though as I'm writing for a variety of fandoms and pairings, I'll probably do a big index post for the first chapter to lay out the characters/pairings/tags as clearly as I can. Not sure I'm going to get through the whole month, although I might resort to little snippet-y bits if I get really stubborn about posting every day!

I'm looking forward to your whumptober fics ^_^

[sholio]

Honestly, that sounds like a very reasonable compromise, not annoying at all! It's also, now that I'm thinking about it, something I do too, where anything that spills over into being an actual, proper, full-length fic gets posted on its own, but short stuff typically doesn't.

I also appreciate this conversation for reminding me that I did want to go get some of my Biggles commentfic and promptfic collected and posted - before I have a whole slew of new short fic from this year's Whumptober. 😅

I'm looking forward to seeing what comes of it all! :D

[gattycat]

well this explains what those fics are that you come across that seem to be tagged to every pairing and fandom ever. ive always just ignored them in a sort of, suspicious fashion, assumed they were badly done giant cross overs, which is just me leaping to conclusions but i never twigged they might be grouped prompt fills! personally, i still think it's a bit fiddly to do it that way because it makes it quite hard to work out if the thing you want is lurking anywhere inside this content item, and there's no harm in individual short fics?

[tweague]

Yeahhhhh I think this is the downside of gathering challenge responses into single multi-chapter works - my eye tends to skate over them because it's often tricky to find what you're looking for in them. I think I'm going to combine both methods, in a way that's probably annoying to everyone without fear or favour ^_^ I'll put the longer and more polished responses up as individual fics, and I'll group the shorter responses into a single multi-chapter work, but I'll use the first chapter as an index page, giving an overview of the challenge, linking the individually posted works, and giving the fandoms / characters / pairings / tags etc for all the chapters of the multi-chapter collection - hopefully that way it'll be easy enough for people to navigate to what they're looking for and avoid what they want to avoid.