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

[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!