Dark Agenda

There are less than 8 days (!!!) before yuletide assignments are due. We hope you're making good progress on your assignment and wish you luck. For those who are already done (!!!!!), congratulations!

In the meantime, there are a few things we want to address. One of the components of our Chromatic Yuletide 2010 Challenge is:

[...] if you end up writing problematic source, engage in fixing it: finding the invisible people of colour and putting them back in, writing the back story for a character without tying it into the white people's narratives, critiquing by making explicit the blind spots and bigotry and flaws in the celebrated white heroes of the narrative.

We encourage you to be aware of how the source for which you're writing in particular portrays race, ethnicity, culture and the intersectionality of these issues with others, especially when the source is not created by people from the identity it portrays.

Last year, we posted about some common pitfalls while writing outside your own culture and how to attempt to avoid them, where we also highlighted a discussion about white and Western consumption of manga and anime, and collected critique posts of some white/Western/other sources.

This year, we'd like to offer similar resources. We're trying to collect a central list of critique posts on the topics of race, ethnicity and culture for white/Western/other sources so if you know of any links, we would love to be linked to them!

( List of Critique Posts for White/Western/Other Sources )

We'd also like to discuss some common pitfalls in writing chromatic characters and non-Western cultures. What problems have you encountered as a writer and/or a reader? And how do you think they can be countered against?

Here are some questions that might help you ground your writing for this challenge:

• ( Who is your audience? )


• ( From what cultural contexts are you working? )

What other questions should we ask themselves? And what other posts or articles have helped you clarify your writing process?

Last Updated: 14 Dec. 2010.

This is a little last minute, but there is a day and a half depending on your time zone until the Yuletide 2009 exchange closes, and this year, since it has moved over to Archive of Our Own, the last minute Yuletide Madness challenge is open to everyone, regardless of whether they signed up for Yuletide or not.

If there are prompts that you have seen float by on the pinch hit list, the unfulfilled prompst list, or on people's 'dear author' letters that fulfil one or all parts of our challenge, please..
Enter them into this convenient form!
Which creates
this handy dandy spreadsheet of chromatic prompts!

If you do not have an AO3 account from which to upload your story, and your request for a code does not get answered in time, you can ask someone to upload your story for you, and they can get you listed as the author. You might be able to find betas at the official beta sign up post, our list of culture-specific betas, or by going to the IRC chat channel and asking a hippo for help.

Remember to tag your fic so we can find it.

Let's see how many Dark Agenda Challenge fics we can generate in a day and a half!