Remix Redux 9 signups are open!

[edenfalling]

Remix Redux is a multi-fandom fic exchange thingy, but a little different from most in that you are not writing a gift for your assigned person -- instead, you take one of your remixee's stories and retell it your own way. I've done it four times now, and it's always been fun even when it simultaneously made me want to tear my hair out and question my sanity. *grin*

There are some new qualifying fandoms this year, including Chronicles of Narnia. Also, Naruto is on the list again, since it did well last year. This makes me very happy because otherwise I am left leaning on Harry Potter, and while I suspect I will never escape HP completely, it's not a fandom I'm looking to start new stories in right now.

(Qualifying fandoms, incidentally, are a thing that exists to make the matching easier. Once you are assigned a remixee, you can rewrite any story that isn't a previous remix, a WIP, a co-written fic, or the one designated "safe" story, but assignments are made by matching a restricted list of fandoms that the mods think will have enough people to work well. To participate, you must have written EITHER five stories of at least 500 words OR seven stories of at least 100 words in at least one of the qualifying fandoms, so your potential remixer has a guaranteed minimum to work with.)

Here is a post with more detailed information and instructions on remixers_lounge.

Here is the collection home page on the AO3. (You need to be a member of the AO3 to participate, but you can get an AO3 invitation code by asking at remixers_lounge.)

And here is the signup form on the AO3!

The more people sign up, the better the chances of everyone getting matched on their preferred fandoms, and the more fun everyone will have. :-)

Note: Remix only matches people on fandom, not on characters, pairings, or types of stories -- meaning a slash-only writer who OTPs characters A and B and abhors character C may well get matched to a het-only writer who OTPs characters B and C and loathes character A. Or people may get matched to writers who work with radically different subsets of a cast of thousands, to the point where they have no overlapping characters. Or a gen-only writer may get matched to someone who specializes in kinky PWP. Etcetera. I think this is part of the fun, but it can be a deal-breaker for some people, so be aware!

Comments

[hungrytiger11.livejournal.com]

I'm sooo excited to do remix again this year! Admittedly, I was spoiled with getting you as a my remixee since not only did you write Naruto and also fandoms I didn't write but loved (Narnia and HP), but we also both loved gen and many same characters...still, I'm excited to see who we get a remixees this year! New stuff to read and to think about and to write! Bring it on!

I'll be interested to see how doing it a second time compares. Remix last year was my first and after doing Yuletide a second time it was interesting to see what did and did not feel the same...

[edenfalling]

Each time I've done Remix has been different, if only because each writer and story is different. The first year, I didn't remix a story so much as expand it -- I kept the POV and almost all the events, and just wrote some of what happened before and after the main incident. (I was terrified of doing somebody else's story "wrong," which is why I didn't dare change much. I have since gotten over that fear. *wry*) The second year I broke a straightfoward romantic tragedy into a pretentious nonlinear meditation on, among other things, the nature of memory, love, and stories. The third year I tried a basic POV-switch, and discovered that in order to make sense of why my new POV character was in the final scene of the original story, I had to invent three new connecting scenes and a structural gimmick. Last year I took a nonlinear multi-POV original story and not only made it linear and single-POV, but set it nearly a decade earlier in the characters' personal timelines and blended the "now" and "before" sections together. (Plus adding over 15,000 words, because I'm crazy, but whatever. *grin*)

I guess the common thread is finding the part of the original story that really speaks to you, and bringing that hook to the front in your own version. And since the hook is going to be different in each story, any given group of remixes will end up looking very different from the outside. :-)

[hungrytiger11.livejournal.com]

I didn't realize you'd moved the timeline of your remix last year up. Interesting!

[edenfalling]

I think that got lost in the sheer length of the story, but yeah, my version takes place when Team 7 are seventeen-to-eighteen, while megyal's story seems to take place when they're in their mid-twenties and at least a few years before that in the flashbacks, which themselves have mentions of prior events that happened maybe a year after Pain's invasion. Part of turning her complex structure into a single plot thread involved moving all the events to the earliest point in her timeline. So it's the same story, but at a different time -- yet another way you can play around while remixing. :-)