Uprooted Ficathon 2021: Creature Week

Alt text: a banner with the image of a cow in a field of flowers. The title text of this post appears around the cow.

Welcome to another summer and another Uprooted ficathon! This year we’re getting a little wild with Creature Week. As with the last couple of events, works for Spinning Silver are also welcome.

Do you have thoughts about the creepy critters that have grown under the influence of the Wood’s corruption? What about those frightening deer used by the Staryk? Are any magic users just calling out for themed animal familiars? What does it mean to be a human or a creature, and do any characters exist near that boundary? You can interpret this theme however you like, just as long as it falls within the Creature Week theme.

Contact us through the ficathon blog or email (uprootedficathon@gmail.com) to let us know that you’re interested, and the sign-up process will start there. To register for the ficathon, you will need a valid email, a Tumblr account, and an AO3 account (we can get you an invite if you don’t have one). Once you sign up, we will contact you with more specific guidelines.

The hashtag for this ficathon is “uprooted ficathon 2021″, and as always you can use “uprooted ficathon” to talk about the ficathon in general.

Whether or not you plan to write, take this opportunity to dive into the ficathon archives and enjoy the work of your peers! Please reblog this post to help spread the word.

Thanks from your mod, @athenasdragon!

Uprooted Ficathon 2021: Creature Week

Alt text: a banner with the image of a cow in a field of flowers. The title text of this post appears around the cow.

Welcome to another summer and another Uprooted ficathon! This year we’re getting a little wild with Creature Week. As with the last couple of events, works for Spinning Silver are also welcome.

Do you have thoughts about the creepy critters that have grown under the influence of the Wood’s corruption? What about those frightening deer used by the Staryk? Are any magic users just calling out for themed animal familiars? What does it mean to be a human or a creature, and do any characters exist near that boundary? You can interpret this theme however you like, just as long as it falls within the Creature Week theme.

Contact us through the ficathon blog or email (uprootedficathon@gmail.com) to let us know that you’re interested, and the sign-up process will start there. To register for the ficathon, you will need a valid email, a Tumblr account, and an AO3 account (we can get you an invite if you don’t have one). Once you sign up, we will contact you with more specific guidelines.

The hashtag for this ficathon is “uprooted ficathon 2021″, and as always you can use “uprooted ficathon” to talk about the ficathon in general.

Whether or not you plan to write, take this opportunity to dive into the ficathon archives and enjoy the work of your peers! Please reblog this post to help spread the word.

Thanks from your mod, @athenasdragon!

Uprooted Ficathon 2021: Creature Week

Alt text: a banner with the image of a cow in a field of flowers. The title text of this post appears around the cow.

Welcome to another summer and another Uprooted ficathon! This year we’re getting a little wild with Creature Week. As with the last couple of events, works for Spinning Silver are also welcome.

Do you have thoughts about the creepy critters that have grown under the influence of the Wood’s corruption? What about those frightening deer used by the Staryk? Are any magic users just calling out for themed animal familiars? What does it mean to be a human or a creature, and do any characters exist near that boundary? You can interpret this theme however you like, just as long as it falls within the Creature Week theme.

Contact us through the ficathon blog or email (uprootedficathon@gmail.com) to let us know that you’re interested, and the sign-up process will start there. To register for the ficathon, you will need a valid email, a Tumblr account, and an AO3 account (we can get you an invite if you don’t have one). Once you sign up, we will contact you with more specific guidelines.

The hashtag for this ficathon is “uprooted ficathon 2021″, and as always you can use “uprooted ficathon” to talk about the ficathon in general.

Whether or not you plan to write, take this opportunity to dive into the ficathon archives and enjoy the work of your peers! Please reblog this post to help spread the word.

Thanks from your mod, @athenasdragon!

Uprooted Ficathon 2021: Creature Week

Alt text: a banner with the image of a cow in a field of flowers. The title text of this post appears around the cow.

Welcome to another summer and another Uprooted ficathon! This year we’re getting a little wild with Creature Week. As with the last couple of events, works for Spinning Silver are also welcome.

Do you have thoughts about the creepy critters that have grown under the influence of the Wood’s corruption? What about those frightening deer used by the Staryk? Are any magic users just calling out for themed animal familiars? What does it mean to be a human or a creature, and do any characters exist near that boundary? You can interpret this theme however you like, just as long as it falls within the Creature Week theme.

Contact us through the ficathon blog or email (uprootedficathon@gmail.com) to let us know that you’re interested, and the sign-up process will start there. To register for the ficathon, you will need a valid email, a Tumblr account, and an AO3 account (we can get you an invite if you don’t have one). Once you sign up, we will contact you with more specific guidelines.

The hashtag for this ficathon is “uprooted ficathon 2021″, and as always you can use “uprooted ficathon” to talk about the ficathon in general.

Whether or not you plan to write, take this opportunity to dive into the ficathon archives and enjoy the work of your peers! Please reblog this post to help spread the word.

Thanks from your mod, @athenasdragon!

Uh I initially planned to do this in January but life happened. Anyways, the new plan is to do a buddy read of Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik in May!

For those not familiar with the concept of buddy reads, it's a very loose kind of book club. We start reading on May 1st, and everyone can read at their own pace, and make posts as they go. If you haven't read the book before, I recommend blocking the spoiler tag until you're done! I'll be reblogging all the posts in the buddy read tag (and discussing if i have input! And make my own posts, duh)

For this one, I'll be using two tags:

#spinning silver buddy read

#spinning silver spoilers

Please boost this post and don't hesitate to join :D even if you can only start later in the month, it's all good. I'll be checking the tag at least until mid june

Hi friends! You may have noticed that registration for the Uprooted winter fic exchange has usually opened by now. This year, due to both personal obligations and decreased engagement, I have decided not to run the fic exchange.

This doesn’t mean that there won’t be any more events in the future. For the last four and a half years I have loved running the summer ficathon, the winter fic exchange, and recently the harvest faire. However, I am also the only mod, and I know I’m not the only one struggling to be creative and meet deadlines this year. I think it’s a good time to take a season off.

While we’re still a small fandom, the number of Uprooted fics on AO3 has gone up dramatically since the ficathon began. We went from 20-something fics in the summer of 2016 to 161 works at the time of posting. 36 of those works were posted for ficathons over the years! In other words, there’s plenty to read while the ficathon is on hiatus.

This definitely isn’t goodbye. If anything, it’s a thank-you to everyone who has participated in the ficathon and read and boosted our writers’ wonderful fics. You all continue to be a great source of joy for me! The ficathon should be back in summer 2021.

In the meantime, if anyone wants to tag me in your wintry Uprooted and Spinning Silver fics as we approach the holidays, please do! I’m happy to reblog them here. You can also find me over at @corruptedwood and haunting the Uprooted discord server.

An early Happy Holidays from me to you. Stay safe, stay strong, stay rooted! I’ll see you all soon.

- Livy

But she had business to do. She scratched Elena’s ears once and headed downstairs to pick out her clothes from the laundry machine. She hadn’t bothered to wear her slippers. Her building was old, and the elevator hadn’t been repaired. It was rumoured that they’d had a set of dryers once, but she had no idea when that was. She’d long ago invested in a clothesline.

She picked a basket of her clothes and hauled them upstairs. She felt the tendrils of autumn snake around her ankles as she did so – it was close to harvest day somewhere else. It was close to home, with pies, zhurek, and stewed apples. Sunlight had dripped through the cracks of the old building – and the thing about autumn was that the sun didn’t discriminate. Everything had the same golden hue, that made you dream of another lifetime centuries ago, in some other country – where the sun had fallen on your hair in the same way as you picked the laundry.

Agnieszka really was feeling awful, wasn’t she? When she returned to her apartment, she remedied that by performing some cantrips to put the tea on boil. Crossed her kitchen and went to the balcony in her bedroom, where her clothesline swayed with the wind.

She watched over the city, feeling the irresistible tug of another time – clotheslines, balconies, a city overrun by the plague, and she was all alone. She was sure a version of her had seen this story play out a long time ago. But that didn’t make it any easier.

Her phone tinkled. She frowned, putting her basket down.

Read the rest here!

Written for the Uprooted Harvest Faire! Thank you to the mods of @uprootedficathon for organising these.

I think I’ve been feeling very strong August emotions lately, especially while I am no longer in Delhi and missing it like a part of me is gone. Hope you guys like the story! 

Anyway I made a spotify playlist for Uprooted, for the harvest faire! It was really hard to find a balance between autumn emotions and light hearted music that talked about the death of the year and loss of childhood while also dealing with the themes of the forest and the wood and the battle. I’ve organised it according to the progression of the book as well as specific thematic build ups. There’s a symmetrical 50 songs! 

Thank you to the Uprooted discord, you’re the reason this was manageable!! 

Here’s a run down of why I picked the songs I picked: 

1. Olsen olsen just felt like such a nice song to set the mountainous mood, that I thought it was a perfect setting establishment. 

2. Song for Memory, Place We Were Made, Welcome Home Son, Tiger Striped Sky, Army, felt like songs that really fit with Agnieszka’s feelings for her village and hometown. Place We Were Made especially feels like an Agnieszka/Kasia song. 

3. Shine You No More is an instrumental which just gave me a harvest faire vibe and an Agnieszka’s village vibe. 

4. You’re My Best Friend, Travelling Song had such STRONG Agnieszka/Kasia vibes I just couldn’t help it. Travelling Song is in particular something for when they meet again post reaping, and they’re trying to save the village. 

5. Invisible String - I don’t know who it fits but it just fits Agnieszka. Her bone with Kasia, with Sarkan, her village. @destroyerofthefreemarket and I had such a good time discussing which of the folklore songs we should put. 

6. Hoax had an emotional core that reminded me and Carrey of Sarkan and Ludmilla a lot, and Hello My Old Heart just really feels like a Sarkan emotion while he trains Agnieszka and she’s out there destroying his library and he’s beginning to actually like this mess of a girl. 

7. Midnight is a Baba Jaga song through and through. I thought it’s a good creepy interlude for when Agnieszka discovers her notebook. 

8. I think Florence and the Machine’s whole discography is an Agnieszka mood but I picked Heartlines and What the Water Gave Me for her, for once she has learned her magic a little more, and especially for the time when she uses it to save Sarkan. 

9. Wax and Wane really feels like a Kasia song, especially after she isn’t really sure whom she should blame for the way things turned out for her, and it has some strong magical elements that made me think of her being taken by the walkers. 

11. Just like Florence and the Machine’s entire discography feels like an Agnieszka discography, Hozier’s entire discography really feels very Sarkan. I HAD to put Would That I, and Like Real People Do. 

12. This one will be a little harder for you guys, but Bollywood is filled with music for men who fall in love with amazing, fantastical women. I really REALLY love Maerie by Palash Sen, and god if Tu Kisi Rail Si isn’t a mood. I wanted to include a song about trains anyway because I love trains and I am Indian - plus this is one of the most famous ghazals by poet Dushyant Kumar. It also felt like a really good yearning song for when Agnieszka goes to the capital. Here is a link for the translation of the song, and here is one for the ghazal. I don’t have a decent translation of Maerie, but it is about a lover remembering a beloved who is half magic if not more. 

13. The Hanging Tree was for the haphazard horrible mission to save the queen. Call out post for prince Marek. 

14. King is obviously about Agnieszka and Kasia escaping the capital trying to save the heirs. I wish I had a song for Alosha. 

15. Dirty Paws, Fear, Sons and Daughters feels like a gathering forces for the battle. 

16. Wild Blue Yonder and The Horror and the Wild - you know how I said Florence and the Machine is for Agnieszka, Hozier is for Sarkan? The Amazing Devil is for them both. Wild Blue Yonder is specifically for that sex scene. 

17. Fear Not This Night and Fearless are more battle songs. And then all the songs betweenThe Mourning Tree and Devil’s Spoke are to set up some creepy tones for the forest. 

18. Songs between mad woman and My Love Took Me Down to the River to Silence Me are Wood Queen songs! 

19. Cradle Hill and Old Churchyard are songs about the Wood Queen’s sister and how she is urging the Wood Queen to forget bitterness. 

20. Lovesong of the Buzzard seemed a nice song to taper of the intense battle feelings and talk about how Sarkan saves Agnieszka from the heart tree. And then The Woods was a good parallel to the previous song about the Woods, which was creepier. This one has a pleasant ending! Sky Full of Song has such a strong emotion of Agnieszka being tired after coming out of the heart tree, and when she holds his hand?? That feeling! That’s the one I was going for!!

21. Garden Song is so lovely, and it really does have a post-battle energy of Agnieszka, so I put that there. 

22. We’re On Our Way has a nice Kasia feeling about it, where she’s figuring out what to do for herself and training with the prince and princess. 

23. this is me trying was said by Carrey to be something that had a strong Sarkan feeling, and I really felt it when he comes back to the valley after leaving her for so many months. It felt like a post-everything song

23. Riches and Wonders was something I wanted to put, because livy ( @athenasdragon ) likes Eliza Rickman and I love the autumn feeling about it. It seemed like the perfect Harvest song, about the community you guard and protect. 

If you guys want to include more songs, do let me know! I will happily do so. And thank you to @uprootedficathon for organising this year’s Harvest Faire! Do check everyone else’s entries on the blog! 

"We were all happy, all together, and I could recognise the song of the river running through the ground beneath our feet, the real song we danced to... Happiness was bubbling up through me, a bright stream laughing. He'd come back."

@uprootedficathon

[Image: light orange brushed calligraphy text that reads “Uprooted Harvest Faire 2020″. The background is a photograph of three small pumpkins on a black surface. End ID.]

In Uprooted, the harvest means festivals in the Valley, tributes to the Dragon, and girls being selected to go live in the Tower. It means leaves falling in the Wood and people huddling closer around the fire with their loved ones. In Spinning Silver, the harvest means the Mandelstams celebrating ראש השנה (Rosh Hashanah), Wanda and her family preserving food to last them through the winter, and a respite from the social season for the nobility. It means that the first snow—and Miryem’s return—are just around the corner.

For the second year in a row, the @uprootedficathon wants to celebrate autumn with a Harvest Faire where we can all get together and share stories, art, food, and more! Now more than ever, we could all use some connection with our community. The Harvest Faire will be potluck-style, which means that a) you don’t have to sign up in advance like you do for other ficathons and b) you get to pick what you bring! You can bring content for Uprooted or Spinning Silver or even just something autumnal, as long as it fits the harvest theme. You might consider:

The event will take place on Friday October 2nd and Saturday October 3rd, 2020. To submit, post your contribution(s) and tag @uprootedficathon and/or use the tag “uprooted harvest faire 2020”. You can start posting as early as you want and continue posting up to midnight EST on the 3rd. Everything will be reblogged on the 2nd and 3rd (potentially with some overflow on the 4th).

We will be including content for both Uprooted and Spinning Silver. All content will be tagged with “uprooted” or “spinning silver” as appropriate, so feel free to blacklist if you’re worried about spoilers.

If you want another way to connect with the Uprooted fandom, we have a discord server you can join!

I hope that this will be a fun way for everyone to get to know each other better. I can’t wait to see you all at the faire!

The Harvest Faire is in less than one week! Don’t forget to prep and submit your items!

[Image: light orange brushed calligraphy text that reads “Uprooted Harvest Faire 2020″. The background is a photograph of three small pumpkins on a black surface. End ID.]

In Uprooted, the harvest means festivals in the Valley, tributes to the Dragon, and girls being selected to go live in the Tower. It means leaves falling in the Wood and people huddling closer around the fire with their loved ones. In Spinning Silver, the harvest means the Mandelstams celebrating ראש השנה (Rosh Hashanah), Wanda and her family preserving food to last them through the winter, and a respite from the social season for the nobility. It means that the first snow—and Miryem’s return—are just around the corner.

For the second year in a row, the @uprootedficathon wants to celebrate autumn with a Harvest Faire where we can all get together and share stories, art, food, and more! Now more than ever, we could all use some connection with our community. The Harvest Faire will be potluck-style, which means that a) you don’t have to sign up in advance like you do for other ficathons and b) you get to pick what you bring! You can bring content for Uprooted or Spinning Silver or even just something autumnal, as long as it fits the harvest theme. You might consider:

The event will take place on Friday October 2nd and Saturday October 3rd, 2020. To submit, post your contribution(s) and tag @uprootedficathon and/or use the tag “uprooted harvest faire 2020”. You can start posting as early as you want and continue posting up to midnight EST on the 3rd. Everything will be reblogged on the 2nd and 3rd (potentially with some overflow on the 4th).

We will be including content for both Uprooted and Spinning Silver. All content will be tagged with “uprooted” or “spinning silver” as appropriate, so feel free to blacklist if you’re worried about spoilers.

If you want another way to connect with the Uprooted fandom, we have a discord server you can join!

I hope that this will be a fun way for everyone to get to know each other better. I can’t wait to see you all at the faire!