How to survive your first High Adrenaline Exchange

[highadrenalinemod]

It's called that for a reason! 10k/a long comic on a flash schedule is HARD. How do you do it? Do you start outlining before signups close? Do you game your offers? Do you buy your own espresso machine?

If you've successfully HA'd before, drop some words of advice here for the newbies. If you're new, ask questions and someone nice will help you out! And remember, whatever you do, DON'T LET THE PONY DRINK THE ESPRESSO.

Comments

[lazyfish]

I completed my first Heart Attack last year! Some things I found helpful:

• During and after signups, look at the offers you may be matchable to. Jot down any ideas you might have. For me, this also helped me refine my signup - I thought I could write A/B, but when scrolling through requests for it I realized I really wanted to read A/B but wasn't comfortable writing it. It might save you the pain of matching on something only to realize you have no ideas or aren't comfortable writing for it.


• Pay attention to people's safety fandoms. Some of them might be media you've meant to consume but have put off for whatever reason. This is your reason now to consume it (and can also be done during signups!).


• Be aware of your own tendencies as far as underwriting/overwriting. I'm a chronic overwriter (something I think will take 10k words actually takes 15k) and with such a tight time limit I needed to be aware of that so I didn't accidentally bite off more than I could chew (ex: I knew my "little 20k idea" was actually going to be 30k, and I could not write 30k in 14 days, so I picked a different idea). Conversely, you don't want to aim right for the 10k word mark only to have written 8k with no idea how to squeeze the extra 2k out of the story.


• Similarly, be aware of your own process and figure out how that's going to be spaced across the creation period. I always need to let ideas sit for a few days before they feel "ready" to write, so I didn't schedule myself to start writing until four days after I received my assignment (and knew that meant I would be writing more words per day on the other days).


• On scheduling: look at your schedule outside of fic writing. Are you actually going to have time to write 10k words, or have you scheduled a bat mitzvah, wedding, and job interview in the two weeks HA is going to be running? There is no shame in not signing up. Even if your schedule looks wide open, I found it helpful to set aside specific writing time in case I got last minute invitations to coffee/dinner/whatever.

[sholio]

I've finished two of them! I agree with the above advice, and I'd say probably the biggest things for me to make it successful are:

a) knowing that I don't have anything major going on for those two weeks, including other deadlines, travel, etc.

b) going into it with some idea already of what I might write for every offer I'm compatible with.

The first year, I jumped in because one of the requests was a juxtaposition of characters I had never considered writing together before, but I saw that and immediately could feel the creative gears turning in my head - I really, really wanted to write that request, and gamed for it. The second year, I had at least one compatible match in my main fandom at the time with the type of iddy request that I can write practically on autopilot.

But this is definitely _not_ an exchange to stretch yourself out of your comfort zone, or at least, if you do, you should also do some brainstorming beforehand so you don't find yourself staring down the barrel of a 2-week deadline with a canon you've always meant to consume in hand and no idea if there's anything you can write for it.