What is Public Call?

Public Call is a secret santa fic exchange for Doctor Who and its various related fandoms, run for the seventh time this year through LJ, DW and AO3. Participants sign up to write a story of at least 1,000 words involving a relationship between two or more characters of the Whoniverse someone else has requested. In return, they receive a story of at least 1,000 words with a relationship they have requested.

All Whovian canons are welcome, from the TV show to the novels to The Curse of Fatal Death. RPF, however, is not included, and non-Whoniverse canon crossovers can't be nominated or matched on.

"Relationship" encompasses all kinds of relationships, from familial to friendship to romance, from platonic to explicitly sexual etc. (Writers are free to write any relationship as a pairing/moresome or as gen. More details below.)

The Schedule & the Gist

• Nominations, 16th - 30th September: nominate up to 15 relationships.


• Sign-ups, 3rd - 17th October: request 3 to 15 relationships, offer 3 to 20. (One each must be New Who and/or Torchwood.)


• Assignments, sent by 20th October: check your email!


• Writing period: write at least 1,000 words for a relationship your recipient requested.


• Deadline, 22nd November: upload your story by the deadline.


• Posting period, starting 1st December: read along as stories are gradually revealed during December.

Detailed Rules and FAQ

(inspired by yuletide and rarepairfest)

( Participation )

( Nominations )

( Sign-ups )

( Matching, Assignments, and Writing )

( Deadline, Extensions and Dropping out (Defaulting) )

( Pinch-hitting )

( Posting Period )

( Treats )

Any more questions, just comment here or email us at publiccall.exchange@gmail.com :)

Nominations are now open.

Nomination Form on AO3

To view the approved tags in the tag set you can go here.

You will need an AO3 account to nominate relationship tags now and to later participate in the exchange. If you don't have an account yet, you can request an invite here.

Nominations will stay open until 30th September.

You can nominate any relationship involving two or more characters from the extended Whoniverse. Crossovers with other fandoms are not allowed for this exchange. You can nominate up to 15 different relationships. The form also asks you to specify the fandom for every relationship, but as only Whoniverse characters are allowed you can leave the field blank as long as the relationship is already a known tag on the AO3.

• Relationships must be formatted like this: Character A/Character B, Character A/Character B/Character C. etc. Normally AO3 uses relationships tags that link character names with a / to mean romantic/sexual relationships and those that link names with a & to mean familial and platonic relationships or friendships. For the nominations, sign up and matching we won't be making this distinction. (Later when you post your fic you can tag however you think is appropriate.)


• Different incarnations of the Doctor or other Time Lords count as different characters, so, for example, Tenth Doctor/Jack Harkness and Twelfth Doctor/Jack Harkness would be two separate relationships.


• Relationships must be unambiguous, so please use the most specific/full name of the characters (for example Fifth Doctor, Martha Jones ...). If one of the characters has only a single, non-unique name (for example, "Jenny"), use a disambiguated version ("Jenny (Doctor Who: The Doctor's Daughter)"). When you start typing into the nominations form, AO3 should bring up suggestions. Choose the most specific phrasing, or create something new if the relationship you want has not been used on AO3 before.

AO3 has a detailed guidelines on how to format canonical tags. We'll try to approve the form of a relationship tag that is closest to the "canonical" form. To make this easier please use the autofill to pull up a suitable synonym for the relationship you want to nominate wherever possible. It pulls canonical (wrangled) tags from the full list of established AO3 tags.

You don't have to nominate in order to participate, but only nominated relationships can be requested and offered during this round of the exchange. To make matching easier please only nominate relationships that you actually plan to request or offer!

The mods will check all nominated relationships while nominations are in progress. All relationships that meet the criteria above will be approved, though they might be approved under different names than you gave. You can change your nominations only until they have been approved or rejected, so be sure of your nominations before you submit them! For more information on how the Ao3 nominations process works also check this detailed nominations tutorial made for the yuletide exchange. (In the case of yuletide fandoms and characters are nominated. In our case only relationship tags are nominated.)

Public Call 2020 - Rules and FAQ