2020 Fanfic Year-End Summary-Type Thing
3/1/21 12:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
neveralarchI posted 201,624 words of fanfic last year! This is. So much. This is the most I've ever written by far (almost 50,000 more than the previous record in 2019, and almost 100,000 more than the 3rd place finish in 2010). And I didn't post any fic until March. Once I got rolling I posted a lot of long fic, and also when quarantine hit I just started writing and posting a huge amount of porn to cope apparently. I also co-wrote a lot, so if we want to pick it apart some of this is definitely Dez's wordcount... but our process doesn't really allow you to say 'oh this scene is Nev and this scene is Dez' so we'll just have to share.
The wordcount breaks down into 26 stories: 5 stories/8,084 words of Yuletide and 23 stories/196,682 words of Transformers (those numbers overlap a bit - it's 98% Transformers fic this year). 105,452 words were in the Banners AU (52%), and 97,078 words were co-written with Dez (48%). We started co-writing in 2019 but MAN did that take off this year.
Incidentally, this was also the year of becoming better at twitter and discord and becoming friends with more people through fandom and fic! There were literally YEARS after Doctor Who fandom where I barely talked to fandom people besides posting fic and running away, and now I have people to talk about ideas and characters and watch things with again :)) It hasn't all been easy and drama-free, but it's been really nice to have so much online interaction in a year where real person interaction has been really limited.
Yearly questions and answers under the cut:
Best/worst title?
Good titles this year! Starscream's Sexy Staycation is obviously the best, haha, altho that one's a Dez invention. I think Frivolities and Incompatible both do good jobs of isolating the one key concept of the fic and just putting it front and center. I also remember suggesting Apotheosis when we were throwing around title idea for that fic, and it stuck immediately.
The Long Way Round and Desecrate You are bad titles because every time I see them I get the namesake songs stuck in my head. Putting them both in that one sentence just basically nerfed me because that mash-up does not work and yet my brain is playing it anyway. But the actual worst title is Bended Knee and Trembling Wing, because it just doesn't really fit the tone of that fic. Dez said at the time that it felt like a title for a different genre, but I went with it anyway, alas.
Best/worst summary?
2020 is the year where I was just like 'here's what's in the fic, read it, or don't, good luck.' Also Dez wrote a bunch of the summaries...
Best is Constructed Hot. I spent a lot of time trying to distill this down to the core of the concept and I like how it came out!
Starscream has a closely-guarded, much-loved stash of contraband onlining porn. It's not Decepticon praxis, but it's his.
Worst summary is The Best Defense. I was post four fics at once for Yuletide and just pulling quotes from the beginning for summaries, and the quote for this one didn't really capture the concept for the fic. Wish I'd put something like 'an ode to the beleaguered grad student' instead, haha, altho that's stolen from a comment. Maybe next year I'll give myself more time instead of doing everything last minute. (I won't.)
You had to fight a big snake for your thesis defense. One of the largest ones you'd ever seen—and you'd attended plenty of defenses, seen the fear in the doctoral candidates' eyes as they sought out their snake in the shadows. You don't actually know if it's the biggest snake the facilities department had to offer, because they don't like to give out that much information. But it was a very big snake indeed.
Best/worst first line?
This year because I was collabing with Dez a lot, I realized that I almost always open a scene in the middle of the action or by describing the blocking position of the character(s), whereas Dez will start a scene by describing the location. I think this is why first lines usually don't stand out to me - because they're more meant to shock the reader into the scene, rather than to be fun/pretty in their own right?
Anyway, best first line is from Starscream's Processor Holiday in the Liquid Flux Banners AU shorts collection. It just so emphasizes how batshit that AU has become and I love it.
The bad thing about being suspended from the senate pending an ethics investigation into his attempted murder of a suspect in the (successful but temporary) murder of his lover was—actually, just about everything.
The first line of Unwinds from Within is also good for basically opposite reasons - I just really like the simplicity here.
Pharma woke up with Ratchet's hands already inside him.
Honorable mention to Apotheosis, because I really like this line and it SOUNDS like I wrote it, but actually Dez wrote it, that monster.
“Excuse me,” Starscream said, striding down the steps of the senate chambers with his cape flaring out behind him, “get your cowcatcher out of his face, you tin-plated amateur despot, he’s with me.”
Worst first line... Bended Knee and Trembling Wing again, because I couldn't quite get the first line to scan. I do really like this fic! But it was written in a frenzy and it shows, haha.
When Scrapper got to the (unexpected, but apparently urgent) meeting in the Nemesis’ leaky conference room, the first thing he noticed was Starscream sitting at the head of the table, with Megatron on his right and Soundwave on his left.
Best/worst last line?
Another reason to love collabing with Dez is that I can send her my endings and she can tell me when to stop writing, haha.
I'm really proud of the ending to A Serious Affection even though it's more than one line. Ratchet Suffers.
MEMORANDUM
TO: All Tetrahex General Hospital Staff
FROM: Medical Department Chief Ratchet of Vaporex
SUBJECT: If I catch anyone having sex in this hospital I will dismantle your equipment myself
To all staff members—read the subject line. Now read it again, but imagine me shouting it at you. Do not test me on this. I will not use pain patches.
Have a great weekend.
I'm a goddamn genius.
I'm still not 100% on the ending of Snapshots. It's very sappy, and maybe that was the right note to hit after everything I'd just dragged Pharma and Aglet through? It just feels like maybe there was a liiiiittle more I could've done.
(Later, much later, in the middle of the night, Aglet said, with his spark in his throat: “Hey, I love you.”
“S’nice,” said Pharma, half-asleep and all the more beautiful for it. “Me too.”)
I have a similar problem with the end of Bring the Club Home. That fic in general never quite cohered for me because it kinda just feels like a victory lap? But perhaps that's what I needed haha.
“No luckier than I am,” said Minimus, and the kiss that followed was the best one yet.
Looking back, did you write more fics than you thought you would this year, less than you thought, or about what you predicted?
I wrote... so much more than I would've predicted.... Especially if you said 'also there will be global pandemic and you'll mostly be teaching online.'
Part of the reason I wrote so much is that it's SO motivating to go 'I can write a bit of this and send it to Dez and then in the morning she'll be like :0!!' instead of 'I can write a bit of this and in a month it'll be done and I can post it' haha. Also obviously a lot of this was collab fic. Dez and I are slowly becoming indistinguishable, whoops.
Last year my goal was to write amica fic and I did! I didn't write all of the amica ideas I've had (I have. so many.), but A Serious Affection is all about amica courtship and then Operating Instructions has some great amica moments imo. Another goal was to make SG Megastarung happen and I did NOT do that, but I did write a couple SG fics for Pharma/Ratchet that I think have a similar vibe. I also wanted to write fic I enjoy and I think I did it :)
Where did you publish/archive your stories?
No changes from last year! Except I did end up in a couple zines this year - Dez and I edited the Kinks in the Wires zine, and one of my older Who fics was republished in the Gallifrey Guardian zine that's distributed once a week by email. That's a lovely bit of old fandom culture that's come back to get people through the pandemic, and I'm really glad I was invited to be part of it.
Oh I also make discord fic announcements now in addition to Dreamwidth and Tumblr and Twitter. It's SO much work on top of writing the fic, but it is really nice because I get more interaction this way and it feels more rewarding. The trade-off.
What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January?
Hmm, I wrote Brainstorm/Whirl for a giveaway, and it was fun even tho neither of them are really my faves.
I don't know that any of my fic was really a surprise... A lot of the stuff that I think is the most out of left field (Pharma/Aglet, epic-length kidfic) is actually stuff Dez and I started plotting out in 2019. I'm maybe most surprised that we actually wrote it instead of just chatting about it in discord endlessly.
What’s your favorite story this year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you the happiest.
I like SO much of my fic this year, but my favorite has gotta be Twenty-Five to Life, a fic I love so much that I recorded a podfic of it over the course of like 7 hours. I ship Minimus/Starscream SO much (blame Choko, Dez, and Zeph and their Good Place/Transformers fusion), and this was basically a Sistine Chapel I constructed to enshrine their love. This was also the last fic I wrote through voice memo (2020 wrecked my commuting routine), so I just spent so much time with it, writing, transcribing, editing, and when I was done I immediately wanted to reread it haha. I hope everyone else likes it even a tenth as much as I do.
Okay, NOW your most popular story.
It's The Long Way Round! Although the way AO3 counts hits for multichapter fic is a little complicated, so its hit count is probably inflated. It's comfortably higher than all my other fic anyway. The recipe for popularity is unrepentantly smutty fic for a juggernaut pairing haha. But I wanted to write it, so I'm really glad people have been enjoying it :)
(Second place is Kinks in the Wires, the zine that Dez and I edited together - that has over 3000 hits on AO3, which is incredibly gratifying.)
Story most under appreciated by the universe?
Listen, Transformers fandom is REALLY nice and I feel so appreciated all the time. It's been so good!!!
That said. I felt a little deflated by the response to Kinks in the Wires. I know numerically a lot of people read it, and I occasionally talk to people who really liked it, but I think I kinda had this vision that we were going to drop a 177 page zine on the fandom and people were gonna be like 'what the fuck' when actually what happened is people were like 'oooh' and went and read it and lost three hours and forgot to come back and comment, probably. Or left their comments on the individual creators' pages?
There might have been a better way to handle the publicity side of it, but you know what, I was in the middle of grading after a very difficult semester AND I do know people liked it AND the creators did get comments, so did I really need to hustle to get comments on the zine post? No. It's all good.
(Please know tho, if you leave comments on my fic you are contributing to a very important self-esteem ecosystem ESPECIALLY in 2020, I literally read some comments multiple times to extract all the validation I can get haha.)
Story that could have been better?
Tbh I am VERY self-satisfied this year. The only one I can think is Bring the Club Home, which as I mentioned before didn't quite cohere for me... but I just reread it and actually I think it's really sweet??
I do think maybe A Serious Affection would've benefited from a little more time and maybe another draft - there's parts of the action that feel like they could've been stretched out a little so the fic feels more natural and less rushed. But again, I just reread it and I really like it... Perhaps I'm too much on my own bullshit :p
Sexiest story?
This is SO hard this year, I wrote SO much porn. The Long Way Round misses out on this because although the first half is extremely horny, the latter half of the fic goes deep into plot/relationship drama. I'm going to say Desecrate You, because the concept completely wrecked the groupchat when we first came up with it, and then when I was working on it I kept having to take breaks and do something else because I was too into it haha.
Most fun story?
Twenty Five to Life is definitely the most fun story to read now that it's done, but it took forever to pull together and get through all my voice memos... I think Starscream's Sexy Staycation, because it's SO silly and also has some great smutty stuff that only makes sense in this weird AU, and also because it meant lots of conversations with Dez about this ridiculous OT3 that we've talked ourselves into.
Did any stories shift your perceptions of the characters?
I went on a Pharma JOURNEY this year. Like, I obviously already had a soft spot for Pharma when Dez and I were talking about him in 2019. But Desecrate You -> Blueprints -> Sparkbreaker -> Snapshots really took me from 'Pharma is a fun character' to 'Pharma has done nothing wrong ever in his entire life ;-;' despite. Pharma doing many things wrong.
I also worked through a lot of thoughts about me and relationships and asexuality through Pharma, thank you chainsaw doctor.
Also! I came up with a new Jazz characterization for The Long Way Round and oh MAN I love it, naive murderer/feral kindness punk Jazz is SO fun to write.
Hardest story to write?
Frivolities is so short and was SO hard to write. There were a lot of Thoughts and I had to express them very carefully, and also I kept ricocheting between 'this is so cathartic' and 'hmm actually I feel bad now' haha. I'm really glad I wrote it and it got the most comments out of any single-chapter fic, so I think what I was doing really resonated with people! But it was pulling teeth, and no one should be holding their breath for a sequel, sorry.
Also Dez had to really cajole me through Snapshots, including some big rewrites and even her writing some bits of it when I got stuck. Working Pharma through to a happy ending AND giving Aglet a chance to stand on his own as a character was a lot.
Easiest story to write?
It took me forever to get started on Lost Thoughts, but once I did I wrote the whole thing in like two sittings. Cabal brothers banter is basically always in my head, waiting to burst free.
I remember Bended Knee and Trembling Wing also being really easy... I had a concept and I needed to manifest it!
Most overdue story?
I finally wrote the amica fic!! Also almost exactly a year ago I was yelling at Dez about this dumb TFP heat/breeding concept, and then six months ago I posted about it on my NSFW twitter, and then at the very end of 2020 I asked Dez what I should write to get to 200k and she was like 'you know...' and then I wrote and posted it in three days. Incompatible wasn't overdue, per se, but it was a long time in coming!
Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?
The biggest one was definitely Kinks in the Wires! In like January Dez and I were talking about weird robot kinks, and we were like 'we should make a zine' and then we just... did? It was remarkably straightforward. I got a lot out of it - I met a bunch of people or got to know them better through the zine, there's SO much good fic and good art in there, it looks AMAZING thanks to harperuth (cover) and perictione (design)... but I also learned that managing a discord server is not at all for me, and that maybe a smaller zine with invite-only applications would've been better as a dry run. I think if we did it again now we could do it a lot better in many ways, but we got VERY lucky with how it turned out and I'm super proud of it :)
The Long Way Round is also a risk for me, in that I never post fic to AO3 without finishing at least a big chunk of it first. Usually I only start posting once it's finished. I have a basic outline for The Long Way Round in my head, but otherwise I'm just. Posting. I needed something fun. And it's working out so far, in that I've written WAY more of it than I think I would've if I was trying to keep it as polished and intricate as my fics often can be. I don't think this is going to be a new standard model for me, but it's a good way to loosen up a bit.
Oh, you know what, Desecrate You was also the first time I'd gone through and written and posted one of my darker porn ideas, and after I did that one I started doing it more. I think partly I just needed more self-indulgence to get through 2020, and partly it was good to see that I could write a fic that hit the buttons I wanted to hit without feeling empty of character/writing merit. I remember back in 2012 I wrote something VERY id-ficcy and it just NOT working at all, and that I can come back and write something both id-ficcy AND messy and be proud of how it turned out... You get better at stuff after nearly a decade, haha. I also only got a couple negative comments and one extremely silly call-out that wasn't actually about me at all, so the world did not collapse on me because I wrote some fictional robots in bad situations. Excellent.
Do you have any fanfic goals for the New Year?
I have another Rung/Pharma concept that I'm committed to working on with Dez! And I want to finish The Long Way Round, there's only 3 chapters left I think. Big picture goals: I think it would be fun to do a collab fic with another friend and see what that's like! But also, you know... I AM really smug about this year's crop of fic. If I can be half as self-indulgent next year, I'd call it time well spent.
The wordcount breaks down into 26 stories: 5 stories/8,084 words of Yuletide and 23 stories/196,682 words of Transformers (those numbers overlap a bit - it's 98% Transformers fic this year). 105,452 words were in the Banners AU (52%), and 97,078 words were co-written with Dez (48%). We started co-writing in 2019 but MAN did that take off this year.
Incidentally, this was also the year of becoming better at twitter and discord and becoming friends with more people through fandom and fic! There were literally YEARS after Doctor Who fandom where I barely talked to fandom people besides posting fic and running away, and now I have people to talk about ideas and characters and watch things with again :)) It hasn't all been easy and drama-free, but it's been really nice to have so much online interaction in a year where real person interaction has been really limited.
Yearly questions and answers under the cut:
Best/worst title?
Good titles this year! Starscream's Sexy Staycation is obviously the best, haha, altho that one's a Dez invention. I think Frivolities and Incompatible both do good jobs of isolating the one key concept of the fic and just putting it front and center. I also remember suggesting Apotheosis when we were throwing around title idea for that fic, and it stuck immediately.
The Long Way Round and Desecrate You are bad titles because every time I see them I get the namesake songs stuck in my head. Putting them both in that one sentence just basically nerfed me because that mash-up does not work and yet my brain is playing it anyway. But the actual worst title is Bended Knee and Trembling Wing, because it just doesn't really fit the tone of that fic. Dez said at the time that it felt like a title for a different genre, but I went with it anyway, alas.
Best/worst summary?
2020 is the year where I was just like 'here's what's in the fic, read it, or don't, good luck.' Also Dez wrote a bunch of the summaries...
Best is Constructed Hot. I spent a lot of time trying to distill this down to the core of the concept and I like how it came out!
Starscream has a closely-guarded, much-loved stash of contraband onlining porn. It's not Decepticon praxis, but it's his.
Worst summary is The Best Defense. I was post four fics at once for Yuletide and just pulling quotes from the beginning for summaries, and the quote for this one didn't really capture the concept for the fic. Wish I'd put something like 'an ode to the beleaguered grad student' instead, haha, altho that's stolen from a comment. Maybe next year I'll give myself more time instead of doing everything last minute. (I won't.)
You had to fight a big snake for your thesis defense. One of the largest ones you'd ever seen—and you'd attended plenty of defenses, seen the fear in the doctoral candidates' eyes as they sought out their snake in the shadows. You don't actually know if it's the biggest snake the facilities department had to offer, because they don't like to give out that much information. But it was a very big snake indeed.
Best/worst first line?
This year because I was collabing with Dez a lot, I realized that I almost always open a scene in the middle of the action or by describing the blocking position of the character(s), whereas Dez will start a scene by describing the location. I think this is why first lines usually don't stand out to me - because they're more meant to shock the reader into the scene, rather than to be fun/pretty in their own right?
Anyway, best first line is from Starscream's Processor Holiday in the Liquid Flux Banners AU shorts collection. It just so emphasizes how batshit that AU has become and I love it.
The bad thing about being suspended from the senate pending an ethics investigation into his attempted murder of a suspect in the (successful but temporary) murder of his lover was—actually, just about everything.
The first line of Unwinds from Within is also good for basically opposite reasons - I just really like the simplicity here.
Pharma woke up with Ratchet's hands already inside him.
Honorable mention to Apotheosis, because I really like this line and it SOUNDS like I wrote it, but actually Dez wrote it, that monster.
“Excuse me,” Starscream said, striding down the steps of the senate chambers with his cape flaring out behind him, “get your cowcatcher out of his face, you tin-plated amateur despot, he’s with me.”
Worst first line... Bended Knee and Trembling Wing again, because I couldn't quite get the first line to scan. I do really like this fic! But it was written in a frenzy and it shows, haha.
When Scrapper got to the (unexpected, but apparently urgent) meeting in the Nemesis’ leaky conference room, the first thing he noticed was Starscream sitting at the head of the table, with Megatron on his right and Soundwave on his left.
Best/worst last line?
Another reason to love collabing with Dez is that I can send her my endings and she can tell me when to stop writing, haha.
I'm really proud of the ending to A Serious Affection even though it's more than one line. Ratchet Suffers.
MEMORANDUM
TO: All Tetrahex General Hospital Staff
FROM: Medical Department Chief Ratchet of Vaporex
SUBJECT: If I catch anyone having sex in this hospital I will dismantle your equipment myself
To all staff members—read the subject line. Now read it again, but imagine me shouting it at you. Do not test me on this. I will not use pain patches.
Have a great weekend.
I'm a goddamn genius.
I'm still not 100% on the ending of Snapshots. It's very sappy, and maybe that was the right note to hit after everything I'd just dragged Pharma and Aglet through? It just feels like maybe there was a liiiiittle more I could've done.
(Later, much later, in the middle of the night, Aglet said, with his spark in his throat: “Hey, I love you.”
“S’nice,” said Pharma, half-asleep and all the more beautiful for it. “Me too.”)
I have a similar problem with the end of Bring the Club Home. That fic in general never quite cohered for me because it kinda just feels like a victory lap? But perhaps that's what I needed haha.
“No luckier than I am,” said Minimus, and the kiss that followed was the best one yet.
Looking back, did you write more fics than you thought you would this year, less than you thought, or about what you predicted?
I wrote... so much more than I would've predicted.... Especially if you said 'also there will be global pandemic and you'll mostly be teaching online.'
Part of the reason I wrote so much is that it's SO motivating to go 'I can write a bit of this and send it to Dez and then in the morning she'll be like :0!!' instead of 'I can write a bit of this and in a month it'll be done and I can post it' haha. Also obviously a lot of this was collab fic. Dez and I are slowly becoming indistinguishable, whoops.
Last year my goal was to write amica fic and I did! I didn't write all of the amica ideas I've had (I have. so many.), but A Serious Affection is all about amica courtship and then Operating Instructions has some great amica moments imo. Another goal was to make SG Megastarung happen and I did NOT do that, but I did write a couple SG fics for Pharma/Ratchet that I think have a similar vibe. I also wanted to write fic I enjoy and I think I did it :)
Where did you publish/archive your stories?
No changes from last year! Except I did end up in a couple zines this year - Dez and I edited the Kinks in the Wires zine, and one of my older Who fics was republished in the Gallifrey Guardian zine that's distributed once a week by email. That's a lovely bit of old fandom culture that's come back to get people through the pandemic, and I'm really glad I was invited to be part of it.
Oh I also make discord fic announcements now in addition to Dreamwidth and Tumblr and Twitter. It's SO much work on top of writing the fic, but it is really nice because I get more interaction this way and it feels more rewarding. The trade-off.
What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January?
Hmm, I wrote Brainstorm/Whirl for a giveaway, and it was fun even tho neither of them are really my faves.
I don't know that any of my fic was really a surprise... A lot of the stuff that I think is the most out of left field (Pharma/Aglet, epic-length kidfic) is actually stuff Dez and I started plotting out in 2019. I'm maybe most surprised that we actually wrote it instead of just chatting about it in discord endlessly.
What’s your favorite story this year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you the happiest.
I like SO much of my fic this year, but my favorite has gotta be Twenty-Five to Life, a fic I love so much that I recorded a podfic of it over the course of like 7 hours. I ship Minimus/Starscream SO much (blame Choko, Dez, and Zeph and their Good Place/Transformers fusion), and this was basically a Sistine Chapel I constructed to enshrine their love. This was also the last fic I wrote through voice memo (2020 wrecked my commuting routine), so I just spent so much time with it, writing, transcribing, editing, and when I was done I immediately wanted to reread it haha. I hope everyone else likes it even a tenth as much as I do.
Okay, NOW your most popular story.
It's The Long Way Round! Although the way AO3 counts hits for multichapter fic is a little complicated, so its hit count is probably inflated. It's comfortably higher than all my other fic anyway. The recipe for popularity is unrepentantly smutty fic for a juggernaut pairing haha. But I wanted to write it, so I'm really glad people have been enjoying it :)
(Second place is Kinks in the Wires, the zine that Dez and I edited together - that has over 3000 hits on AO3, which is incredibly gratifying.)
Story most under appreciated by the universe?
Listen, Transformers fandom is REALLY nice and I feel so appreciated all the time. It's been so good!!!
That said. I felt a little deflated by the response to Kinks in the Wires. I know numerically a lot of people read it, and I occasionally talk to people who really liked it, but I think I kinda had this vision that we were going to drop a 177 page zine on the fandom and people were gonna be like 'what the fuck' when actually what happened is people were like 'oooh' and went and read it and lost three hours and forgot to come back and comment, probably. Or left their comments on the individual creators' pages?
There might have been a better way to handle the publicity side of it, but you know what, I was in the middle of grading after a very difficult semester AND I do know people liked it AND the creators did get comments, so did I really need to hustle to get comments on the zine post? No. It's all good.
(Please know tho, if you leave comments on my fic you are contributing to a very important self-esteem ecosystem ESPECIALLY in 2020, I literally read some comments multiple times to extract all the validation I can get haha.)
Story that could have been better?
Tbh I am VERY self-satisfied this year. The only one I can think is Bring the Club Home, which as I mentioned before didn't quite cohere for me... but I just reread it and actually I think it's really sweet??
I do think maybe A Serious Affection would've benefited from a little more time and maybe another draft - there's parts of the action that feel like they could've been stretched out a little so the fic feels more natural and less rushed. But again, I just reread it and I really like it... Perhaps I'm too much on my own bullshit :p
Sexiest story?
This is SO hard this year, I wrote SO much porn. The Long Way Round misses out on this because although the first half is extremely horny, the latter half of the fic goes deep into plot/relationship drama. I'm going to say Desecrate You, because the concept completely wrecked the groupchat when we first came up with it, and then when I was working on it I kept having to take breaks and do something else because I was too into it haha.
Most fun story?
Twenty Five to Life is definitely the most fun story to read now that it's done, but it took forever to pull together and get through all my voice memos... I think Starscream's Sexy Staycation, because it's SO silly and also has some great smutty stuff that only makes sense in this weird AU, and also because it meant lots of conversations with Dez about this ridiculous OT3 that we've talked ourselves into.
Did any stories shift your perceptions of the characters?
I went on a Pharma JOURNEY this year. Like, I obviously already had a soft spot for Pharma when Dez and I were talking about him in 2019. But Desecrate You -> Blueprints -> Sparkbreaker -> Snapshots really took me from 'Pharma is a fun character' to 'Pharma has done nothing wrong ever in his entire life ;-;' despite. Pharma doing many things wrong.
I also worked through a lot of thoughts about me and relationships and asexuality through Pharma, thank you chainsaw doctor.
Also! I came up with a new Jazz characterization for The Long Way Round and oh MAN I love it, naive murderer/feral kindness punk Jazz is SO fun to write.
Hardest story to write?
Frivolities is so short and was SO hard to write. There were a lot of Thoughts and I had to express them very carefully, and also I kept ricocheting between 'this is so cathartic' and 'hmm actually I feel bad now' haha. I'm really glad I wrote it and it got the most comments out of any single-chapter fic, so I think what I was doing really resonated with people! But it was pulling teeth, and no one should be holding their breath for a sequel, sorry.
Also Dez had to really cajole me through Snapshots, including some big rewrites and even her writing some bits of it when I got stuck. Working Pharma through to a happy ending AND giving Aglet a chance to stand on his own as a character was a lot.
Easiest story to write?
It took me forever to get started on Lost Thoughts, but once I did I wrote the whole thing in like two sittings. Cabal brothers banter is basically always in my head, waiting to burst free.
I remember Bended Knee and Trembling Wing also being really easy... I had a concept and I needed to manifest it!
Most overdue story?
I finally wrote the amica fic!! Also almost exactly a year ago I was yelling at Dez about this dumb TFP heat/breeding concept, and then six months ago I posted about it on my NSFW twitter, and then at the very end of 2020 I asked Dez what I should write to get to 200k and she was like 'you know...' and then I wrote and posted it in three days. Incompatible wasn't overdue, per se, but it was a long time in coming!
Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?
The biggest one was definitely Kinks in the Wires! In like January Dez and I were talking about weird robot kinks, and we were like 'we should make a zine' and then we just... did? It was remarkably straightforward. I got a lot out of it - I met a bunch of people or got to know them better through the zine, there's SO much good fic and good art in there, it looks AMAZING thanks to harperuth (cover) and perictione (design)... but I also learned that managing a discord server is not at all for me, and that maybe a smaller zine with invite-only applications would've been better as a dry run. I think if we did it again now we could do it a lot better in many ways, but we got VERY lucky with how it turned out and I'm super proud of it :)
The Long Way Round is also a risk for me, in that I never post fic to AO3 without finishing at least a big chunk of it first. Usually I only start posting once it's finished. I have a basic outline for The Long Way Round in my head, but otherwise I'm just. Posting. I needed something fun. And it's working out so far, in that I've written WAY more of it than I think I would've if I was trying to keep it as polished and intricate as my fics often can be. I don't think this is going to be a new standard model for me, but it's a good way to loosen up a bit.
Oh, you know what, Desecrate You was also the first time I'd gone through and written and posted one of my darker porn ideas, and after I did that one I started doing it more. I think partly I just needed more self-indulgence to get through 2020, and partly it was good to see that I could write a fic that hit the buttons I wanted to hit without feeling empty of character/writing merit. I remember back in 2012 I wrote something VERY id-ficcy and it just NOT working at all, and that I can come back and write something both id-ficcy AND messy and be proud of how it turned out... You get better at stuff after nearly a decade, haha. I also only got a couple negative comments and one extremely silly call-out that wasn't actually about me at all, so the world did not collapse on me because I wrote some fictional robots in bad situations. Excellent.
Do you have any fanfic goals for the New Year?
I have another Rung/Pharma concept that I'm committed to working on with Dez! And I want to finish The Long Way Round, there's only 3 chapters left I think. Big picture goals: I think it would be fun to do a collab fic with another friend and see what that's like! But also, you know... I AM really smug about this year's crop of fic. If I can be half as self-indulgent next year, I'd call it time well spent.
