2024 Fanfic Year-End Summary-Type Thing
1/5/25 05:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
neveralarchSo last year my year-end summary was late because I could NOT look at or engage with my 2023 fic. This year it's late because I've been writing so so much lmao. Very different experience.
I posted 160,287 words of fanfic last year, including the longest thing I've ever posted. That's the second highest total ever, eclipsed only by 2020 when I was trapped at home all day every day. AND I didn't post anything until May this year. The total breaks down into 15 stories: 1 story/1,262 words of Doctor Who for Yuletide, 1 very old Great Mouse Detective story (9,682 words), 2 stories/11,211 words of Transformers, 1 Discworld flashfic (1,316 words), 1 Dungeon Meshi fic (2,133), and 9 stories/134,683 words of Naruto. 95,507 words were written with Dez :)
Yearly questions and answers under the cut. Note that a lot of the fics linked are NSFW/adult.
Best/worst title?
REALLY happy with Red Sun, Autumn Chill (Kakashi/Gai arranged marriage AU). Dez and I were kicking around several titles, like 'A Season of Loneliness,' or 'One Body Intertwined,' or 'A Body Separated' - very poetic seeming titles but not quite hitting. Then I started searching around and immediately hit on this Bashō poem about travel and a lover growing distant:
Bright red sun
relentless, but
an autumn breeze
Some tweaking gave us Red Sun, Autumn Chill, and also my true ideal for any fanfic title: cool-sounding concept that also gives you a hint at the contents if you follow the rabbit hole down.
I'm not the happiest with Too Much (Kakashi/Gai porn), because it feels very similar to other fics that I've named very quickly without much thought. See my Yuletide fic from last year (More - Radiant Emperor series), or this other Yuletide fic from 2013 (But Never Too Much - Brooklyn Nine-Nine)... Looking back at Discord I see that I posted this without consulting Dez on a title haha
Best/worst summary?
Lot of quotes from the fic themselves this year. I really like this summary from Red Sun, Autumn Chill (which was heavily workshopped with Dez):
The delegation from Iwagakure arrives in Konoha on a cold, misty morning. It carries with it wedding gifts, guests, and a man promised to marry Hatake Kakashi. Political marriage in the shinobi world has its own set of duties and expectations, its difficult conflicted loyalties. But Maito Gai has been obsessed with Kakashi since they were twelve years old. If anyone could make this work, surely it's them.
And this one from Torn Wires (Doctor Who - Shalka) is good:
It starts badly, with a blaster strike tearing across the Doctor's shoulders as they run from the guards who are, as usual, chasing them.
Alison learns something that the Doctor would really rather she didn't know, and which he certainly doesn't want to explain. So, obviously, she goes to the Master to find out what's going on.
I did NOT try with the summary for Dental Maintenance (TF Deadlock):
A little fic about Deadlock's teeth.
But to be fair the fic is very short. And very about Deadlock's teeth.
Best/worst first line?
I tried to get more into Scene Setting this year, although there's always a place for just throwing the reader into the deep end. I really like the simplicity of this first line from Becoming (Dungeon Meshi, Kabru and Laios):
The thing was, Kabru had expected Laios to turn back.
It only makes sense if you've finished the manga, but that's fine since the whole fic is in dialogue with the ending of the manga and also the picture of monster Laios that's still my phone's lock screen.
Also gotta mention that in the special category of Scene Setting, I like the first line from Torn Wires - which is in the summary that I gave above as one of my faves, so it wins twice.
I'm not quite into the first line in Too Much:
Making out with Kakashi was a joy that Gai hadn't yet learned to anticipate.
There's something off with the rhythm. I settle more firmly into Gai voice later in the fic, and the rest of the opening paragraph has some good setup, but this doesn't work as well for me.
Best/worst last line?
Got some really good ones this year, I think!
From a meta perspective I'm very pleased with the ending of The Adventure of the Forged Statues (Great Mouse Detective, Basil/Ratigan):
And thus the Adventure of the Forged Statues finally came to a somewhat disappointing end. It was not reported by any newspapers or enterprising crime dramatists, much to everyone's profound relief. Except, of course, for what has now been presented to you.
Also, love a fic that ends with literally dozens of footnotes.
The ending of Dantian (Kakashi/Gai porn again) is SO funny to me, because it's Kakashi being lazily pleased about having sex in a bathroom while a house party's worth of people are trying to break in:
He could do without all the noise outside, but hey. It was a party.
He's cute!! Truly a nightmare man to have at any event, do not invite him.
The ending to Red Sun, Autumn Chill was the subject of a lot of discussion between me and Dez - we weren't sure if we wanted it to end with the last flashback (to Kakashi and Gai's childhood) or with the flashforward to the Zabuza fight. We went with the flashforward, but it's interesting to compare the endings and where they leave the fic.
He opened his sharingan and slapped Tenten on the back. “I’ll see if I can get it for you,” he said, and leapt out to join his husband in the fight.
vs
My rival, the genius, he thought, smiling through the drudge work he’d been assigned. One day, we’re going to be Great.
I think the flashforward ending leaves us with a sense of completion and growth (which is why I lobbied for it), but I do really love the wistfulness of the flashback ending...
I have a couple endings I'm more disappointed in because they feel like lazy 'they fell asleep' or 'then they ate food' things that I usually try to avoid. A perennial frustration that I keep inflicting on myself because... it's easy... and people do fall asleep or eat food a lot. So we have this ending from We Are All Flesh (Kakashi/Gai mpreg):
Gai snored. Which was as good a response as any, really.
And this one from Too Much:
“After breakfast,” agreed Gai, and handed him an onigiri.
Looking back, did you write more fics than you thought you would this year, less than you thought, or about what you predicted?
Definitely more than I expected. I was NOT with it for the first few months of the year, so if you'd asked me around then I probably would've expected to get a few thousand words out for Yuletide and not much else. Instead very very inspired by Gai's pecs.
Where did you publish/archive your stories?
All AO3 again! The process got more streamlined now that I don't have five different discord groups to announce fic to... Last year I tossed around the idea of putting together my own website as a duplicate archive and I DO want to do that, I'm just. Look there's only so much time in the day. And obviously I'm spending a lot of it writing fanfic.
What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January?
Truly had no idea that I would relapse so hard for Naruto after more than a decade. Kakashi/Gai was one of the obvious best ships to me when I was a teen, and when Dez started getting back into Naruto I went looking for some to show her... and then fell into a pit. A pit which I keep dragging Dez back into by the ankles. It's very strange to me to be into ONE pairing with ONE canon for so long.
What’s your favorite story this year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you the happiest.
I REALLY enjoyed writing Red Sun with Dez, it was just a really good combo of fun plot concept, cool structural setup, and also the classic me n Dez tag team where we're able to just leapfrog over each other like we're scrambling to get to all the best parts. It's also nearly twice as long as my next longest work, so that was a cool thing to do at this advanced writing age.
Okay, NOW your most popular story.
Looks like it's Dantian, which is fun! The people are crying out for more Daoist-based sex nonsense. Possibly the magical healing cock tag is helping me out there.
Story most under appreciated by the universe?
I gotta say. It has been an adjustment coming into an old anime fandom compared to the comment-lined streets of Transformers. The comment to kudos ratio is VERY different, and it took me a little while to adjust to it. Luckily Dez and I are constantly pumping each other up over our wips so by the time I actually post it I kinda feel like I've sucked up a lot of enjoyment and adulation anyway. Also people have been very gratifyingly excited that we've shown up and started kicking the tires on this ship, so thanks very much to everyone who has taken the time to let us know :)
Story that could have been better?
I think Exposure Therapy (Kakashi/Gai cuck kink) suffers from 'Nev writes a porn coda for self-indulgent reasons' disease, which is to say that it doesn't QUITE justify its existence in comparison to the much more cohesive Torn Green Paper (Kakashi/Gai plotty porn). Someday I will figure out how to write these in a way I'm perfectly happy with, but for now. Listen. I wrote it for self-indulgent reasons.
Sexiest story?
Man it's steep competition this year. I'm gonna say, just for sheer volume and also my own bias, Too Much is very very sexy. Here's a sfw quote which I think still conveys the general tenor of the story:
There was something—Something about being wanted, wanted all the time, so badly that it couldn't wait another moment. It was how Gai had felt for years, needing Kakashi to look at him, to see him, and to think that Kakashi sometimes felt the same way...
It's about the mutual longing!!!
Most fun story?
Ok besides Red Sun, We Are All Flesh was a blast for me to conceive and write. Very good experience. I was never an mpreg person but as usual I am easily converted by gleeful spite and a wild idea. I came up with the concept while trapped in an MRI machine and I was so so grateful that Dez was willing to entertain it with me when I came out.
Did any stories shift your perceptions of the characters?
Stand Me Up at the Gates of Hell was the first kakagai story I wrote, but it was easy because it's like. It's orgasm denial porn. This stuff is easy for me. But writing Ambulatory (gen Kakashi & Gai mental health issues) was where I really started getting into both Kakashi and Gai's heads, and during edits I started thinking more about GAI'S issues and it revealed a whole world of delicious insecurity to me. Really fun to dig into.
Hardest story to write?
I really had to cudgel my brain into playing with TF reverse bang, despite a really cool prompt, a lovely artist partner, and the shorter wordcount requirement. I just sooo didn't want to get off the kakagai train. In the end I'm pretty happy with Carry What You Can Hold (TF Deadlock/Rung) but I probably won't try to do the TF bang this year.
Easiest story to write?
The Crime Machine (Discworld, Vimes & Hex) was very very fast, since it was flash fic on a short deadline haha. But also Discworld voice is absolutely burned into my brain, so it was nice to be able to tap into both that well and my general robot obsession and just bang it out.
Most overdue story?
Dez has spent several years occasionally pestering me about some of my long-running wips and finally I sent her The Adventure of the Forged Statue - a Great Mouse Detective fic I finished literally a decade ago and then found myself completely unable or willing to edit. She gave it the 'rough but readable' seal of approval and I went ahead and posted it. It was harder than that because I had to code nearly FIFTY footnotes (thanks past self) but it's still nice to have it out in the world :)
Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?
I wouldn't call this a RISK exactly, but I've never done mpreg before and it was interesting to do that in We Are All Flesh. Especially doing it in a fic with a trans male character, where the cis guy is the one who gets pregnant, and their relationship is very ambiguous and not especially romantic in the classical fanfic sense. I'm really glad it seems to have found its audience!
Do you have any fanfic goals for the New Year?
Ok I successfully posted my 2024 summary before June so I succeeded in that goal. Now. Let's try for before May for the 2025 summary. Get this thing back into January or February even.
And make the personal website.
I posted 160,287 words of fanfic last year, including the longest thing I've ever posted. That's the second highest total ever, eclipsed only by 2020 when I was trapped at home all day every day. AND I didn't post anything until May this year. The total breaks down into 15 stories: 1 story/1,262 words of Doctor Who for Yuletide, 1 very old Great Mouse Detective story (9,682 words), 2 stories/11,211 words of Transformers, 1 Discworld flashfic (1,316 words), 1 Dungeon Meshi fic (2,133), and 9 stories/134,683 words of Naruto. 95,507 words were written with Dez :)
Yearly questions and answers under the cut. Note that a lot of the fics linked are NSFW/adult.
Best/worst title?
REALLY happy with Red Sun, Autumn Chill (Kakashi/Gai arranged marriage AU). Dez and I were kicking around several titles, like 'A Season of Loneliness,' or 'One Body Intertwined,' or 'A Body Separated' - very poetic seeming titles but not quite hitting. Then I started searching around and immediately hit on this Bashō poem about travel and a lover growing distant:
Bright red sun
relentless, but
an autumn breeze
Some tweaking gave us Red Sun, Autumn Chill, and also my true ideal for any fanfic title: cool-sounding concept that also gives you a hint at the contents if you follow the rabbit hole down.
I'm not the happiest with Too Much (Kakashi/Gai porn), because it feels very similar to other fics that I've named very quickly without much thought. See my Yuletide fic from last year (More - Radiant Emperor series), or this other Yuletide fic from 2013 (But Never Too Much - Brooklyn Nine-Nine)... Looking back at Discord I see that I posted this without consulting Dez on a title haha
Best/worst summary?
Lot of quotes from the fic themselves this year. I really like this summary from Red Sun, Autumn Chill (which was heavily workshopped with Dez):
The delegation from Iwagakure arrives in Konoha on a cold, misty morning. It carries with it wedding gifts, guests, and a man promised to marry Hatake Kakashi. Political marriage in the shinobi world has its own set of duties and expectations, its difficult conflicted loyalties. But Maito Gai has been obsessed with Kakashi since they were twelve years old. If anyone could make this work, surely it's them.
And this one from Torn Wires (Doctor Who - Shalka) is good:
It starts badly, with a blaster strike tearing across the Doctor's shoulders as they run from the guards who are, as usual, chasing them.
Alison learns something that the Doctor would really rather she didn't know, and which he certainly doesn't want to explain. So, obviously, she goes to the Master to find out what's going on.
I did NOT try with the summary for Dental Maintenance (TF Deadlock):
A little fic about Deadlock's teeth.
But to be fair the fic is very short. And very about Deadlock's teeth.
Best/worst first line?
I tried to get more into Scene Setting this year, although there's always a place for just throwing the reader into the deep end. I really like the simplicity of this first line from Becoming (Dungeon Meshi, Kabru and Laios):
The thing was, Kabru had expected Laios to turn back.
It only makes sense if you've finished the manga, but that's fine since the whole fic is in dialogue with the ending of the manga and also the picture of monster Laios that's still my phone's lock screen.
Also gotta mention that in the special category of Scene Setting, I like the first line from Torn Wires - which is in the summary that I gave above as one of my faves, so it wins twice.
I'm not quite into the first line in Too Much:
Making out with Kakashi was a joy that Gai hadn't yet learned to anticipate.
There's something off with the rhythm. I settle more firmly into Gai voice later in the fic, and the rest of the opening paragraph has some good setup, but this doesn't work as well for me.
Best/worst last line?
Got some really good ones this year, I think!
From a meta perspective I'm very pleased with the ending of The Adventure of the Forged Statues (Great Mouse Detective, Basil/Ratigan):
And thus the Adventure of the Forged Statues finally came to a somewhat disappointing end. It was not reported by any newspapers or enterprising crime dramatists, much to everyone's profound relief. Except, of course, for what has now been presented to you.
Also, love a fic that ends with literally dozens of footnotes.
The ending of Dantian (Kakashi/Gai porn again) is SO funny to me, because it's Kakashi being lazily pleased about having sex in a bathroom while a house party's worth of people are trying to break in:
He could do without all the noise outside, but hey. It was a party.
He's cute!! Truly a nightmare man to have at any event, do not invite him.
The ending to Red Sun, Autumn Chill was the subject of a lot of discussion between me and Dez - we weren't sure if we wanted it to end with the last flashback (to Kakashi and Gai's childhood) or with the flashforward to the Zabuza fight. We went with the flashforward, but it's interesting to compare the endings and where they leave the fic.
He opened his sharingan and slapped Tenten on the back. “I’ll see if I can get it for you,” he said, and leapt out to join his husband in the fight.
vs
My rival, the genius, he thought, smiling through the drudge work he’d been assigned. One day, we’re going to be Great.
I think the flashforward ending leaves us with a sense of completion and growth (which is why I lobbied for it), but I do really love the wistfulness of the flashback ending...
I have a couple endings I'm more disappointed in because they feel like lazy 'they fell asleep' or 'then they ate food' things that I usually try to avoid. A perennial frustration that I keep inflicting on myself because... it's easy... and people do fall asleep or eat food a lot. So we have this ending from We Are All Flesh (Kakashi/Gai mpreg):
Gai snored. Which was as good a response as any, really.
And this one from Too Much:
“After breakfast,” agreed Gai, and handed him an onigiri.
Looking back, did you write more fics than you thought you would this year, less than you thought, or about what you predicted?
Definitely more than I expected. I was NOT with it for the first few months of the year, so if you'd asked me around then I probably would've expected to get a few thousand words out for Yuletide and not much else. Instead very very inspired by Gai's pecs.
Where did you publish/archive your stories?
All AO3 again! The process got more streamlined now that I don't have five different discord groups to announce fic to... Last year I tossed around the idea of putting together my own website as a duplicate archive and I DO want to do that, I'm just. Look there's only so much time in the day. And obviously I'm spending a lot of it writing fanfic.
What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January?
Truly had no idea that I would relapse so hard for Naruto after more than a decade. Kakashi/Gai was one of the obvious best ships to me when I was a teen, and when Dez started getting back into Naruto I went looking for some to show her... and then fell into a pit. A pit which I keep dragging Dez back into by the ankles. It's very strange to me to be into ONE pairing with ONE canon for so long.
What’s your favorite story this year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you the happiest.
I REALLY enjoyed writing Red Sun with Dez, it was just a really good combo of fun plot concept, cool structural setup, and also the classic me n Dez tag team where we're able to just leapfrog over each other like we're scrambling to get to all the best parts. It's also nearly twice as long as my next longest work, so that was a cool thing to do at this advanced writing age.
Okay, NOW your most popular story.
Looks like it's Dantian, which is fun! The people are crying out for more Daoist-based sex nonsense. Possibly the magical healing cock tag is helping me out there.
Story most under appreciated by the universe?
I gotta say. It has been an adjustment coming into an old anime fandom compared to the comment-lined streets of Transformers. The comment to kudos ratio is VERY different, and it took me a little while to adjust to it. Luckily Dez and I are constantly pumping each other up over our wips so by the time I actually post it I kinda feel like I've sucked up a lot of enjoyment and adulation anyway. Also people have been very gratifyingly excited that we've shown up and started kicking the tires on this ship, so thanks very much to everyone who has taken the time to let us know :)
Story that could have been better?
I think Exposure Therapy (Kakashi/Gai cuck kink) suffers from 'Nev writes a porn coda for self-indulgent reasons' disease, which is to say that it doesn't QUITE justify its existence in comparison to the much more cohesive Torn Green Paper (Kakashi/Gai plotty porn). Someday I will figure out how to write these in a way I'm perfectly happy with, but for now. Listen. I wrote it for self-indulgent reasons.
Sexiest story?
Man it's steep competition this year. I'm gonna say, just for sheer volume and also my own bias, Too Much is very very sexy. Here's a sfw quote which I think still conveys the general tenor of the story:
There was something—Something about being wanted, wanted all the time, so badly that it couldn't wait another moment. It was how Gai had felt for years, needing Kakashi to look at him, to see him, and to think that Kakashi sometimes felt the same way...
It's about the mutual longing!!!
Most fun story?
Ok besides Red Sun, We Are All Flesh was a blast for me to conceive and write. Very good experience. I was never an mpreg person but as usual I am easily converted by gleeful spite and a wild idea. I came up with the concept while trapped in an MRI machine and I was so so grateful that Dez was willing to entertain it with me when I came out.
Did any stories shift your perceptions of the characters?
Stand Me Up at the Gates of Hell was the first kakagai story I wrote, but it was easy because it's like. It's orgasm denial porn. This stuff is easy for me. But writing Ambulatory (gen Kakashi & Gai mental health issues) was where I really started getting into both Kakashi and Gai's heads, and during edits I started thinking more about GAI'S issues and it revealed a whole world of delicious insecurity to me. Really fun to dig into.
Hardest story to write?
I really had to cudgel my brain into playing with TF reverse bang, despite a really cool prompt, a lovely artist partner, and the shorter wordcount requirement. I just sooo didn't want to get off the kakagai train. In the end I'm pretty happy with Carry What You Can Hold (TF Deadlock/Rung) but I probably won't try to do the TF bang this year.
Easiest story to write?
The Crime Machine (Discworld, Vimes & Hex) was very very fast, since it was flash fic on a short deadline haha. But also Discworld voice is absolutely burned into my brain, so it was nice to be able to tap into both that well and my general robot obsession and just bang it out.
Most overdue story?
Dez has spent several years occasionally pestering me about some of my long-running wips and finally I sent her The Adventure of the Forged Statue - a Great Mouse Detective fic I finished literally a decade ago and then found myself completely unable or willing to edit. She gave it the 'rough but readable' seal of approval and I went ahead and posted it. It was harder than that because I had to code nearly FIFTY footnotes (thanks past self) but it's still nice to have it out in the world :)
Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?
I wouldn't call this a RISK exactly, but I've never done mpreg before and it was interesting to do that in We Are All Flesh. Especially doing it in a fic with a trans male character, where the cis guy is the one who gets pregnant, and their relationship is very ambiguous and not especially romantic in the classical fanfic sense. I'm really glad it seems to have found its audience!
Do you have any fanfic goals for the New Year?
Ok I successfully posted my 2024 summary before June so I succeeded in that goal. Now. Let's try for before May for the 2025 summary. Get this thing back into January or February even.
And make the personal website.
