2017 fanfic year-end summary type thing
6/1/18 10:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
neveralarchFor the first time in 3 years, I'm posting my year-end summary on time!
I wrote and posted 71,007 words of fanfic last year: 6 stories for myself, and 11 for Yuletide. This is the most since 2014 and also very close to the 2014 total so, like, look at that! Turns out that I can actually write if I'm not completely miserable with stress. Big chunks of 2015 and 2016 were taken up with some exhausting stuff that really triggered my anxiety, and I've been feeling better every month that I got away from that. Hooray!
Yearly questions and answers under the cut:
Best/worst title?
Mhmmm I really like the title for Philadelphia (Johannes Cabal) even though that particular fic is set in fantasy England about two Anglo-German brothers. It just jumped to mind immediately, and it has a very strong feeling to me of trying to get somewhere without really knowing where that place is. Which is very idiosyncratic and probably nonsensical to anyone else. I think it has to do with the one time I was in Philly on my own and spent almost an hour waiting for a bus late at night.
I also really like the title to Change Your Mind (Johannes Cabal), which is from this Strfkr song. It's the perfect OTP song for a spider devil and the very tired necromancer she hypnotizes into making his brain stop whirring for a little while.
I was going to say that the worst title was Beat Love Down (Aubrey-Marturin series) was the worst title because it sounds like gibberish or possibly a techno song. Then I remembered it's actually Shakespeare, from this:
If love be rough with you, be rough with love; Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down.
Which I actually like a lot for a fic about William Marshall's hopeless crush on Jack Aubrey being made infinitely worse by being asked to 'help' Aubrey through the effects of an aphrodisiac colloquially called a frog's prick. I haven't read Shakespeare in years and have no recollection of how I came up with this.
Man, I'm rambling so much about how clever I am. Reflections (Lackadaisy) is a bad, lazy title. Yuletide panic happens.
Best/worst summary?
Somebody said they liked my summary for Reflections, which made me very proud.
Fashionable people, doing fashionable things.
Otherwise I think this was a year of good titles and mediocre summaries. I don't know if it's objectively terrible, but I had fits with the summary for Increase Your Circulation (Johannes Cabal) and clearly just gave up.
Miss Smith summons Zarenyia to help with an intimate problem. A very intimate problem.
(Zarenyia coaches Miss Smith to orgasm. That's it, that's the fic.)
Best/worst first line?
As usual, lots of mediocre first lines. But I do really liked this, from Mind How You Go (Rivers of London):
There's a woman at Finchley Road.
I think that bluntly conveys the mysteriousness and mundanity that I wanted the story to have.
This, from The Square Peg (Inspector Rebus), isn't the worst possible first line, but it bothers me because it's the beginning of a paragraph that I never quite figured out:
Malcolm calls John in the evening, in that long timeless moment when John is choosing what kind of man he’ll be tonight.
Best/worst last line?
I think the last lines of The Square Peg are pretty good:
“No regrets,” he mutters.
Deborah yawns. “A first time for everything.”
I also like the last line of Reflections, although I thought it was too on the nose when I was writing it and I still kind of think so now.
"That was the only useful advice you ever gave me," says Mitzi, and Mordecai smiles through the smoke because they both know it isn't true.
A very special shoutout this year to the ending of A Harder Road (Johannes Cabal / Dead Souls) which was so brutally abrupt that after a reader mentioned it I came back two weeks later and wrote a new 900 word ending scene. For posterity, here is the original ending, which I didn't like even when I first posted it:
Three months later, a man named Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov arrived in the town of N----. He was neither tall nor short, neither thin nor particularly fat. He was clean, and he was charming, and he was accompanied by two servants. He was seeking to buy dead souls as part of a complicated tax fraud. And he was extremely surprised when he was run out of town by an elite corps of vampire hunters, trained and led by the governor's daughter.
There's a good idea in there, which I spun out a lot more in the new ending.
Looking back, did you write more fics than you thought you would this year, less than you thought, or about what you predicted?
Last year my goal was to finish a couple wips and write something fun, and I did! I finished and posted 3 long-term wips, which always feels great. I definitely wrote more than I expected, though - when I'm really feeling it I can write about 1000 words in an hour, and I was feeling it more and more this year :)
Where did you publish/archive your stories?
AO3 again! This year I did stop cross-posting to LJ because I couldn't work out what the deal was with the new ToS and it didn't feel like a huge part of my life anymore. All of the content is mostly on DW, although there are comments and things over there that I'll miss.
What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January?
Probably crossing Johannes Cabal with Nikolai Gogol's classic Russian novel, Dead Souls. I picked up the novel from the library's magical realism display, and was delighted to find that it was actually a story about a conman. But the title and the association of magic kept bumping up against the Cabal centers of my brain, and I was already plotting out A Harder Road when I was barely 100 pages in.
What’s your favorite story this year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you the happiest.
The Captain and the Shore (Suradanna and the Sea) is my favorite :) I had a lot of fun getting into Suradanna's head and thinking about the captain and immortality and early aviation. It was written very quickly in three days spent at various breweries and coffee shops, and then edited frantically about three days before the archive went live, so I imagine that in a few months I'll go back to it and find a bunch of rough edges and mistakes. But I'm happy with it now.
Okay, NOW your most popular story.
Some interesting differences depending on the stats! Hits: Change Your Mind, Kudos: Mind How You Go, Comments: tie between The Captain and the Shore and Pack Dynamics (What We Do in the Shadows), Bookmarks: Give it Up (Sherlock).
I have some thoughts about the whys and wherefores of this, but it's all speculation. Change Your Mind was the first story of 2017, so it might just be accumulation - but tbh I think a lot of people may have come for the hypnosis kink and then ditched without commenting afterward. No shame, sometimes you're in an underpopulated AO3 tag and you read fic in a fandom you don't care about and don't want to tell the author that. Give It Up has a bunch of private bookmarks and is also an explicit fic, so maybe something similar going on there.
The other fics are from Yuletide, and I'm always so pleased by how generous people are with their comments and kudos there :) Also Pack Dynamics had one particular line that everyone wanted to quote.
Story most under appreciated by the universe?
I wrote a LOT of small fandom fic this year, so I'm gratified by all of the comments and engagement I got :) BUT I wish there was an Inspector Rebus fandom, because I think they would really dig The Square Peg. I mean, I like the Inspector Rebus books and I like my fic. I guess I'm the fandom.
Story that could have been better?
I'm not super happy with Diplomatic Overtures (Imperial Radch) - I had fun writing it, but I think the characterization is off even for a small snippet. In an ideal universe I would've reread a few chapters of Ancillary Mercy before tackling the prompt, but I was running up against deadlines.
I'm weirdly smug about most of my fic this year though. I keep looking at the list and thinking 'ahh - that's a good fic' haha.
Sexiest story?
...I had to stop working on The Square Peg several times to cool down. It also wins the 'most sex scenes of the year' award, previously held by absurd fics like It'll Be Alright (Teen Wolf) and Operator, Operator (Doctor Who). The real winner of 'sexiest story' is Change Your Mind, though, because it's the incredibly specific smut that I want to see in the world. I'm very glad I wrote it so that I can read it.
Most fun story?
Probably Pack Dynamics, which is short and silly and led me to the discovery that there was a Wellington Sausage Festival in December 2015 that DEFINITELY had some werewolves in attendance.
Did any stories shift your perceptions of the characters?
There were a lot of fics this year that were written and rewritten by basically pulling apart a character and trying to understand how they work. I already had a lot of thoughts about Horst Cabal before I wrote Philadelphia, and Suradanna before I wrote The Captain and the Shore, and Garal Ket before I wrote Personal Space (Provenance). But writing those fics made me think deeper about who they are and what I have in common with them, and what that says about me. They're very different fics, but the writing process felt similarly meditative.
Hardest story to write?
Not very many wips this year, but shoutout to the 12,000 word Kingsman fic that I wrote, edited, and then decided was deeply flawed in its emotional arc. Not sure how I'm going to move forward with that one, although I have some things to try.
I don't think anything else was particularly hard - I finished a lot of fics this year from previous years, so most of the work on those was done already.
Easiest story to write?
The Revelations of Horst Cabal (Johannes Cabal) is exactly the kind of sibling shenanigans that I could write in my sleep. I love it so.
Most overdue story?
Mhmm, probably that Kingsman fic. The wips I finished were from 2016 and 2015, so that felt good. I probably should let go of some of my wips from 2014, even though it hurts.
Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?
Give It Up is written in the second person! That was a fun thing, and it feels appropriate for a fic about Sebastian Moran, who afaik has never actually shown up in Sherlock. I know people have very strong feelings about second person and I don't know that I'd do it again, but it was a nice experiment.
Do you have any fanfic goals for the New Year?
I do want to finish that Kingsman fic. And! Despite myself, I'd really like to finish one of the older wips, a reasonably sized one. And I'd like to finish the fic that I started on new year's day, which unexpectedly (predictably) is a Doctor Who fic about the Master. I'll settle for any one of those, and anything else is a bonus - I got a job (a job!) which starts in August and I'm not sure how much time I'll have for fic.
I wrote and posted 71,007 words of fanfic last year: 6 stories for myself, and 11 for Yuletide. This is the most since 2014 and also very close to the 2014 total so, like, look at that! Turns out that I can actually write if I'm not completely miserable with stress. Big chunks of 2015 and 2016 were taken up with some exhausting stuff that really triggered my anxiety, and I've been feeling better every month that I got away from that. Hooray!
Yearly questions and answers under the cut:
Best/worst title?
Mhmmm I really like the title for Philadelphia (Johannes Cabal) even though that particular fic is set in fantasy England about two Anglo-German brothers. It just jumped to mind immediately, and it has a very strong feeling to me of trying to get somewhere without really knowing where that place is. Which is very idiosyncratic and probably nonsensical to anyone else. I think it has to do with the one time I was in Philly on my own and spent almost an hour waiting for a bus late at night.
I also really like the title to Change Your Mind (Johannes Cabal), which is from this Strfkr song. It's the perfect OTP song for a spider devil and the very tired necromancer she hypnotizes into making his brain stop whirring for a little while.
I was going to say that the worst title was Beat Love Down (Aubrey-Marturin series) was the worst title because it sounds like gibberish or possibly a techno song. Then I remembered it's actually Shakespeare, from this:
If love be rough with you, be rough with love; Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down.
Which I actually like a lot for a fic about William Marshall's hopeless crush on Jack Aubrey being made infinitely worse by being asked to 'help' Aubrey through the effects of an aphrodisiac colloquially called a frog's prick. I haven't read Shakespeare in years and have no recollection of how I came up with this.
Man, I'm rambling so much about how clever I am. Reflections (Lackadaisy) is a bad, lazy title. Yuletide panic happens.
Best/worst summary?
Somebody said they liked my summary for Reflections, which made me very proud.
Fashionable people, doing fashionable things.
Otherwise I think this was a year of good titles and mediocre summaries. I don't know if it's objectively terrible, but I had fits with the summary for Increase Your Circulation (Johannes Cabal) and clearly just gave up.
Miss Smith summons Zarenyia to help with an intimate problem. A very intimate problem.
(Zarenyia coaches Miss Smith to orgasm. That's it, that's the fic.)
Best/worst first line?
As usual, lots of mediocre first lines. But I do really liked this, from Mind How You Go (Rivers of London):
There's a woman at Finchley Road.
I think that bluntly conveys the mysteriousness and mundanity that I wanted the story to have.
This, from The Square Peg (Inspector Rebus), isn't the worst possible first line, but it bothers me because it's the beginning of a paragraph that I never quite figured out:
Malcolm calls John in the evening, in that long timeless moment when John is choosing what kind of man he’ll be tonight.
Best/worst last line?
I think the last lines of The Square Peg are pretty good:
“No regrets,” he mutters.
Deborah yawns. “A first time for everything.”
I also like the last line of Reflections, although I thought it was too on the nose when I was writing it and I still kind of think so now.
"That was the only useful advice you ever gave me," says Mitzi, and Mordecai smiles through the smoke because they both know it isn't true.
A very special shoutout this year to the ending of A Harder Road (Johannes Cabal / Dead Souls) which was so brutally abrupt that after a reader mentioned it I came back two weeks later and wrote a new 900 word ending scene. For posterity, here is the original ending, which I didn't like even when I first posted it:
Three months later, a man named Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov arrived in the town of N----. He was neither tall nor short, neither thin nor particularly fat. He was clean, and he was charming, and he was accompanied by two servants. He was seeking to buy dead souls as part of a complicated tax fraud. And he was extremely surprised when he was run out of town by an elite corps of vampire hunters, trained and led by the governor's daughter.
There's a good idea in there, which I spun out a lot more in the new ending.
Looking back, did you write more fics than you thought you would this year, less than you thought, or about what you predicted?
Last year my goal was to finish a couple wips and write something fun, and I did! I finished and posted 3 long-term wips, which always feels great. I definitely wrote more than I expected, though - when I'm really feeling it I can write about 1000 words in an hour, and I was feeling it more and more this year :)
Where did you publish/archive your stories?
AO3 again! This year I did stop cross-posting to LJ because I couldn't work out what the deal was with the new ToS and it didn't feel like a huge part of my life anymore. All of the content is mostly on DW, although there are comments and things over there that I'll miss.
What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January?
Probably crossing Johannes Cabal with Nikolai Gogol's classic Russian novel, Dead Souls. I picked up the novel from the library's magical realism display, and was delighted to find that it was actually a story about a conman. But the title and the association of magic kept bumping up against the Cabal centers of my brain, and I was already plotting out A Harder Road when I was barely 100 pages in.
What’s your favorite story this year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you the happiest.
The Captain and the Shore (Suradanna and the Sea) is my favorite :) I had a lot of fun getting into Suradanna's head and thinking about the captain and immortality and early aviation. It was written very quickly in three days spent at various breweries and coffee shops, and then edited frantically about three days before the archive went live, so I imagine that in a few months I'll go back to it and find a bunch of rough edges and mistakes. But I'm happy with it now.
Okay, NOW your most popular story.
Some interesting differences depending on the stats! Hits: Change Your Mind, Kudos: Mind How You Go, Comments: tie between The Captain and the Shore and Pack Dynamics (What We Do in the Shadows), Bookmarks: Give it Up (Sherlock).
I have some thoughts about the whys and wherefores of this, but it's all speculation. Change Your Mind was the first story of 2017, so it might just be accumulation - but tbh I think a lot of people may have come for the hypnosis kink and then ditched without commenting afterward. No shame, sometimes you're in an underpopulated AO3 tag and you read fic in a fandom you don't care about and don't want to tell the author that. Give It Up has a bunch of private bookmarks and is also an explicit fic, so maybe something similar going on there.
The other fics are from Yuletide, and I'm always so pleased by how generous people are with their comments and kudos there :) Also Pack Dynamics had one particular line that everyone wanted to quote.
Story most under appreciated by the universe?
I wrote a LOT of small fandom fic this year, so I'm gratified by all of the comments and engagement I got :) BUT I wish there was an Inspector Rebus fandom, because I think they would really dig The Square Peg. I mean, I like the Inspector Rebus books and I like my fic. I guess I'm the fandom.
Story that could have been better?
I'm not super happy with Diplomatic Overtures (Imperial Radch) - I had fun writing it, but I think the characterization is off even for a small snippet. In an ideal universe I would've reread a few chapters of Ancillary Mercy before tackling the prompt, but I was running up against deadlines.
I'm weirdly smug about most of my fic this year though. I keep looking at the list and thinking 'ahh - that's a good fic' haha.
Sexiest story?
...I had to stop working on The Square Peg several times to cool down. It also wins the 'most sex scenes of the year' award, previously held by absurd fics like It'll Be Alright (Teen Wolf) and Operator, Operator (Doctor Who). The real winner of 'sexiest story' is Change Your Mind, though, because it's the incredibly specific smut that I want to see in the world. I'm very glad I wrote it so that I can read it.
Most fun story?
Probably Pack Dynamics, which is short and silly and led me to the discovery that there was a Wellington Sausage Festival in December 2015 that DEFINITELY had some werewolves in attendance.
Did any stories shift your perceptions of the characters?
There were a lot of fics this year that were written and rewritten by basically pulling apart a character and trying to understand how they work. I already had a lot of thoughts about Horst Cabal before I wrote Philadelphia, and Suradanna before I wrote The Captain and the Shore, and Garal Ket before I wrote Personal Space (Provenance). But writing those fics made me think deeper about who they are and what I have in common with them, and what that says about me. They're very different fics, but the writing process felt similarly meditative.
Hardest story to write?
Not very many wips this year, but shoutout to the 12,000 word Kingsman fic that I wrote, edited, and then decided was deeply flawed in its emotional arc. Not sure how I'm going to move forward with that one, although I have some things to try.
I don't think anything else was particularly hard - I finished a lot of fics this year from previous years, so most of the work on those was done already.
Easiest story to write?
The Revelations of Horst Cabal (Johannes Cabal) is exactly the kind of sibling shenanigans that I could write in my sleep. I love it so.
Most overdue story?
Mhmm, probably that Kingsman fic. The wips I finished were from 2016 and 2015, so that felt good. I probably should let go of some of my wips from 2014, even though it hurts.
Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?
Give It Up is written in the second person! That was a fun thing, and it feels appropriate for a fic about Sebastian Moran, who afaik has never actually shown up in Sherlock. I know people have very strong feelings about second person and I don't know that I'd do it again, but it was a nice experiment.
Do you have any fanfic goals for the New Year?
I do want to finish that Kingsman fic. And! Despite myself, I'd really like to finish one of the older wips, a reasonably sized one. And I'd like to finish the fic that I started on new year's day, which unexpectedly (predictably) is a Doctor Who fic about the Master. I'll settle for any one of those, and anything else is a bonus - I got a job (a job!) which starts in August and I'm not sure how much time I'll have for fic.
