2018 fanfic year-end summary type thing
4/1/19 09:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
neveralarchI wrote and posted 107,653 words of fanfic last year: 9 stories for myself (approx. 90,500 words), and 11 for Yuletide (approx 17,000 words). This is very very close to the most fic I've ever written in one year, beaten only by 109,900 words in 2010 (when I started writing fic for the first time). I was pretty sure I wasn't going to write anything since I also had to finish a thesis and start a new faculty position this year, but, uh. Apparently this fanfic stuff is fun, or something. Also I wrote almost 83,000 words of Transformers fic, so there's the heady rush of 80s cartoon robots to thank for a lot of this.
I've mentioned this a couple times, but large chunks of 2015 and 2016 were really taken up by stressful work and people who were making me unhappy. Most of my free time was spent watching mindless TV and trying to chill out. 2018 was also taken up by stressful work, but this time I had lots of people around who were making me very happy. World of difference for my free time and creative output :)
Yearly questions and answers under the cut:
Best/worst title?
I like the sequence of the Attaque Composée titles. This is a Transformers fencing AU, and each individual fic is a fencing term in French (the international language of fencing) which relates to the content of the fic. So for instance Reprise d'Attaque (a restart of a failed attack) focuses on Starscream trying to restart his fencing career after a recent fencing ban and a slightly older failed partnership with Megatron. It's fun to think through the implications, and to leave an easter egg for any readers who are a little more familiar with fencing.
I think most of the titles are good, or at least okay... I wish I'd spent a little more time on the title to Nat Geo (Squirrel Girl), because it became one of my more popular Yuletide fics and the title was absolutely the last gasp of 'I want to go to bed' while posting the last YT fic at 2 am on Christmas Eve.
Best/worst summary?
I like a lot of my summaries this year, which is unusual! I like the concision of the Every Sundown (Imperial Radch) summary:
Breq is a traitor, a rebel, and a captain a thousand years out of date. Mercy of Seivarden is drifting without a crew.
Like - those are the things you need to know about these characters, and about the fic. It conveys that it's a roleswap without me needing to add a little 'hey this is a roleswap fyi' parenthetical. And it doesn't spoil anything about the plot, because the main hook is really just that these are the characters and we're gonna watch them bounce off each other.
I think the Nat Geo summary is also pretty good, even though I spent approximately the same minimal amount of time on the summary as I did on the title:
Kraven needs a plus one to the National Geographic Anniversary Gala. Doreen was born for this.
I'm always striving for that two sentence encapsulation.
On the other hand, the summary for Crash and Carry (Transformers) doesn't entirely scan as real English:
Starscream may or may not be satisfied with Megatron's skill in interfacing. Megatron may or may not need some tips. Skywarp is certainly offering.
There's something there, and it does encapsulate the fic, but... I wish I'd given it a couple more sentences of elaboration instead of the weird 'may or may not' phrasing.
Best/worst first line?
Once again, mostly mediocre first lines. I feel like I always get started in the second paragraph.
But I do like this, from Just As Thick As My Skin (Deadpool):
This part is just to recap.
Which is the start of me blatantly lying about how Deadpool 2 ended. It was fun to mix in some not!fic style storytelling, and I really hope someone read it before seeing the movie and then got confused when the movie didn't actually end that way.
I also think the first line from Crash and Carry does a nice job of evoking both the image and the feeling I wanted:
As usual, Megatron woke up with empty arms and his pillows scattered on the floor.
For worst first line, I guess Calluses (Megalo Box):
Aragaki's hands were the same.
Just because I used this line for the summary but converted it to present tense, and now I wish the whole fic was in present tense too. I think it would do a better job of conveying the way Nanbu's thoughts are piling up on each other and how his attention keeps being caught by these little details of Aragaki. Tenses are magic and a mystery.
Best/worst last line?
I really like the ending of Reprise d'Attaque:
He'd worry about it in the morning. If he knew himself, he'd probably worry about it for the rest of his life.
Just... yeah. A lot of these fencing fics are me muddling through some of the hundreds of emotions fencing has given me. I think does a good job of capturing that moment of going 'I need to stop thinking about this so I can sleep' and also 'fuck I'm going to think about this forever' which my anxiety inflicts on me so often when I screw up while fencing or refereeing.
Also, Just As Thick As My Skin has a LOT of endings, finally wrapping up on this joke that I came up with before I even started writing the fic:
"Anyway," said Cable, "my stripper name was Sex-Man."
I don't care if anyone else gets it, I love it more than anything.
The rest of the endings I think are again good or okay! Quarantine (Transformers) maybe needed a little more work:
Megatron turned off his comm. He’d deal with everyone when Starscream was well.
I think the rest of the ending is silly and fun, but the absolute last line falls a little flat and undermines the rest.
In general, I rewrote a lot of endings this year (most extensively Every Sundown, Nat Geo) and I was happier for it :)
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 rewrite my Kingsman fic, OR finish an older WIP, OR finish the Doctor Who fic I'd started on new year's day. I finished the Who fic! Cool It was my first Doctor/Master fic in ages and it felt really good and interesting to come back to an old OTP.
I did not do any of the other things. Instead I dived into Transformers, which I was kind of expecting. I'd been reading a lot of fic, and TF is one of those perennial almost-fandoms where I'd done some of the canon media and would occasionally dip into the fic. Apparently it was just time to fall in the deep end. As a consequence, I wrote way more than I was expecting.
I also started writing during my commutes via voice memo a lot more, and my new fencing commute is a lot longer. This means I have about 90 minutes of guaranteed writing time every week, and it's surprising how quickly that adds up.
Where did you publish/archive your stories?
It's all on AO3. One small change - I started linking my tumblr fic posts from AO3 and asking people to rec or reblog if they liked. I think that really helped my engagement with readers even though I rarely have the time/energy for online interaction, and I'm annoyed that I figured it out just as tumblr started to implode.
What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January?
I wasn't expecting to write so much fencing fic. I've played with Doctor Who fencing fic and original fencing fic, but the most I've produced is a short Dr Who fic with lots of fencing innuendos, a By the Sword fic, and some historical RPF. Some fic with sword fights. Not the fencing magnum opus of my dreams.
The fencing fic series is 4 stories and 37,433 words long, and has at least one more big fic to go. It's already the most I've ever written in one continuity. It's also been really fun - I tend to write very self-contained fics, and giving myself the permission to write these connected fics and trust readers to follow along has been really rewarding.
What’s your favorite story this year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you the happiest.
THIS IS SO HARD. I wrote a LOT of idfic this year. I'll say Total Eclipse (Transformers) because I spent so much time writing it and so much time enjoying the process of writing it, and now I have it as a thing that I can read whenever I want :) I started out thinking of it as TF Road to El Dorado, and I had exactly as much fun with it as you'd expect.
Okay, NOW your most popular story.
Just As Thick As My Skin! More than double the hits of its closest competitor. It's for Deadpool, which was the only big media fandom I wrote for, haha.
Story most under appreciated by the universe?
I'm very well-appreciated! Even my weird fencing fic has gotten a really gratifying response :) But it was interesting to post Cool It and get only a couple of comments from people I didn't know. Really a sign of how much the Doctor/Master community I used to have has moved on (myself included).
Story that could have been better?
Calluses should be in the present tense.
Otherwise - all of this is good shit. I'm so smug.
Sexiest story?
Both Crash and Carry and Just As Thick As My Skin are stories about sex, and about wanting to have the best kind of sex for yourself and your partner. I'm giving the award to Crash and Carry, a story which contains no human-equivalent sex at all. I mean, there's three whole chapters of non-stop cabling. Megatron puts his tongue in a USB port. Unf.
Most fun story?
No Colors Anymore (Vantablack Feud) was super fun to write. I even had fun adding all the hyperlink citations.
Did any stories shift your perceptions of the characters?
The fencing series has made me think a lot about Megatron and Starscream and the difficult nature of their relationship in this AU. But I think Coupé was especially useful to me on a personal level, because it draws on a lot of my experiences with refereeing and has made me think differently about how I see myself as a referee. Sometimes the character you perceive... is you.
Hardest story to write?
This year's wips: 1,600 words of Megatron/Starscream functionist AU, where Megatron is a medic managing an illegal clinic, and Starscream owns a junkyard. I love it so, and I have no motivation to write the 50,000 words it would take to flesh out that premise. I also have a couple voice memos with the beginning of a fic where young Megatron is brought to Starscream-ruled Cybertron by a Device, and Starscream tries to reconcile his complicated and mostly negative feelings about present-day Megatron with his nostalgia/fondness toward the past version.
Oh, also I started a fic about Harriet Vane pegging Peter Wimsey, and I'm mad I never finished it. But I feel like the whole fic could just be conveyed with 'HARRIET VANE PEGGING LORD PETER WIMSEY' and it doesn't really need elaboration.
All of the finished fics were pretty easy. I did have to change Every Sundown from third-person to first-person, that was a pain.
Easiest story to write?
I started recording the first draft of Crash and Carry on March 1st, and I finished it on March 16th. It's 18,000 words. Literally every time I was in the car I was so so psyched to get more of it out of my head. It took a couple weeks to edit and post, but that first draft was like liquid.
Most overdue story?
I have a Gallifrey prompt in my tumblr messages from this summer I'd still like to answer. It's on my list.
Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?
I felt like the fencing series was pretty risky. It's hard to write fencing so it's understandable to the layperson, and it's hard to take characters and put them in an idiosyncratic AU like that. Also, weird and maybe off-putting to use them so blatantly to process your feelings about an Olympic sport?
I think I learned that's there's an audience for everything, haha. And that I'm a better writer (and fencer) than the last time I tried to tackle fencing in fic!
Do you have any fanfic goals for the New Year?
My goal is to write at least one of the idfic pwps I spend so much time thinking about before discarding them unwritten. It's easier for me to write plotty idfic, because it feels... more virtuous? I guess? To write plot? And I've written a couple of h/c idfics, because again fluff feels easier somehow. But I really appreciate all of the great pwps in the Transformers fandom, and I've written a lot of weird idfic pwp for other fandoms. Gotta make this happen in TF.
I'm not saying my New Year's resolution is to write Rumble/Frenzy/Starscream non-con somnophilia. But something like that, in spirit if not in substance.
I've mentioned this a couple times, but large chunks of 2015 and 2016 were really taken up by stressful work and people who were making me unhappy. Most of my free time was spent watching mindless TV and trying to chill out. 2018 was also taken up by stressful work, but this time I had lots of people around who were making me very happy. World of difference for my free time and creative output :)
Yearly questions and answers under the cut:
Best/worst title?
I like the sequence of the Attaque Composée titles. This is a Transformers fencing AU, and each individual fic is a fencing term in French (the international language of fencing) which relates to the content of the fic. So for instance Reprise d'Attaque (a restart of a failed attack) focuses on Starscream trying to restart his fencing career after a recent fencing ban and a slightly older failed partnership with Megatron. It's fun to think through the implications, and to leave an easter egg for any readers who are a little more familiar with fencing.
I think most of the titles are good, or at least okay... I wish I'd spent a little more time on the title to Nat Geo (Squirrel Girl), because it became one of my more popular Yuletide fics and the title was absolutely the last gasp of 'I want to go to bed' while posting the last YT fic at 2 am on Christmas Eve.
Best/worst summary?
I like a lot of my summaries this year, which is unusual! I like the concision of the Every Sundown (Imperial Radch) summary:
Breq is a traitor, a rebel, and a captain a thousand years out of date. Mercy of Seivarden is drifting without a crew.
Like - those are the things you need to know about these characters, and about the fic. It conveys that it's a roleswap without me needing to add a little 'hey this is a roleswap fyi' parenthetical. And it doesn't spoil anything about the plot, because the main hook is really just that these are the characters and we're gonna watch them bounce off each other.
I think the Nat Geo summary is also pretty good, even though I spent approximately the same minimal amount of time on the summary as I did on the title:
Kraven needs a plus one to the National Geographic Anniversary Gala. Doreen was born for this.
I'm always striving for that two sentence encapsulation.
On the other hand, the summary for Crash and Carry (Transformers) doesn't entirely scan as real English:
Starscream may or may not be satisfied with Megatron's skill in interfacing. Megatron may or may not need some tips. Skywarp is certainly offering.
There's something there, and it does encapsulate the fic, but... I wish I'd given it a couple more sentences of elaboration instead of the weird 'may or may not' phrasing.
Best/worst first line?
Once again, mostly mediocre first lines. I feel like I always get started in the second paragraph.
But I do like this, from Just As Thick As My Skin (Deadpool):
This part is just to recap.
Which is the start of me blatantly lying about how Deadpool 2 ended. It was fun to mix in some not!fic style storytelling, and I really hope someone read it before seeing the movie and then got confused when the movie didn't actually end that way.
I also think the first line from Crash and Carry does a nice job of evoking both the image and the feeling I wanted:
As usual, Megatron woke up with empty arms and his pillows scattered on the floor.
For worst first line, I guess Calluses (Megalo Box):
Aragaki's hands were the same.
Just because I used this line for the summary but converted it to present tense, and now I wish the whole fic was in present tense too. I think it would do a better job of conveying the way Nanbu's thoughts are piling up on each other and how his attention keeps being caught by these little details of Aragaki. Tenses are magic and a mystery.
Best/worst last line?
I really like the ending of Reprise d'Attaque:
He'd worry about it in the morning. If he knew himself, he'd probably worry about it for the rest of his life.
Just... yeah. A lot of these fencing fics are me muddling through some of the hundreds of emotions fencing has given me. I think does a good job of capturing that moment of going 'I need to stop thinking about this so I can sleep' and also 'fuck I'm going to think about this forever' which my anxiety inflicts on me so often when I screw up while fencing or refereeing.
Also, Just As Thick As My Skin has a LOT of endings, finally wrapping up on this joke that I came up with before I even started writing the fic:
"Anyway," said Cable, "my stripper name was Sex-Man."
I don't care if anyone else gets it, I love it more than anything.
The rest of the endings I think are again good or okay! Quarantine (Transformers) maybe needed a little more work:
Megatron turned off his comm. He’d deal with everyone when Starscream was well.
I think the rest of the ending is silly and fun, but the absolute last line falls a little flat and undermines the rest.
In general, I rewrote a lot of endings this year (most extensively Every Sundown, Nat Geo) and I was happier for it :)
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 rewrite my Kingsman fic, OR finish an older WIP, OR finish the Doctor Who fic I'd started on new year's day. I finished the Who fic! Cool It was my first Doctor/Master fic in ages and it felt really good and interesting to come back to an old OTP.
I did not do any of the other things. Instead I dived into Transformers, which I was kind of expecting. I'd been reading a lot of fic, and TF is one of those perennial almost-fandoms where I'd done some of the canon media and would occasionally dip into the fic. Apparently it was just time to fall in the deep end. As a consequence, I wrote way more than I was expecting.
I also started writing during my commutes via voice memo a lot more, and my new fencing commute is a lot longer. This means I have about 90 minutes of guaranteed writing time every week, and it's surprising how quickly that adds up.
Where did you publish/archive your stories?
It's all on AO3. One small change - I started linking my tumblr fic posts from AO3 and asking people to rec or reblog if they liked. I think that really helped my engagement with readers even though I rarely have the time/energy for online interaction, and I'm annoyed that I figured it out just as tumblr started to implode.
What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January?
I wasn't expecting to write so much fencing fic. I've played with Doctor Who fencing fic and original fencing fic, but the most I've produced is a short Dr Who fic with lots of fencing innuendos, a By the Sword fic, and some historical RPF. Some fic with sword fights. Not the fencing magnum opus of my dreams.
The fencing fic series is 4 stories and 37,433 words long, and has at least one more big fic to go. It's already the most I've ever written in one continuity. It's also been really fun - I tend to write very self-contained fics, and giving myself the permission to write these connected fics and trust readers to follow along has been really rewarding.
What’s your favorite story this year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you the happiest.
THIS IS SO HARD. I wrote a LOT of idfic this year. I'll say Total Eclipse (Transformers) because I spent so much time writing it and so much time enjoying the process of writing it, and now I have it as a thing that I can read whenever I want :) I started out thinking of it as TF Road to El Dorado, and I had exactly as much fun with it as you'd expect.
Okay, NOW your most popular story.
Just As Thick As My Skin! More than double the hits of its closest competitor. It's for Deadpool, which was the only big media fandom I wrote for, haha.
Story most under appreciated by the universe?
I'm very well-appreciated! Even my weird fencing fic has gotten a really gratifying response :) But it was interesting to post Cool It and get only a couple of comments from people I didn't know. Really a sign of how much the Doctor/Master community I used to have has moved on (myself included).
Story that could have been better?
Calluses should be in the present tense.
Otherwise - all of this is good shit. I'm so smug.
Sexiest story?
Both Crash and Carry and Just As Thick As My Skin are stories about sex, and about wanting to have the best kind of sex for yourself and your partner. I'm giving the award to Crash and Carry, a story which contains no human-equivalent sex at all. I mean, there's three whole chapters of non-stop cabling. Megatron puts his tongue in a USB port. Unf.
Most fun story?
No Colors Anymore (Vantablack Feud) was super fun to write. I even had fun adding all the hyperlink citations.
Did any stories shift your perceptions of the characters?
The fencing series has made me think a lot about Megatron and Starscream and the difficult nature of their relationship in this AU. But I think Coupé was especially useful to me on a personal level, because it draws on a lot of my experiences with refereeing and has made me think differently about how I see myself as a referee. Sometimes the character you perceive... is you.
Hardest story to write?
This year's wips: 1,600 words of Megatron/Starscream functionist AU, where Megatron is a medic managing an illegal clinic, and Starscream owns a junkyard. I love it so, and I have no motivation to write the 50,000 words it would take to flesh out that premise. I also have a couple voice memos with the beginning of a fic where young Megatron is brought to Starscream-ruled Cybertron by a Device, and Starscream tries to reconcile his complicated and mostly negative feelings about present-day Megatron with his nostalgia/fondness toward the past version.
Oh, also I started a fic about Harriet Vane pegging Peter Wimsey, and I'm mad I never finished it. But I feel like the whole fic could just be conveyed with 'HARRIET VANE PEGGING LORD PETER WIMSEY' and it doesn't really need elaboration.
All of the finished fics were pretty easy. I did have to change Every Sundown from third-person to first-person, that was a pain.
Easiest story to write?
I started recording the first draft of Crash and Carry on March 1st, and I finished it on March 16th. It's 18,000 words. Literally every time I was in the car I was so so psyched to get more of it out of my head. It took a couple weeks to edit and post, but that first draft was like liquid.
Most overdue story?
I have a Gallifrey prompt in my tumblr messages from this summer I'd still like to answer. It's on my list.
Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?
I felt like the fencing series was pretty risky. It's hard to write fencing so it's understandable to the layperson, and it's hard to take characters and put them in an idiosyncratic AU like that. Also, weird and maybe off-putting to use them so blatantly to process your feelings about an Olympic sport?
I think I learned that's there's an audience for everything, haha. And that I'm a better writer (and fencer) than the last time I tried to tackle fencing in fic!
Do you have any fanfic goals for the New Year?
My goal is to write at least one of the idfic pwps I spend so much time thinking about before discarding them unwritten. It's easier for me to write plotty idfic, because it feels... more virtuous? I guess? To write plot? And I've written a couple of h/c idfics, because again fluff feels easier somehow. But I really appreciate all of the great pwps in the Transformers fandom, and I've written a lot of weird idfic pwp for other fandoms. Gotta make this happen in TF.
I'm not saying my New Year's resolution is to write Rumble/Frenzy/Starscream non-con somnophilia. But something like that, in spirit if not in substance.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-05 08:36 am (UTC)well done on writing! and really happy that you were with nice people in 2018.
I think I learned that's there's an audience for everything, haha.
aha. so true
no subject
Date: 2019-01-14 04:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-27 03:44 am (UTC)Also I will say I thought the Crash and Carry summary was great—that was the first of your fics I'd read and the summary drew me in immediately.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-28 10:54 pm (UTC)I'm glad that the Crash and Carry summary is better than I think it is! I try hard with summaries but they're a mysterious alchemy.