Fic in 2018!

[starfishstar]

What I wrote this past year:

JANUARY

• My Heart Shall Not Reproach Me (Sherlock; a gift/remix forancientreader)

• Festivals of Light (Remus and Tonks and a family of Muggle OCs, Chanukah during the war)


FEBRUARY–MARCH

• The Snow Wolf (one of the fics I’ve worked the hardest on, and one of my favorites; a fusion of Remus and Tonks’ story with The Snow Queen)


JUNE

• There Are Days (Torchwood; Jack/Ianto, my usual take on Jack having the weight of the universe on his shoulders and Ianto really getting him and trying to ease the burden)


NOVEMBER

• Do You Observe? (221B Baker Towers; I have so long admired the concept of this fandom, and for Holmestice this year I finally dared to write it!)

• The Glorious Disguise (My Dearly Beloved Detective; because when you’re assigned sanguinity, Queen of More Holmes, as your Holmestice recipient, you don’t write her just one More Holmes fic)

• Further Negotiations Amongst the Penguins (John Finnemore’s Double Acts; for my Yuletide recipient, whose prompts in this fandom were so wonderful)

• Since You Ask Me for a Tale of Magic (John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme; also for my Yuletide recipient, whose prompts were so charming in both these fandoms that I had to write both!)


DECEMBER

• Sweetly, Before the Mystery Ends (Call Me By Your Name; a Yuletide treat)

• Be My Rest, Be My Fantasy (Call Me By Your Name; a Yuletide treat)

• One Weird Thing (Call Me By Your Name; a Yuletide treat double drabble)


Things I did:

• rt_morelove 
• holmestice (winter)
• Yuletide (first time!!)
• a “mini” NaNoWriMo, where I wrote 28,190 words, completed 7 fics (in 5 different fandoms, 4 of them ones I'd never written in before), wrote every day, and even got back to a bit of original writing!
• went to John Finnemore’s live show and MET JOHN FINNEMORE, my writing hero. Also wrote up the Most Comprehensive Summary of the show, for the benefit of fans who weren’t able to go to it.
• once again wrote in the café in Edinburgh where J.K. Rowling worked on the first Harry Potter book (no, not that touristy café that claims to be that…the real one) ;-)
• read 128 books, and did quarterly write-ups about my favorites
• a whole lot of coursework for my MLS (does that count as writing? sort of?)
• passed the milestone of 100 fics on AO3!


Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you'd predicted?

Lots more: I basically didn’t have time to write all year because of grad school, but then I did a huge burst of writing for NaNo, Holmestice and Yuletide.


Looking back, was your fandom involvement (modding, cheerleading, fest participation, etc.) more, less, or about what you'd predicted?

More? Because the same reasons, grad school.


What's your favorite story of the year?

The Snow Wolf! I’m so proud of this novella-length, took-me-over-a-year-to-write project! And in a way, it does almost feel like an original novella, since so much of it is my own creation, OCs, etc.

Also, Do You Observe? (Because I’d been so daunted by the thought of writing 221B Baker Towers and I’m so pleased I found a format to make it work. Also, I really like working with strictly limited formats and word counts – they make me work a lot harder, so the resulting work is better.)

I’m also quite proud of My Heart Shall Not Reproach Me. (In which I set out to write a remix of an author I really admire, so that’s daunting even to start with; and I wanted to experiment with what remixing could be, beyond just switching the POV, so I also changed the structure – told the same essential story, but in a very different timeframe, condensed into one night instead of spread over an extended time.)

And I’m pretty pleased with Further Negotiations Amongst the Penguins, too. (John Finnemore is brilliant and a hard act to follow! But it was a delightful challenge, and also writing this in script format was really fun.)


What's your favorite fandom fest/project of the year?

I honestly cannot choose. rt_morelove will always be dear to me simply because it’s where I started; Holmestice is a wonderful community and I always have The Most Fun there; and diving into Yuletide blew my mind with how great it was – why was I too daunted to sign up for this before??


Least favorite fandom project?

Nope. :-) (Although I do have to say, the challenging, multiple goals I set myself for the month of November were exhausting.)


Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?

Oh, yeah. The writing challenges I set myself in November. And writing in so many new fandoms for Holmestice and Yuletide. And especially writing 221B Baker Towers!


Do you have any fanfic or profic goals for the new year?

Just keep writing, at all. It’s been a hard time for creative writing, between grad school and health stuff, so I’m just happy if I can do it even a bit.


My best story of the year:

I've still never understood how this is different from favorite story?

But I guess if I go by readers' responses, rather than my own, then definitely Do You Observe? Wow. To get that huge and effusive response in a tiny, tiny fandom? It was incredible, in a way that rarely happens to obscure, rare pair, genfic-writing me!


Most fun story:

Most fun to write, or to read? ;-)

Probably Further Negotiations Amongst the Penguins, for the challenge but fun of trying to strike the same tone as such a great writer, and to write a mix of comedy and emotion, and to write it all in radio play format. Or maybe Do You Observe? for the unusual format. Or the Call Me By Your Name fics, because those characters are such a joy to write.


Most Sexy Story:

Be My Rest, Be My Fantasy – clearly, “most sexy” was going to be Call Me By Your Name, in some fashion. I’m not generally a sexy writer, but in this fandom, how can you be anything but?


Story with the single sexiest moment:

Be My Rest, Be My Fantasy, Elio and Oliver roughhousing in the pool, but trying not to roughhouse too conspicuously since other people might be around…and also quoting poetry at each other.


"Holy crap, that's wrong even for you" story:

I…really am not this sort of writer. The only even slightly weird thing I’ve done is transporting the Storyteller from John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme into the wizarding world, in Since You Ask Me for a Tale of Magic.


Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters:

I always love this question! This year, probably the Call Me By Your Name fics, because both the book and the movie are so intensely from Elio’s perspective, so I enjoyed the challenge of trying to reexamine the whole thing through Oliver’s POV.


Hardest story to write:

I suppose The Snow Wolf, which I started writing for rt_morelove in December 2016 (!), posted a partial version to that comm in January 2017, then went on to massively expand and revise, really turning it into a proper novella, editing obsessively and endlessly, and going back and forth with wonderful beta gilpin25 all the way through early 2018 – when I finally posted it, chapter by chapter, over the course of several weeks in February and March. Working on The Snow Wolf wasn’t hard so much as obsessively detailed.

Biggest surprise:

I think I surprised myself by becoming so at home in writing new and unfamiliar fandoms. I’ve always been a Harry Potter fic writer, with a tiny bit of a few other things thrown in. So to have ended the year suddenly having written in multiple different Sherlock Holmes versions, two different John Finnemore radio canons, a movie fandom, another TV show I love but had never written for… It’s been really great. :-)


List of WIPs:

• my first Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries fic, complete and just waiting on beta! :-)

• a Harry Potter genfic that’s intended to be five one-shots; so far I’ve written three of them.

• the bi Remus/Tonks fic I’ve wanted to write FOR YEARS. It’s made a ton of progress (I’ve finally written Tonks all the way up to…the point where she first meets Remus) but will it ever actually be complete?

• the final (?) fic in my small series for Call Me By Your Name, which started out as a Yuletide treat but has since shown me that it needs to be quite different from what I’d first intended, so it’s still very much a work in progress.



ETA: It occurs to me (after reading trobadora's writing-year-in-review) that it would be nice to include totals in this, too! So:

Total fics posted: 11 (and in 8 different fandoms! only 2 were Harry Potter...am I even myself anymore...?)  ;-)

Total word count posted, at least according to AO3: 50,722 words. Hey, that's technically a novel length! Cool! Except that the bulk of that is The Snow Wolf, which I wrote largely in 2016 and 2017, and only posted in 2018. So...not really. But it's still nice to have a proper word count in a year where I had hardly any time to write.

.