Fic in 2016!

[starfishstar]

A little belated, now, because there was so much else going on in January, but I didn't want to let the turn of the year go by entirely without doing this reflection on "what I wrote this past year." (Even though, wow, there's not a whole lot to say about last year in the writing department.)

This is, of course, in addition to my massive reflection on everything I read last year, which you can find here: "Books in 2016!"

And by the way, because I'm a dork (and a librarian in training...) I've added some tags to make everything even more easily searchable: In addition to my general "books" tag, each year's reflection on All The Books I Read is now found under the "year in review – reading" tag, and each quarterly post where I talk about some of my favorites from those three months are under "quarterly books." (My years' reflections on my writing, like this one, will also be findable under "year in review – writing," though I'm not sure why anyone but me would be interested in searching back for that?)

Anyway! What I wrote in 2016...


FIC/FANDOM MEME


What I wrote this past year:

• Raise Your Lantern High (written over the course of several years, posted weekly throughout the first half of the year; completed mid-June)

• Fremdsprachen (my own translation into German of my fic "Foreign Languages," translated in July – while I was in Germany and Belgium, appropriately enough!)

...And that's it, that's all the fic I wrote (or at least, completed) in 2016. (Compare this to: the 29 fics I posted in 2015!)


Things I did:

Found my writing life consumed by the process of revising and posting "Raise Your Lantern High" to the exclusion of all other projects; read SO MANY books; did not participate in fests I wished I could have participated in (because I didn't know if I had the time, and I don't commit to things unless I'm absolutely sure I can do it!); spent the summer back in Europe and somehow fell out of the habit of writing; took a language course for the first time in several years so that was good (but also all-consuming); worked in theater again for the first time in a decade and half (also good for the creative brain!); finally jumped back into writing by joining in for rt_morelove, thank goodness.


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

So much less. Oh god.

In retrospect, I think what happened was that I was spending so much time on editing "Raise Your Lantern High" – it really took a ton of effort and focus to keep on track and have each chapter ready in time for when it needed to post, so I felt like I was writing a lot...but I was revising. Which is a different, though related, thing. So I was working on a writing project, constantly, all-consumingly, but because it demanded that I spend almost all my time revising existing material instead of writing new material, without my noticing I fell out of the habit of writing new stuff, the habit of just throwing new ideas down on the page in the heat of the moment as they come, writing one-shots right and left all the time like I used to do.

And then I went away for the summer, and was traveling, and had all sorts of other things on my mind, and no longer had one Big Defining Project to focus my writing attention on, and I couldn't seem to get back into the habit of writing at all. It was weird, and a bit scary, because over the last couple years my identity had come very much to include once again (as it did back when I was a kid/teenager) "person who writes all the time."

And then I was back at work in the fall, and still didn't have any one clear project to focus on, and still couldn't get back in the habit of writing regularly, and it was still alarming. So I made the choice to actively sacrifice any writing aspirations for a while and take the opportunity to work on a professional theater production instead, and I did that and it was cool but insane and kind of destroyed my life for a while but also I met some great people (and a couple of terrible people), and I've only now finally recovered from that experience. And THANK GOODNESS rt_morelove came along at just the right time to kick me back into gear with a deadline, plus I finally made a local writer friend (via the insane play I worked on), plus another friend may have just connected me with a local writer's group at long last (which means I might actually have to start doing some original writing, gasp!) So I think things are okay again. Just in time for when what I should be doing is devoting my whole being to trying to apply to grad school, and nothing else. Sigh.


What's your favorite story of the year?

I won't be able to answer most of the rest of the questions that are supposed to be part of this (best story...hardest story...sexiest story...) but "Raise Your Lantern High" would probably be my favorite even if it weren't the only thing I wrote last year! I worked so damn hard on that story – and improved so immeasurably much as a writer, from the start of the first half ("Be the Light in My Lantern") that I started six or seven years ago, when I hardly even knew what I was doing, to the completion of the second half ("Raise Your Lantern High"), with its complex character development, interweaving of many strands of plot, and deep worldbuilding for the werewolves. I am damn proud of those werewolves.


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

Continue the good momentum from January and keep writing regularly; continue my move to writing multi-chapter stories with real plot arcs (plus character), rather than just one-shots that are nothing but character and dialogue.

Maybe, maybe do some original (non-fic) writing, too – especially if I join this writer's group, where that's probably what they're going to expect! The characters for my maybe YA novel get ever more firm in my mind, even when I'm not even trying to think about them, but as usual I'm all character and no plot.


List of WIPs:

The Snow Wolf: A fairy tale fusion, of Harry Potter characters (and world) with the story arc of "The Snow Queen." Except it's a Snow Wolf, because the person who gets abducted is a werewolf: Remus. Tonks is the main character, forging her way northward on a quest to reclaim the person she loves from the clutches of this powerful, magical beast, and along the way she meets a whole lot of characters who help her along her quest in different ways. Also known as: I took a 19th century fairy tale that's surprisingly full of strong female characters, and added even more of them.

[another fusion to be revealed]: Don't want to give this away yet, because the reveal is always fun, but it's Remus/Sirius, and again it's a fusion of Harry Potter characters + world, with the plot + atmosphere of another story to be revealed... A gothic romance, because those are the most fun. :-) Also, Regulus is in this one again, because I can't seem to stop including Regulus. :-) :-)

If You’ve Got a Lantern Hold It High, or La Ronde du Petit Loup-Garou: A four-chapter story that catches up with four women characters several years after Be the Light in My Lantern/Raise Your Lantern High, aka, several years after the end of Deathly Hallows: Andromeda, McGonagall and two OCs from my story, whose lives touched Remus' during his time with the werewolf pack. This is the one where I finally got unstuck on the last bit of Chapter 3 last month, after like half a year of being stalled on it. Now I just have to work out what on Earth is supposed to happen in Chapter 4...

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