fic retrospective 2021
Dec. 5th, 2021 06:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
screechfoxIs this an odd choice for my first entry on Dreamwidth? Maybe so!
I'd like to think I'll get some more writing done this year (I have a couple of Jon/Elias prompts on Tumblr, if nothing else), but I'll forget about this if I put it off, so I'm doing it a month early. Read ahead for more author commentary than is warranted by the questions!
Looking back, did you write more fics than you thought you would this year, less than you thought, or about what you predicted?
More than I thought, less than I would have liked. I've had a lot of writer's block this year, interspersed with brief bursts of fixation on particular fics, and every time I've been in a block, it's felt like I wouldn't manage to write anything for months.
Where did you publish/archive your stories?
AO3!
What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January 2021?
I genuinely can't pick between to sculpt anew (post-canon time travel Jon/Elias) and death & desolation (post-canon Agnes/Oliver).
Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?
Before crossed wires, I'd never written porn where I felt like the sex was the point. I've written wholly explicit ficlets, so maybe this is strange, but I've always written them because some core idea has sparked. Working on crossed wires was a definite new experience, and one I'm very glad to have done. It also broadened my horizons of "types of sex scenes I can kind of write"!
My best story of this year:
I'm biased because I love it anyway, but to sculpt anew hit exactly the beats I wanted it to, and I think it was successful as a cohesive story.
Okay, NOW your most popular story:
to sculpt anew wins out in both kudos and bookmarks, although hope, love, and indigestion has the most comment threads.
Most underappreciated by the universe, in my opinion:
I know death & desolation was doomed to be niche: it's a character study of a side character, with a rarepair with another side character (only fic in the tag for them!) But all the same, I think it deserved more than it got.
Story that could have been better:
There are fics I'm less satisfied with, but kill you in the morning is the fic I'm most frustrated by. Something about it didn't click the way I wanted it to--it lacks a spark that I think is present in most of my writing, to the point that my beta-reader noticed and agreed. I was going through a rough patch when writing it, both creatively and in general, and I don't think it's bad, but the wasted potential of it annoys me.
Most fun story:
I don't know if I do fun. :D I'd probably say a swing of the axe is the most fun of all of my fics; Michael always adds a certain twisted joy to whatever fic he's in by virtue of his perpetual amusement.
Sexiest story:
I'm not well-equipped to judge this in my own writing, but I'd probably say crossed wires? It's definitely intended as such.
Story with single sweetest moment:
hope, love, and indigestion, with Jon and Martin joking about being the powers of hope and love, and so being the main characters of a children's show. If not that, something else from that fic.
"Holy crap, that's wrong, even for you" story:
family secret wins that battle, thanks to the non-con, blackmail, and pseudo-incest... There's a reason I kept it on anon for ten months before I got my courage up to reveal it; it was definitely the most out there fic I'd written at the time.
Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters:
I had to do a lot of thinking about Agnes (and Oliver) when I was writing death & desolation and the WIPs that came before it. She's a really fascinating character, and it was interesting building up a picture of who she could have been from the negative space of people's descriptions of her.
Hardest story to write:
Absolutely a swing of the axe. I had the moments that I wanted, but building the connective tissue between them was difficult--so much so that I largely didn't bother to do that in any great detail at all.
Easiest story to write:
To make a bad joke, river-clay, chalk, and silt just flowed once I started it. The way I write dialogue--by "hearing" the words in the characters' voices--was a good fit for the Silt Verses' style of internal monologue/narration. Even moreso because Faulkner has a lovely, distinctive voice.
Most overdue story:
I'd been trying to find the right angle on rara avis since the start of 2020. Weirdly, it only clicked when I decided I wanted to write T4T Elias/Mike Crew in response to #discourse, so yay for that burst of spite!
Biggest surprise:
family secret. I didn't expect to write for Alex Rider (TV), and I definitely didn't expect to write 1k of pseudo-incest and blackmail. It just kind of... happened.
Favorite Opening Line(s):
From no knowledge so sweet.
Jon isn’t hungry until he is, until he has Martin pushed up against a London wall, until the watchers are chittering eagerly from their windows and pressing their lenses to the glass to get a better view of what’s about to happen.
Favorite Closing Line(s):
Again from no knowledge so sweet!
He’s still got a lot of Martin to get through before he reaches the heart.
Top Scenes from Anywhere You Would Choose to Have Illustrated:
I'd like to think I'll get some more writing done this year (I have a couple of Jon/Elias prompts on Tumblr, if nothing else), but I'll forget about this if I put it off, so I'm doing it a month early. Read ahead for more author commentary than is warranted by the questions!
Looking back, did you write more fics than you thought you would this year, less than you thought, or about what you predicted?
More than I thought, less than I would have liked. I've had a lot of writer's block this year, interspersed with brief bursts of fixation on particular fics, and every time I've been in a block, it's felt like I wouldn't manage to write anything for months.
Where did you publish/archive your stories?
AO3!
What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January 2021?
- Fluffy post-canon Jon/Martin (hope, love, or indigestion). I don't write fluff and I don't ship Jon/Martin!
- Jinx/Silco. I always thought underage was the one thing that would never interest me, but then *waves hands* they happened.
- Alex Rider TV
I genuinely can't pick between to sculpt anew (post-canon time travel Jon/Elias) and death & desolation (post-canon Agnes/Oliver).
Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?
Before crossed wires, I'd never written porn where I felt like the sex was the point. I've written wholly explicit ficlets, so maybe this is strange, but I've always written them because some core idea has sparked. Working on crossed wires was a definite new experience, and one I'm very glad to have done. It also broadened my horizons of "types of sex scenes I can kind of write"!
My best story of this year:
I'm biased because I love it anyway, but to sculpt anew hit exactly the beats I wanted it to, and I think it was successful as a cohesive story.
Okay, NOW your most popular story:
to sculpt anew wins out in both kudos and bookmarks, although hope, love, and indigestion has the most comment threads.
Most underappreciated by the universe, in my opinion:
I know death & desolation was doomed to be niche: it's a character study of a side character, with a rarepair with another side character (only fic in the tag for them!) But all the same, I think it deserved more than it got.
Story that could have been better:
There are fics I'm less satisfied with, but kill you in the morning is the fic I'm most frustrated by. Something about it didn't click the way I wanted it to--it lacks a spark that I think is present in most of my writing, to the point that my beta-reader noticed and agreed. I was going through a rough patch when writing it, both creatively and in general, and I don't think it's bad, but the wasted potential of it annoys me.
Most fun story:
I don't know if I do fun. :D I'd probably say a swing of the axe is the most fun of all of my fics; Michael always adds a certain twisted joy to whatever fic he's in by virtue of his perpetual amusement.
Sexiest story:
I'm not well-equipped to judge this in my own writing, but I'd probably say crossed wires? It's definitely intended as such.
Story with single sweetest moment:
hope, love, and indigestion, with Jon and Martin joking about being the powers of hope and love, and so being the main characters of a children's show. If not that, something else from that fic.
"Holy crap, that's wrong, even for you" story:
family secret wins that battle, thanks to the non-con, blackmail, and pseudo-incest... There's a reason I kept it on anon for ten months before I got my courage up to reveal it; it was definitely the most out there fic I'd written at the time.
Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters:
I had to do a lot of thinking about Agnes (and Oliver) when I was writing death & desolation and the WIPs that came before it. She's a really fascinating character, and it was interesting building up a picture of who she could have been from the negative space of people's descriptions of her.
Hardest story to write:
Absolutely a swing of the axe. I had the moments that I wanted, but building the connective tissue between them was difficult--so much so that I largely didn't bother to do that in any great detail at all.
Easiest story to write:
To make a bad joke, river-clay, chalk, and silt just flowed once I started it. The way I write dialogue--by "hearing" the words in the characters' voices--was a good fit for the Silt Verses' style of internal monologue/narration. Even moreso because Faulkner has a lovely, distinctive voice.
Most overdue story:
I'd been trying to find the right angle on rara avis since the start of 2020. Weirdly, it only clicked when I decided I wanted to write T4T Elias/Mike Crew in response to #discourse, so yay for that burst of spite!
Biggest surprise:
family secret. I didn't expect to write for Alex Rider (TV), and I definitely didn't expect to write 1k of pseudo-incest and blackmail. It just kind of... happened.
Favorite Opening Line(s):
From no knowledge so sweet.
Jon isn’t hungry until he is, until he has Martin pushed up against a London wall, until the watchers are chittering eagerly from their windows and pressing their lenses to the glass to get a better view of what’s about to happen.
I feel like it expresses the suddenness of the situation well--how much Jon has been caught off-guard by what's happening even as he does it.
Favorite Closing Line(s):
Again from no knowledge so sweet!
He’s still got a lot of Martin to get through before he reaches the heart.
Top Scenes from Anywhere You Would Choose to Have Illustrated:
- Jon hunt-crazed, holding an axe, and covered in blood after killing the Not-Sasha, from a swing of the axe
- Jon crouched over Martin, blood on his mouth and Martin's stomach torn open, from no knowledge so sweet
- Any of the exchanges between Oliver and Agnes in death & desolation
Most revealing story:
This is a difficult one; I don't really conceptualise my fic like this? weave yourself a web was perhaps one of my most self-indulgent fics this year, if that counts. There were a lot of concessions I made that I wouldn't normally to enjoy the story beats I wanted.
A story I want remembered:
I'd be very happy if my 2021 writing was remembered by to sculpt anew.
Story I haven't yet written, but intend to:
Oh, so many. I hesitate to commit to saying any one in particular, because I know my moods will change like the wind and it'll be something different I'm focusing my energies on tomorrow.
Fic-writing goals for 2022:
This is a difficult one; I don't really conceptualise my fic like this? weave yourself a web was perhaps one of my most self-indulgent fics this year, if that counts. There were a lot of concessions I made that I wouldn't normally to enjoy the story beats I wanted.
A story I want remembered:
I'd be very happy if my 2021 writing was remembered by to sculpt anew.
Story I haven't yet written, but intend to:
Oh, so many. I hesitate to commit to saying any one in particular, because I know my moods will change like the wind and it'll be something different I'm focusing my energies on tomorrow.
Fic-writing goals for 2022:
- Finally finish that one Homestuck fic I've been writing since 2017
- It's not even 7k. It would have been finished long ago if I could figure out a coherent ending for it.
- Work up the courage to write something for the Untamed
- The amount of cultural context I lack is intimidating, but I have a lot of feelings around Nie Huaisang and Jin Guangyao that I need to put into words somehow.
- Write more for Arcane and TMA
- Work on original fiction--either in the AO3 sense or something vaguely resembling a novel
- As an ambitious extension of the above: do Camp NaNoWriMo in the summer, or NaNoWriMo proper come autumn.
- I haven't been able to try any of these in years, but by the summer, I'll finally be free from the academic world, and I like to think that will give me more brain-space for writing commitments.
no subject
Date: 2021-12-11 12:55 pm (UTC)Having your most popular fic of the year also be your best one sounds nice 😂 And writing porn where the sex isn't really the point is a huge mood, honestly. That's one of my favorite types of fics, both as a reader and as a writer.
Definitely saving this list of questions to go through for myself after I actually finish everything I'm going to post in 2021. I still have a few exchange fics in the pipeline that I can't write about until after author reveals, so I probably won't be doing my roundup until mid-January, but I'm excited to eventually get around to it!
no subject
Date: 2021-12-13 08:33 pm (UTC)I didn't expect my best fic to be the most popular, ngl. I thought for sure it would be the fluffy Jon/Martin, because TMA fandom, but I guess Jon/Elias being less popular means it didn't get swallowed as easily as the Jon/Martin probably did. (Plus, not to toot my own horn, it's also both a fun idea and one that plays on popular fandom tropes of time travel fix-its.)
🤝 My porny fics so far have tended to be based around an idea or an image or a dynamic, and the porn is necessary for what it ends up as, but it isn't really the point.
Also 👀. Look forward to reading your fic roundup. I probably should have left it to the end of the month, because I think I might get at least one thing written over the Christmas break if I'm lucky, but I knew I'd procrastinate and/or overthink things.