Dec. 31st, 2014 08:56 pm
2014 Fandom Retrospective
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
subjunctiveBecause who doesn't love a bit of self-indulgent navel-gazing?
While the personal and scholarly sides of my life were not great, the fannish side was pretty rad, all things considered. I've gone in and out of fandom for the last 15 years or so, and picked up again at the end of 2013 after a couple years' absence. This probably coincides with stumbling across FFA, which is my only real multifandom space and makes the whole endeavor feel very alive and active in a way it hadn't for me in a while.
I made a commitment to write at least 100,000 words this year. I wanted to keep the overall total low, because in the past I've had a nasty habit of setting very high goals that I always fail. 272 words per day, on the other hand, sounded pretty doable. And even though I was significantly behind on this goal for almost six months, I caught up in the second half and ended up writing 142,000 words total, over 100k of which was posted. My goal for 2015 is 150k, which seems pretty doable in light of that. I signed up for![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
inkingitout, but honestly, the tool that helped me the most was Svenja Gosen's wordcount tracking spreadsheets - just today she put up the sheets for 2015, with a bunch of different themes. They are a superb tool; the spreadsheet not only tracks your daily output but tells you how far you're behind or ahead, how much you have left to do for the month/year, and doesn't worry if you miss a day or a week or a month. Since I tend to sit down and write a couple thousand words at a stretch once or twice a week, I much preferred this over having a daily wordcount goal. There's just no way I'm going to sit down and write every day, and I prefer not to feel guilty about it. She also makes some specially for NaNoWriMo, if you do that.
Other fannish highlights of 2014:
I received some pretty amazing exchange gifts this year, all told. Not a dud among them. (Like I would say if there were, but still. You can trust me.) The average quality of what I got was, I think, significantly higher than the average of what I put out. I don't have the time or space to rec them all, even though they deserve it, but here are four that I think didn't get enough appreciation or attention even though they were balls-to-the-walls amazing:
The Rubble or Our Sins by Ils_mutant (BSG, 6k, Boomer & Elosha)
Summary: Sharon was caught between two sides, two different worlds. But a friendship with Elosha on New Caprica clarifies a lot of things.
I basically asked for fix-it fic for Boomer, which is a tricky kind of request (she was one of my favorite characters early in the show and her every appearance after 2x18, "Downloaded," made zero sense to me). Fortunately the author wasn't afraid to go AU to do it.
Skullgaffer's Crown by loki-of-sassgaard (Journey into Mystery, 19k, Leah/Loki)
Summary: Loki is given a mission to retrieve a stolen crown, but he's more interested in getting a new pair of shoes and trying to get laid. Mostly, Leah is just bored. Bored enough to go along with him, and bored by his antics.
Ignores what happened in Manchester Gods and moves forward several years. Utterly delightful casefic (something I am incapable of writing myself) and Leah/Loki moments. Perfect character voices.
i'm the road that drives away (then follows you back home) by thinkatory (MCU, 6.5k, Jane Foster/Gamora)
Summary: Jane finds a portal to the Guardians' part of space. She, Darcy, and the Guardians suddenly have to deal with the consequences, or risk leaving Earth vulnerable to any random threat who might stomp through it. But once opened, some doors aren't so easy to close, for plenty of reasons.
Fun adventuresome space romp, where Jane has a bit of a fetish for musclebound aliens. Served with a hilarious side of Darcy/Peter Quill, which is an amazing pairing that everyone should write more of, because duh.
Love Lives in Hiding by lilybeth84 (몬스타 | Monstar, 26k, Sun-woo/Na-na)
Summary: Six years after she gave him the coat, after he rejected her, NaNa stumbles out of a club and into Sun Woo's arms--again.
I requested this last Yuletide, and it turned up as an NYR treat this year. No one has ever requested or offered the fandom but me. No lie, when I got the alert email and saw the fandom and length, I might have actually cried a little. It is the perfect follow-up to this ambiguously ended Kdrama. Utilized almost every aspect of my request (I actually deleted it from my sign up this year because I couldn't think of anything else... and because no one else was requesting or offering it) and contains a lot of nods to great moments in the show as well as reasonable extrapolations to where the characters are now. Sad that because of the fandom it will never get the attention it deserves.
In other news.
Not counting the unfinished HP Year Five fic I posted on FFN twelve years ago (because who does, really?), I wrote my very first fic longer than about 4k this year. I worked my way up from there.
Closely related, I finished my first big bang,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
marvel_bang. I've signed up for at least a dozen over the last several years and never managed it. The resulting fic, So Bound with Ice, clocked in at 32k, which is definitely the most I've managed to write ever. I'm not 100% happy with the story, for a few reasons - mostly I had no idea what I was doing with respect to plot; it's just a bunch of scenes strung together - but it's readable and, most importantly, I finished the goddamn thing. (It was a close thing, though: in the last week there were a couple of days where I had to sit down and write 6k in a session to crank it out). I'm not so much proud of the fic as I am of myself. I'm going to give it a re-read next summer and see what I would do to revise it, just for the exercise of doing so with some distance.
Although I'm proud of that story for having finished it, the story I'm most proud of actually writing is A Temporary Arrangement, a post-TWS Bruce/Natasha story that I thought did a good job with the character voices. I also really like the Mischief & Mistletoe fic I wrote, but I can't tell you about that yet!
I also completed art for someone else's big bang, but I'm not linking to that because of its aggressive mediocrity. I will sit back and appreciate more talented people's work next year.
I ran or co-ran four exchanges, which went off more or less without major hitches, and all of which I'll run again in 2015.
I signed up for 13 exchanges, only defaulting on one (which I ended up picking up a pinch hit for anyway). Pressure is 90% of what gets me to write, but I'm not doing that again, and definitely not more than one at once. There are just a couple of fics I'm not super happy with having written, one because it didn't live up to its potential because I was a bit burned out, and the other because I didn't have a good grasp on one of the main characters (the recip requested two and their only prompt was for them together, when I had only offered one).
And finally, last but greatest, I made some delightful friends. YOU'RE ALL GREAT. I LOVE EVERYONE IN THIS BAR.
Altogether, I think, a success.
While the personal and scholarly sides of my life were not great, the fannish side was pretty rad, all things considered. I've gone in and out of fandom for the last 15 years or so, and picked up again at the end of 2013 after a couple years' absence. This probably coincides with stumbling across FFA, which is my only real multifandom space and makes the whole endeavor feel very alive and active in a way it hadn't for me in a while.
I made a commitment to write at least 100,000 words this year. I wanted to keep the overall total low, because in the past I've had a nasty habit of setting very high goals that I always fail. 272 words per day, on the other hand, sounded pretty doable. And even though I was significantly behind on this goal for almost six months, I caught up in the second half and ended up writing 142,000 words total, over 100k of which was posted. My goal for 2015 is 150k, which seems pretty doable in light of that. I signed up for
inkingitout, but honestly, the tool that helped me the most was Svenja Gosen's wordcount tracking spreadsheets - just today she put up the sheets for 2015, with a bunch of different themes. They are a superb tool; the spreadsheet not only tracks your daily output but tells you how far you're behind or ahead, how much you have left to do for the month/year, and doesn't worry if you miss a day or a week or a month. Since I tend to sit down and write a couple thousand words at a stretch once or twice a week, I much preferred this over having a daily wordcount goal. There's just no way I'm going to sit down and write every day, and I prefer not to feel guilty about it. She also makes some specially for NaNoWriMo, if you do that.Other fannish highlights of 2014:
I received some pretty amazing exchange gifts this year, all told. Not a dud among them. (Like I would say if there were, but still. You can trust me.) The average quality of what I got was, I think, significantly higher than the average of what I put out. I don't have the time or space to rec them all, even though they deserve it, but here are four that I think didn't get enough appreciation or attention even though they were balls-to-the-walls amazing:
The Rubble or Our Sins by Ils_mutant (BSG, 6k, Boomer & Elosha)
Summary: Sharon was caught between two sides, two different worlds. But a friendship with Elosha on New Caprica clarifies a lot of things.
I basically asked for fix-it fic for Boomer, which is a tricky kind of request (she was one of my favorite characters early in the show and her every appearance after 2x18, "Downloaded," made zero sense to me). Fortunately the author wasn't afraid to go AU to do it.
Skullgaffer's Crown by loki-of-sassgaard (Journey into Mystery, 19k, Leah/Loki)
Summary: Loki is given a mission to retrieve a stolen crown, but he's more interested in getting a new pair of shoes and trying to get laid. Mostly, Leah is just bored. Bored enough to go along with him, and bored by his antics.
Ignores what happened in Manchester Gods and moves forward several years. Utterly delightful casefic (something I am incapable of writing myself) and Leah/Loki moments. Perfect character voices.
i'm the road that drives away (then follows you back home) by thinkatory (MCU, 6.5k, Jane Foster/Gamora)
Summary: Jane finds a portal to the Guardians' part of space. She, Darcy, and the Guardians suddenly have to deal with the consequences, or risk leaving Earth vulnerable to any random threat who might stomp through it. But once opened, some doors aren't so easy to close, for plenty of reasons.
Fun adventuresome space romp, where Jane has a bit of a fetish for musclebound aliens. Served with a hilarious side of Darcy/Peter Quill, which is an amazing pairing that everyone should write more of, because duh.
Love Lives in Hiding by lilybeth84 (몬스타 | Monstar, 26k, Sun-woo/Na-na)
Summary: Six years after she gave him the coat, after he rejected her, NaNa stumbles out of a club and into Sun Woo's arms--again.
I requested this last Yuletide, and it turned up as an NYR treat this year. No one has ever requested or offered the fandom but me. No lie, when I got the alert email and saw the fandom and length, I might have actually cried a little. It is the perfect follow-up to this ambiguously ended Kdrama. Utilized almost every aspect of my request (I actually deleted it from my sign up this year because I couldn't think of anything else... and because no one else was requesting or offering it) and contains a lot of nods to great moments in the show as well as reasonable extrapolations to where the characters are now. Sad that because of the fandom it will never get the attention it deserves.
In other news.
Not counting the unfinished HP Year Five fic I posted on FFN twelve years ago (because who does, really?), I wrote my very first fic longer than about 4k this year. I worked my way up from there.
Closely related, I finished my first big bang,
marvel_bang. I've signed up for at least a dozen over the last several years and never managed it. The resulting fic, So Bound with Ice, clocked in at 32k, which is definitely the most I've managed to write ever. I'm not 100% happy with the story, for a few reasons - mostly I had no idea what I was doing with respect to plot; it's just a bunch of scenes strung together - but it's readable and, most importantly, I finished the goddamn thing. (It was a close thing, though: in the last week there were a couple of days where I had to sit down and write 6k in a session to crank it out). I'm not so much proud of the fic as I am of myself. I'm going to give it a re-read next summer and see what I would do to revise it, just for the exercise of doing so with some distance.Although I'm proud of that story for having finished it, the story I'm most proud of actually writing is A Temporary Arrangement, a post-TWS Bruce/Natasha story that I thought did a good job with the character voices. I also really like the Mischief & Mistletoe fic I wrote, but I can't tell you about that yet!
I also completed art for someone else's big bang, but I'm not linking to that because of its aggressive mediocrity. I will sit back and appreciate more talented people's work next year.
I ran or co-ran four exchanges, which went off more or less without major hitches, and all of which I'll run again in 2015.
I signed up for 13 exchanges, only defaulting on one (which I ended up picking up a pinch hit for anyway). Pressure is 90% of what gets me to write, but I'm not doing that again, and definitely not more than one at once. There are just a couple of fics I'm not super happy with having written, one because it didn't live up to its potential because I was a bit burned out, and the other because I didn't have a good grasp on one of the main characters (the recip requested two and their only prompt was for them together, when I had only offered one).
And finally, last but greatest, I made some delightful friends. YOU'RE ALL GREAT. I LOVE EVERYONE IN THIS BAR.
Altogether, I think, a success.
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It works at letting me plug in word counts for completed projects/chapters, instead of daily word counts, too. Which you can kind of do with Svenja's sheets, but I see the dates and get really weird about blank spaces.
And thanks for the rec! I'm still pleased you liked that one. I got super nervous about it toward the end, because it got surprisingly long, and I worried you'd hate it, and then have about 20k of fic to slog through. IDK don't look at me. I get weirrd sometimes.
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How would something like that work for art, I wonder? I really need to get into the habit of drawing more often as well. I actually did some sketches tonight while watching some YouTube videos, and on actual paper at that! I really need to find my face book again, because I just can't make faces work without it. Wah.
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I really wish I had the room here for my markers. I really want to colour with markers lately.