subjunctive

I've been working on this for about a week! It's half for myself, and half for anyone who might be interested. This is fairly comprehensive in that it's pretty much everything I've liked so far that I've found, but it's no guarantee that I've found everything worth reading. I welcome any recs you have, especially if they're from FFN, where I've only dared venture a few times, or Tumblr, where it's hard to find fic. (Chances are, if it's on AO3, I've read it.)

The well-known classics are here (okay, the one classic everyone knows and that I'm pretty sure is responsible for half the following this small ship does have), as well as some less famous works and a lot of WIPs. (Finish your WIPs! /hypocrite)

They're roughly sorted from longer to shorter, with commentary (including some criticism) following. There are 23 works here total.

( finished fics )


( WIPs )

Because 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 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:

( BSG 2003, Journey into Mystery, MCU, Monstar )

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.

Mostly for my own reference, but in case anyone else is interested in this pairing, which I'm really excited for given the AOU spoilers and trailer (my icon is a moment I am SO looking forward to). Bruce and Natasha are my favorites, and I saw their chemistry in The Avengers and immediately wanted to see more of them together in whatever context or relationship. They're perfect together: both with angsty pasts they are trying to move on from, suspicious of each other even though they really have more in common, and delicious potential for hurt/comfort. (That moment with Bruce in the blanket did things for me, emotionally speaking.)

Unfortunately, though they're tagged in more than 300 fics on AO3, they're almost always a background pairing in someone else's story. So I made it my mission to look through every fic and find the ones that were really about Bruce/Natasha and find the best ones. Ta da~

( 14 Bruce/Natasha fics )