And Now, The Year-End Fic Roundup Meme
All righty, now that all the Yuletide fics are non-anonymous and claimable, it's time to actually do this thing. I'm just recycling the same one I did last year.
List of Completed Fic
"The Process, the Expression, and the State" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 502 words, written for Fandomtrees)
"The Patron Demon of Everybody's Embarrassing Youth" (Good Omens, Crowley, 870 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"Defying All Description" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 347 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"On the Verge of All Things New" (Good Omens, Anathema/Newt, 1,969 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"An Angel, a Demon, a Bench, and Some Ducks" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 648 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"Out Here in Front of God and Everybody" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 1,465 words, written for Trope Bingo round 16)
"Sometimes a Snake Is Just a Snake" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 1,465 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"...and round she goes..." (Doctor Who, 13th Doctor, Yaz, Graham, Ryan, the TARDIS, 3,919 words, written for Past Imperfect, Future Unknown and Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"A Distant Harbor, Briefly Glimpsed" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 3,390 words, written for Trope Bingo round 16)
"A Bright Dividing Line" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 1,652 words, written for Trope Bingo round 16)
"The First Last Time" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 890 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"Free as the Birds" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 2,719 words, Trope Bingo round 16)
"The Heart That Keeps Us All Alive" (Umbrella Academy, Ben, 315 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"I Think We're Alone now" (Umbrella Academy, Number Five/Dolores, 100 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"Mightier" (Good Omens, Agnes Nutter, 562 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"The Four Hundredth Anniversary Is Stars" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 1,713 words written for Trope Bingo round 16)
"If at First You Don't Succeed, Steal Somebody Else's Completely Inappropriate Apocalypse" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 324 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"Don't Call It a Comeback" (Good Omens, Pestilence, 100 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"The First of the Poets" (Good Omens, God, Aziraphale/Crowley 621 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"A Watched Pot, Boiling" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowely, 1,704 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"An American Bibliophile in London Reviews: A.Z. Fell & Co." (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, OC, 1,487 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"Just a Few Bonecalls" (Undertale, Sans/Toriel, Papyrus, 2,026 words, written for Unsent Letters and Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"Which Is Harder: Armageddon or the Junior Jumble?" (Undertale, Sans & Papyrus, 246 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"A Question of Interior Design" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 1,551 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"Pride, No Fall" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 497 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"Only as Old as the World" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 600 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"Stupid Cute Tragic Dead Kid" (Umbrella Academy/Undertale, Klaus, Asriel, 4,031 words, written for A Ficathon Goes Into a bar and Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"Perennial" (Undertale, Flowey, 100 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"Undone" (Undertale, Undyne/Alphys, 1,973 words, written for Summertime Sadness)
"Fail Until You're Good Enough at It That It Starts to Look Like Hope" (Disco Elysium, Harry/Kim, 1,950 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 20)
"A Time You May Embrace" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, Gabriel, Beelzebub, 24,351 words, written for Just Married)
"Detective, Interrogate Thyself" (Disco Elysium, Harry/Kim, 378 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 20)
"Self-Acceptance (The Hey, That's One Way to Address an Identity Crisis Remix)" (Doctor Who, Thirteenth Doctor/Fourth Doctor, 3,484 words, written for Remix Redux)
"Funerals Are for the Living" (Disco Elysium, Jean & Harry, 473 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 20)
"Paper and Wind and Streets and Skin" (Disco Elysium, Harry, Kim, Revachol, 100 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 20)
"Borrow My Authority When Your Volition Fails" (Disco Elysium, Harry, Kim, 1,012 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 20)
"In Common" (Doctor Who, Third Doctor/Delgado!Master, 3,854 words, written for Multifandom Tropefest)
"Unexpected Shelters" (Disco Elysium, Harry/Kim, 3,879 words, written for Multifandom Tropefest)
"One More Thing Chewing on Your Heart" (Disco Elysium, Harry, 1,075 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 21)
"Something Scarred, and Strangely Dressed, and Yours" (Disco Elysium, Harry/Kim, 1,183 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 21)
"Groundhog Day Rules" (The Good Place, Michael, Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, Jason, Janet, 3,293 words, written for Yuletide)
"The Cracks Are Where the Air Comes Through" (Disco Elysium, Harry/Kim/Revacholl, 488 words, written for Yuletide Madness and Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
Interesting how you can kind of track my Year in Fannishness from that list. It starts out with my continued outpouring of Good Omens fics, which I seem to have finally worked out of my system at least somewhat, possibly in the course of writing that 24k Just Married fic. (Or maybe my brain is just waiting now for S2 to give it some more to work with. ) We then get some smatterings of Umbrella Academy, although, honestly, that's not a show I see myself writing a lot of fic for, no matter how much I enjoy it. Apparently it's at leat good for a couple of (not very exciting) bingo ficlets and an Into a Bar crossover, though. Then, somewhere in there, there's a nostalgic Undertale revival that lasts for a little while, until my new Disco Elysium obsession suddenly kicks in. And, of course, there are also a few Doctor Who fics scattered across the year, Doctor Who being, as I believe someone once described it, my "forever fandom."
Stats
Total number: 42. Which is one more than last year! And last year, I added a whole bunch of exclamation points after that total, too. Well, I guess this is what happens when nobody talks me out of doing blackout bingos, two years in a row.
Total word count: 81,824. I find it really interesting to look over the word counts for stuff this year. So many of them are short, even by my standards. Indeed, there's only one over 4,000 words, and that only barely... Except, of course, for that 24k behemoth which is now officially the longest thing I've ever written. Even with that one, though, the average word count this year is less than last year's, when the total was over 89k -- a number that still astonishes me.
Ship/character breakdown:
Ships:
Aziraphale/Crowley: 18 (although the shippiness in those ranges from extremely explicit to extremely vague)
Harry/Kim: 6 (Including some some vaguely UST-y stuff, plus that one that I've somewhat fancifully -- but not, I think inaccurately -- labeled as Harry/Kim/Revachol. Look, they both love that city, and it is canonically mutual, at least for Harry!)
Anathema/Newt: 1
Number Five/Dolores: 1 (Yes, that does totally count!)
Sans/Toriel: 1
Alphys/Undyne: 1
Doctor/Master: 1
Doctor/Doctor: 1 (Yes, that also counts.)
Well, the detectives clearly still have a way to go if they want to give the angel and the demon a run for their money, shipwise.
There are also some other minor or ambiguous or vague or backgrounded pairings in there, too, probably: the Doctor/TARDIS elements in "...and round she goes...", Eleanor kissing almost everybody in "Groundhog Day Rules," a bit of Ben/Jill pining in one of the Umbrella Academy ficlets. I was going to say "and maybe some other stuff I'm forgetting," but I think that does actually cover everything.
Characters:
Aziraphale: 16
Crowley: 16
Harry Du Bois: 7
Kim Kitsuragi: 5
The Doctor: 4 Or 5, if you count being in the same same story twice as two appearances.
Sans: 2
And one each for: God, Agnes Nutter, Newt, Anathema, Pestilence, Gabriel, Beelzebub, Yaz, Graham, Ryan, The Master, the Doctor's TARDIS, Ben Hargreeves, Klaus Hargreeves, Number Five, Toriel, Flowey, Undyne, Alphys, Papyrus, Asriel, Jean Vicquemare, the City of Revachol, Michael, Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, Jason, Janet, and some unnamed OC.
Although, honestly, those totals are all extremely fuzzy, as there are a lot of cases where I genuinely can't say whether I think a particular character is present enough in the story to count or not. Especially as I seem to write a lot of fics that boil down to "Character A spends the entire fic thinking about Character B, who might then appear for two seconds at the end or something."
Specifics:
Best/worst title?
I think the best title might be "A Time You May Embrace," just because it seems so completely perfect for that story. It's nice and simple, but it does, I think, work on a couple of different levels, and I think there should be bonus points if you use a Bible quote in the title of a Good Omens story.
I don't know if it's the worst, but "The Heart That Keeps Us All Alive" irritates me a lot, and I don't even know why. I think it may just be that it's one of those titles I way overthought, and that's even less excusable for a story that short. I also think anyone who uses "I Think We're Alone Now" for an Umbrella Academy fic deserves all the eye-rolls in the world, but, hey, at least I didn't overthink that one. I'd say apparently I just can't title UA stories, but "Stupid Cute Tragic Dead Kid" isn't actually too awful.
Best /worst summary?
Hmm. There are a lot of very short, not super informative summaries this year, mostly because there are a lot of very short fics, and it's always seemed weird to me to write a big, informative summary for a fic that's only, like, 300 words long. You might as well just read the thing, really. So there are a lot that are just very small suggestive little sentences meant to give you a general idea of the tone or something. Which aren't bad, I don't think, but I can hardly call them good, either.
But never mind those. Let's see... Well, for best, I rather like the one for "...and round she goes...": "That little spark from the wiring was probably fine. That seasick feeling is probably fine. The way time keeps repeating itself is... Oh. Wait. That might actually not be fine."
Worst? Well, I don't know about "worst," but I do worry a bit about the one for "A Watched Pot, Boiling": "Aziraphale loves humanity, that's all. He's interested in everything they do, even the more... intimate things. The fact that the being he's interested in doing them with isn't human is just an inconvenient but unavoidable side-effect." Because the whole point there is that Aziraphale tells himself that, but it's not exactly true, and it does occur to me to wonder if that unreliable-narrator irony comes through there for every potential reader, or if a summary is even quite the place for that.
Otherwise... I don't know, I'm not fond of the one for "In Common": "The Doctor walks into a psychic trap set for the Master. And now they can both sense everything the other one thinks and feels about the situation." It certainly tells you what the story is about, but it doesn't really do it with any style.
Best first line?
Annoyingly there aren't any that really leap out at me as being particularly good. If I have to choose, I guess I might go with the one from "Undone": "It's very early still, but when the day's first rays of sunlight slip in through the open window and hit Undyne in the face like a friendly punch, she's instantly up on her feet, friendly-punching it back." Just because, well, that's very, very Undyne. I also like the fact that, if you know the canon and are paying attention, it immediately tells you where in the game's many possible timelines we are: sometime after the good ending. Which, for that particular fic, is a good thing to understand from sentence one, I think.
Best last line?
There are more here to choose from than in the case of the first lines, and I'd actually have a hard time deciding on one, if it weren't for that one little drabble, "Don't Call It a Comeback," with "Muttering under his breath, Pestilence prepares to show them all." Because... yeah.
General questions:
Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less than you thought, or about what you predicted?
More! I was genuinely astonished by how much I wrote last year, and this year I wrote even more than that, by number of stories if not by word count. Even if only just.
What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted last year?
Well, there's a lot of answers to that. I hadn't started watching Umbrella Academy last year, so I wouldn't have expected to write even the tiny things for that that I did. And I didn't really expect to go back to Undertale again, certainly not to that extent.
But the big one, really, is Disco Elysium. I'm pretty sure I hadn't even heard of that game last year. And it's funny. I remember, not all that many years ago, feeling sort of befuddled by the question of how people could write fic for video games at all, when the story itself can vary from playthrough to playthrough. Then I started writing Undertale, and it made a bit more sense to me, but that's mostly just because, well, you can play that game and watch a few Let's Plays, and browse through the fan wiki, and actually get quite a thorough handle on everything in the game. There are multiple endings, but not that many, and most of them are just variations on each other. And it's entirely possible to see all the dialog in the game, one way or another, without too much difficulty.
But DE is different. So, so, so different. Play with a skill leveled slightly higher or lower, or get a different dice roll on a skill check, or do things in a different order, or say or don't say a particular line of dialog somewhere along the line, and you might learn something entirely new about the world or the main character or the people he meets than you would otherwise. Even with the searchable database of game dialog someone helpfully put together, there's still no way one I'm ever, ever going to see everything there is to see. It's sort of requiring me to get over the feeling I've long had that it's not OK to write fic for something unless you know everything there is to know about the canon, but it feels like maybe it's OK, because everyone else is in more or less the same boat, too. Mind you, there's still the fact that, depending on how you play, the main character can turn out very differently. Honestly, I still don't know how anyone writes fic for this sort of thing, but here I am doing it, anyway.
What's your favourite story this year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you the happiest.
I'm ridiculously fond of "Unexpected Shelters" for some reason. (It was also surprisingly popular, too, given the size of that particular fandom.) If nothing else, it's the story that made me realize that I'm not irredeemably meh about the "And There Was Only One Bed!" trope. Turns out I just needed the right pairing in the right circumstances to properly appreciate it.
Okay, NOW your most popular story.
By kudos, it's "An American Bibliophile in London Reviews: A.Z. Fell & Co." Which seems a bit odd to me, but then, I have seen it recced a place or two, and it got included in someone's collection of outsider POV fic, too. Actually, every time I've written Good Omens fic from an OC's POV, it's become way more popular than I expected it to. Apparently this is something Good Omens fandom wants!
Story most underappreciated by the universe?
I'm gonna say "Undone." I really like it, but it comes in fourth from the bottom on the sorted-by-kudos list for the year, ahead of two tiny ficlets even I don't much care about and the embarrassing explicit porn, which always gets a skewed hits-to-kudos ration on account of being embarrassing.
It's not surprising, though. Sad endings are not especially popular, and the tastes of Undertale fandom in general are... not something I exactly understand.
Story that could have been better?
I mean, probably all of them, in one way or another. I'm not sure I'm capable of pure and flawless perfection. I will say that I keep feeling like I've fallen down somehow with "Groundhog Day Rules," without knowing quite how, but I suspect that may have less to do with the story itself and more to do a fear that (deliberately or otherwise) I've recycled a bit too much from the canon, and with my worry that what I was capable of writing and what I vaguely suspect my recipient actually wanted just weren't quite the same thing. Which is probably ridiculous, anyway, as they left me a very nice and seemingly sincere comment on it, and quite a few other people seem to have liked it, too.
Sexiest story?
Well, yes, that would have to be "Self-Acceptance." It is to blush.
Saddest story?
"Undone." Which was, after all, written for Summertime Sadness, the whole point of which was sad fic and unhappy endings.
Most fun?
Maybe "Sometimes a Snake Is Just a Snake?" Humorous Aziraphale/Crowley bantering is never not fun.
Story with single sweetest moment?
Hmm, there are a lot of sweet moments scattered through these, I think. "A Time You May Embrace" in particular has several of them, but my favorite, I think, isn't any of the more obvious scenes, but rather the bit where, as they're going upstairs to have their wedding night, Crowley quickly works a little miracle to keep the cake fresh so Aziraphale won't be disappointed to find it stale later. It's just so perfectly, adorably them. At least, I think it is, anyway. So I'm going to go with that one.
Hardest story to write?
Also "A TIme You May Embrace." There was so much of it! And I had to put so much thought into making all of it work.
Easiest/most fun story to write?
It may have been the hardest, but "A TIme You May Embrace" was also fun. There was a scene or two in there that I was definitely chuckling at even as I was writing.
Easiest? Well, some of the tinier ficlets were pretty low-effort, I fear, but that is perhaps not quite the same thing. In one sense, "Unexpected Shelters" may qualify as easiest, as once I got started with it, it just happened sort of effortlessly and very quickly. (An excellent thing in a pinch hit!) Except then I kept constantly coming back to it, over and over, right up until the exchange reveals, tweaking things and changing little details and then changing them back. So that part was less easy.
Most overdue story?
Not overdue, since there's no actual deadline, but I was very late in getting to work on stuff for round 20 of Gen Prompt Bingo, almost entirely because it took me forever to finish the silly blackout bingo for round 19.
Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?
I suppose "An Angel, a Demon, a Bench, and Some Ducks" was a writing risk, with its bizarre formatting. And from that I learned how to mess with style sheets on AO3. Which I then promptly forgot again, unfortunately.
This year's theme and the story that demonstrates it most:
It feels like there's probably some sort of interesting theme to be discerned in there somewhere, but damned if I know what it is. I suppose a lot of them could be said to be about love, of some kind or another, but that seems pretty vague and generic, really.
What are your fic writing goals for next year?
To finish my current Gen Prompt Bingo line. I've got two squares left, and an interesting possible idea for what to do with one of them. I'm also definitely going to snag a Trope Bingo card for their next round. I think their prompts often generate more interesting stories for me than Gen Prompt's do. I'm also going to keep doing exchanges. I see Chocolate Box is open for signups now, and their tagset does have a lot of stuff I'm interested in. I considered doing it last year, but kind of gave up in disgust when I couldn't even find where their rules were posted. I'm still annoyed by the fact that they're nowhere to be found on the comm. It's extremely unfriendly to new participants, to put it mildly. But since I've finally been able to figure out basic things like the minimum word count now, I may sign up this year, anyway.
No more blackout bingos, though! Never, ever ever! Hold me to that, people.
This entry was originally posted at https://astrogirl.dreamwidth.org/1021525.html. Comment here or there, whichever you like.
List of Completed Fic
"The Process, the Expression, and the State" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 502 words, written for Fandomtrees)
"The Patron Demon of Everybody's Embarrassing Youth" (Good Omens, Crowley, 870 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"Defying All Description" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 347 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"On the Verge of All Things New" (Good Omens, Anathema/Newt, 1,969 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"An Angel, a Demon, a Bench, and Some Ducks" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 648 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"Out Here in Front of God and Everybody" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 1,465 words, written for Trope Bingo round 16)
"Sometimes a Snake Is Just a Snake" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 1,465 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"...and round she goes..." (Doctor Who, 13th Doctor, Yaz, Graham, Ryan, the TARDIS, 3,919 words, written for Past Imperfect, Future Unknown and Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"A Distant Harbor, Briefly Glimpsed" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 3,390 words, written for Trope Bingo round 16)
"A Bright Dividing Line" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 1,652 words, written for Trope Bingo round 16)
"The First Last Time" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 890 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"Free as the Birds" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 2,719 words, Trope Bingo round 16)
"The Heart That Keeps Us All Alive" (Umbrella Academy, Ben, 315 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"I Think We're Alone now" (Umbrella Academy, Number Five/Dolores, 100 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"Mightier" (Good Omens, Agnes Nutter, 562 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"The Four Hundredth Anniversary Is Stars" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 1,713 words written for Trope Bingo round 16)
"If at First You Don't Succeed, Steal Somebody Else's Completely Inappropriate Apocalypse" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 324 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"Don't Call It a Comeback" (Good Omens, Pestilence, 100 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"The First of the Poets" (Good Omens, God, Aziraphale/Crowley 621 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"A Watched Pot, Boiling" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowely, 1,704 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"An American Bibliophile in London Reviews: A.Z. Fell & Co." (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, OC, 1,487 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"Just a Few Bonecalls" (Undertale, Sans/Toriel, Papyrus, 2,026 words, written for Unsent Letters and Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"Which Is Harder: Armageddon or the Junior Jumble?" (Undertale, Sans & Papyrus, 246 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"A Question of Interior Design" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 1,551 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"Pride, No Fall" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 497 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"Only as Old as the World" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 600 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"Stupid Cute Tragic Dead Kid" (Umbrella Academy/Undertale, Klaus, Asriel, 4,031 words, written for A Ficathon Goes Into a bar and Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"Perennial" (Undertale, Flowey, 100 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
"Undone" (Undertale, Undyne/Alphys, 1,973 words, written for Summertime Sadness)
"Fail Until You're Good Enough at It That It Starts to Look Like Hope" (Disco Elysium, Harry/Kim, 1,950 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 20)
"A Time You May Embrace" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, Gabriel, Beelzebub, 24,351 words, written for Just Married)
"Detective, Interrogate Thyself" (Disco Elysium, Harry/Kim, 378 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 20)
"Self-Acceptance (The Hey, That's One Way to Address an Identity Crisis Remix)" (Doctor Who, Thirteenth Doctor/Fourth Doctor, 3,484 words, written for Remix Redux)
"Funerals Are for the Living" (Disco Elysium, Jean & Harry, 473 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 20)
"Paper and Wind and Streets and Skin" (Disco Elysium, Harry, Kim, Revachol, 100 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 20)
"Borrow My Authority When Your Volition Fails" (Disco Elysium, Harry, Kim, 1,012 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 20)
"In Common" (Doctor Who, Third Doctor/Delgado!Master, 3,854 words, written for Multifandom Tropefest)
"Unexpected Shelters" (Disco Elysium, Harry/Kim, 3,879 words, written for Multifandom Tropefest)
"One More Thing Chewing on Your Heart" (Disco Elysium, Harry, 1,075 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 21)
"Something Scarred, and Strangely Dressed, and Yours" (Disco Elysium, Harry/Kim, 1,183 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 21)
"Groundhog Day Rules" (The Good Place, Michael, Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, Jason, Janet, 3,293 words, written for Yuletide)
"The Cracks Are Where the Air Comes Through" (Disco Elysium, Harry/Kim/Revacholl, 488 words, written for Yuletide Madness and Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)
Interesting how you can kind of track my Year in Fannishness from that list. It starts out with my continued outpouring of Good Omens fics, which I seem to have finally worked out of my system at least somewhat, possibly in the course of writing that 24k Just Married fic. (Or maybe my brain is just waiting now for S2 to give it some more to work with. ) We then get some smatterings of Umbrella Academy, although, honestly, that's not a show I see myself writing a lot of fic for, no matter how much I enjoy it. Apparently it's at leat good for a couple of (not very exciting) bingo ficlets and an Into a Bar crossover, though. Then, somewhere in there, there's a nostalgic Undertale revival that lasts for a little while, until my new Disco Elysium obsession suddenly kicks in. And, of course, there are also a few Doctor Who fics scattered across the year, Doctor Who being, as I believe someone once described it, my "forever fandom."
Stats
Total number: 42. Which is one more than last year! And last year, I added a whole bunch of exclamation points after that total, too. Well, I guess this is what happens when nobody talks me out of doing blackout bingos, two years in a row.
Total word count: 81,824. I find it really interesting to look over the word counts for stuff this year. So many of them are short, even by my standards. Indeed, there's only one over 4,000 words, and that only barely... Except, of course, for that 24k behemoth which is now officially the longest thing I've ever written. Even with that one, though, the average word count this year is less than last year's, when the total was over 89k -- a number that still astonishes me.
Ship/character breakdown:
Ships:
Aziraphale/Crowley: 18 (although the shippiness in those ranges from extremely explicit to extremely vague)
Harry/Kim: 6 (Including some some vaguely UST-y stuff, plus that one that I've somewhat fancifully -- but not, I think inaccurately -- labeled as Harry/Kim/Revachol. Look, they both love that city, and it is canonically mutual, at least for Harry!)
Anathema/Newt: 1
Number Five/Dolores: 1 (Yes, that does totally count!)
Sans/Toriel: 1
Alphys/Undyne: 1
Doctor/Master: 1
Doctor/Doctor: 1 (Yes, that also counts.)
Well, the detectives clearly still have a way to go if they want to give the angel and the demon a run for their money, shipwise.
There are also some other minor or ambiguous or vague or backgrounded pairings in there, too, probably: the Doctor/TARDIS elements in "...and round she goes...", Eleanor kissing almost everybody in "Groundhog Day Rules," a bit of Ben/Jill pining in one of the Umbrella Academy ficlets. I was going to say "and maybe some other stuff I'm forgetting," but I think that does actually cover everything.
Characters:
Aziraphale: 16
Crowley: 16
Harry Du Bois: 7
Kim Kitsuragi: 5
The Doctor: 4 Or 5, if you count being in the same same story twice as two appearances.
Sans: 2
And one each for: God, Agnes Nutter, Newt, Anathema, Pestilence, Gabriel, Beelzebub, Yaz, Graham, Ryan, The Master, the Doctor's TARDIS, Ben Hargreeves, Klaus Hargreeves, Number Five, Toriel, Flowey, Undyne, Alphys, Papyrus, Asriel, Jean Vicquemare, the City of Revachol, Michael, Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, Jason, Janet, and some unnamed OC.
Although, honestly, those totals are all extremely fuzzy, as there are a lot of cases where I genuinely can't say whether I think a particular character is present enough in the story to count or not. Especially as I seem to write a lot of fics that boil down to "Character A spends the entire fic thinking about Character B, who might then appear for two seconds at the end or something."
Specifics:
Best/worst title?
I think the best title might be "A Time You May Embrace," just because it seems so completely perfect for that story. It's nice and simple, but it does, I think, work on a couple of different levels, and I think there should be bonus points if you use a Bible quote in the title of a Good Omens story.
I don't know if it's the worst, but "The Heart That Keeps Us All Alive" irritates me a lot, and I don't even know why. I think it may just be that it's one of those titles I way overthought, and that's even less excusable for a story that short. I also think anyone who uses "I Think We're Alone Now" for an Umbrella Academy fic deserves all the eye-rolls in the world, but, hey, at least I didn't overthink that one. I'd say apparently I just can't title UA stories, but "Stupid Cute Tragic Dead Kid" isn't actually too awful.
Best /worst summary?
Hmm. There are a lot of very short, not super informative summaries this year, mostly because there are a lot of very short fics, and it's always seemed weird to me to write a big, informative summary for a fic that's only, like, 300 words long. You might as well just read the thing, really. So there are a lot that are just very small suggestive little sentences meant to give you a general idea of the tone or something. Which aren't bad, I don't think, but I can hardly call them good, either.
But never mind those. Let's see... Well, for best, I rather like the one for "...and round she goes...": "That little spark from the wiring was probably fine. That seasick feeling is probably fine. The way time keeps repeating itself is... Oh. Wait. That might actually not be fine."
Worst? Well, I don't know about "worst," but I do worry a bit about the one for "A Watched Pot, Boiling": "Aziraphale loves humanity, that's all. He's interested in everything they do, even the more... intimate things. The fact that the being he's interested in doing them with isn't human is just an inconvenient but unavoidable side-effect." Because the whole point there is that Aziraphale tells himself that, but it's not exactly true, and it does occur to me to wonder if that unreliable-narrator irony comes through there for every potential reader, or if a summary is even quite the place for that.
Otherwise... I don't know, I'm not fond of the one for "In Common": "The Doctor walks into a psychic trap set for the Master. And now they can both sense everything the other one thinks and feels about the situation." It certainly tells you what the story is about, but it doesn't really do it with any style.
Best first line?
Annoyingly there aren't any that really leap out at me as being particularly good. If I have to choose, I guess I might go with the one from "Undone": "It's very early still, but when the day's first rays of sunlight slip in through the open window and hit Undyne in the face like a friendly punch, she's instantly up on her feet, friendly-punching it back." Just because, well, that's very, very Undyne. I also like the fact that, if you know the canon and are paying attention, it immediately tells you where in the game's many possible timelines we are: sometime after the good ending. Which, for that particular fic, is a good thing to understand from sentence one, I think.
Best last line?
There are more here to choose from than in the case of the first lines, and I'd actually have a hard time deciding on one, if it weren't for that one little drabble, "Don't Call It a Comeback," with "Muttering under his breath, Pestilence prepares to show them all." Because... yeah.
General questions:
Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less than you thought, or about what you predicted?
More! I was genuinely astonished by how much I wrote last year, and this year I wrote even more than that, by number of stories if not by word count. Even if only just.
What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted last year?
Well, there's a lot of answers to that. I hadn't started watching Umbrella Academy last year, so I wouldn't have expected to write even the tiny things for that that I did. And I didn't really expect to go back to Undertale again, certainly not to that extent.
But the big one, really, is Disco Elysium. I'm pretty sure I hadn't even heard of that game last year. And it's funny. I remember, not all that many years ago, feeling sort of befuddled by the question of how people could write fic for video games at all, when the story itself can vary from playthrough to playthrough. Then I started writing Undertale, and it made a bit more sense to me, but that's mostly just because, well, you can play that game and watch a few Let's Plays, and browse through the fan wiki, and actually get quite a thorough handle on everything in the game. There are multiple endings, but not that many, and most of them are just variations on each other. And it's entirely possible to see all the dialog in the game, one way or another, without too much difficulty.
But DE is different. So, so, so different. Play with a skill leveled slightly higher or lower, or get a different dice roll on a skill check, or do things in a different order, or say or don't say a particular line of dialog somewhere along the line, and you might learn something entirely new about the world or the main character or the people he meets than you would otherwise. Even with the searchable database of game dialog someone helpfully put together, there's still no way one I'm ever, ever going to see everything there is to see. It's sort of requiring me to get over the feeling I've long had that it's not OK to write fic for something unless you know everything there is to know about the canon, but it feels like maybe it's OK, because everyone else is in more or less the same boat, too. Mind you, there's still the fact that, depending on how you play, the main character can turn out very differently. Honestly, I still don't know how anyone writes fic for this sort of thing, but here I am doing it, anyway.
What's your favourite story this year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you the happiest.
I'm ridiculously fond of "Unexpected Shelters" for some reason. (It was also surprisingly popular, too, given the size of that particular fandom.) If nothing else, it's the story that made me realize that I'm not irredeemably meh about the "And There Was Only One Bed!" trope. Turns out I just needed the right pairing in the right circumstances to properly appreciate it.
Okay, NOW your most popular story.
By kudos, it's "An American Bibliophile in London Reviews: A.Z. Fell & Co." Which seems a bit odd to me, but then, I have seen it recced a place or two, and it got included in someone's collection of outsider POV fic, too. Actually, every time I've written Good Omens fic from an OC's POV, it's become way more popular than I expected it to. Apparently this is something Good Omens fandom wants!
Story most underappreciated by the universe?
I'm gonna say "Undone." I really like it, but it comes in fourth from the bottom on the sorted-by-kudos list for the year, ahead of two tiny ficlets even I don't much care about and the embarrassing explicit porn, which always gets a skewed hits-to-kudos ration on account of being embarrassing.
It's not surprising, though. Sad endings are not especially popular, and the tastes of Undertale fandom in general are... not something I exactly understand.
Story that could have been better?
I mean, probably all of them, in one way or another. I'm not sure I'm capable of pure and flawless perfection. I will say that I keep feeling like I've fallen down somehow with "Groundhog Day Rules," without knowing quite how, but I suspect that may have less to do with the story itself and more to do a fear that (deliberately or otherwise) I've recycled a bit too much from the canon, and with my worry that what I was capable of writing and what I vaguely suspect my recipient actually wanted just weren't quite the same thing. Which is probably ridiculous, anyway, as they left me a very nice and seemingly sincere comment on it, and quite a few other people seem to have liked it, too.
Sexiest story?
Well, yes, that would have to be "Self-Acceptance." It is to blush.
Saddest story?
"Undone." Which was, after all, written for Summertime Sadness, the whole point of which was sad fic and unhappy endings.
Most fun?
Maybe "Sometimes a Snake Is Just a Snake?" Humorous Aziraphale/Crowley bantering is never not fun.
Story with single sweetest moment?
Hmm, there are a lot of sweet moments scattered through these, I think. "A Time You May Embrace" in particular has several of them, but my favorite, I think, isn't any of the more obvious scenes, but rather the bit where, as they're going upstairs to have their wedding night, Crowley quickly works a little miracle to keep the cake fresh so Aziraphale won't be disappointed to find it stale later. It's just so perfectly, adorably them. At least, I think it is, anyway. So I'm going to go with that one.
Hardest story to write?
Also "A TIme You May Embrace." There was so much of it! And I had to put so much thought into making all of it work.
Easiest/most fun story to write?
It may have been the hardest, but "A TIme You May Embrace" was also fun. There was a scene or two in there that I was definitely chuckling at even as I was writing.
Easiest? Well, some of the tinier ficlets were pretty low-effort, I fear, but that is perhaps not quite the same thing. In one sense, "Unexpected Shelters" may qualify as easiest, as once I got started with it, it just happened sort of effortlessly and very quickly. (An excellent thing in a pinch hit!) Except then I kept constantly coming back to it, over and over, right up until the exchange reveals, tweaking things and changing little details and then changing them back. So that part was less easy.
Most overdue story?
Not overdue, since there's no actual deadline, but I was very late in getting to work on stuff for round 20 of Gen Prompt Bingo, almost entirely because it took me forever to finish the silly blackout bingo for round 19.
Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?
I suppose "An Angel, a Demon, a Bench, and Some Ducks" was a writing risk, with its bizarre formatting. And from that I learned how to mess with style sheets on AO3. Which I then promptly forgot again, unfortunately.
This year's theme and the story that demonstrates it most:
It feels like there's probably some sort of interesting theme to be discerned in there somewhere, but damned if I know what it is. I suppose a lot of them could be said to be about love, of some kind or another, but that seems pretty vague and generic, really.
What are your fic writing goals for next year?
To finish my current Gen Prompt Bingo line. I've got two squares left, and an interesting possible idea for what to do with one of them. I'm also definitely going to snag a Trope Bingo card for their next round. I think their prompts often generate more interesting stories for me than Gen Prompt's do. I'm also going to keep doing exchanges. I see Chocolate Box is open for signups now, and their tagset does have a lot of stuff I'm interested in. I considered doing it last year, but kind of gave up in disgust when I couldn't even find where their rules were posted. I'm still annoyed by the fact that they're nowhere to be found on the comm. It's extremely unfriendly to new participants, to put it mildly. But since I've finally been able to figure out basic things like the minimum word count now, I may sign up this year, anyway.
No more blackout bingos, though! Never, ever ever! Hold me to that, people.
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