Writing and fandom round-up for 2012
2012 was an interesting one. This time last year I was extremely disappointed to have only written 48,675 words of fic in 2011, although that was based on stuff posted rather than stuff written, of which there was considerably more. So, was 2012 any better?
This year is the first year that I’ve actually kept a spreadsheet documenting my daily word count for the whole year. So, here we go with some figures:
Primeval fic written (inc drabbles): 46,549 (posted 43,589)
Primeval meta written: 71,745 (posted 55,646)
Merlin fic written: 1723 (posted 1700)
Original fiction written: 2352
Total words written for the year: 122,369
Woohoo! Okay, the fic total isn’t actually that different to last year’s fic total, but what’s made the difference this year is obviously all that meta (Abby - 59,178, Connor - 7383, Becker - 5184). I’m going to try to have a push to get back into those and finish them this year, because I was enjoying the Abby one far more than I expected, and only broke off because it was interrupted by the July fest. I had been intending to return to it in August, but the less said about the August the better, really (see below). BTW, the rather large discrepancy between the total written and the total posted is because I apparently have all of series 4 of the Abby meta written, I just never got round to editing/posting them. Oops! I want to finish the Connor meta because it’s something I had wanted to do for ages. I’m a little annoyed I didn’t get more of it done in time for July, but with all the other fic and graphics and so on I was doing in July, I wasn’t able to give it as much time as I did for the Abby one in April.
One thing I have noticed about this year’s fic, is that with some notable exceptions, the vast majority of it has been fairly short ficlets, or stuff written for the drabble trees, particularly during the team fests in Jan/April/July. I’ve written very little longer fic this year, and the long fics I have written have nearly all been for the fests, or gift fics for birthdays or the secret santa. The longest fic of the year was Void (10,020), second longest was the secret santa, Not Quite According to Plan (5385). I’m not sure what that says about my writing this year, apart from that I spent several months from April to July pouring most of my effort into meta, and that I apparently had a much shorter attention span for fic for a lot of the year. I’m going to blame this on work stress and related health issues, I think!
I had been aiming for about 10,000 a month as a vague target, but in the end I only made or exceeded that target in four months of the year. A couple of times I got quite close with 8 or 9k, although there were also a couple of months where I didn’t even make it to 1k! Best word count month was April (37,519, most of it Abby meta). Worst month was August (200, just two P100 drabbles in the whole month). I think August was a combination of burnout from the July team fest (which I won! Woohoo! *happy dance*), and health stuff, but I don’t know.
I’m quite pleased with myself for writing a drabble for all but two of cordeliadelayne’s primeval100 prompts this year. The two that I missed were April Leonard, and the Christmas tree picture prompt from a few weeks ago. It has to be said, in the bad writing months, particularly in the latter half of the year, forcing myself to write *something* for the P100s every fortnight has at least kept the word count ticking over.
For the last two or three years I’ve been saying I was going to write Merlin fic, and this year I finally have. Three weeks before the series ended for good *headdesk*. Since when has a series ending stopped us from writing fic, eh?
I’ve also started writing original fiction again, including two short stories for Writers’ Club competitions, and *gasp* a couple of poems, again for Writers’ Club. The fact that I placed second in the Summer Prose competition was a massive morale boost, and I’ve decided I’m going to try to enter at least one story for all of this year’s prose competitions.
2012 was also the year that I finally took the plunge and started playing with GIMP. And thus lost many, many hours of my life. I have to admit I started with it mostly so that I could enter the July fest header competition, but since then I’ve had a huge amount of fun making icons and graphics and wallpapers, and entering the monthly icon competitions. It’s also been surprisingly good for morale, because in the really bad writing months in the latter half of the year, if I was making graphics then at least I was still doing *something* creative, so I didn’t get quite so upset or angry about it as I might have in previous years. I’m thinking for this year of doing a ‘graphic a month’ thing, where every month I make icons or a wallpaper or an e-book cover or something for no other reason than because I want to (this is in addition to entering the icons comps, and any graphics I might do for gifts or challenges, etc).
So, bit of an up and down year, but I’m feeling pretty positive about it. No real writing resolutions for 2013, I’m just going to see how it goes.
Happy new year, everyone!