2010 writing round up and word count
It's that time of year again, I'm not doing the meme that various people have done, but just generally rambling.
So, word count for 2010. I honestly didn't know what it would be, although I was rather hopeful that I would have beaten last year's 80,750. Well, the answer is yes, I've most definitely beaten that total, because this year's fic word count is 115,860! I got over 100,000 word for the first time since I started writing Primeval fanfic! *does extremely happy happy dance around the room*.
Of that total, 25,307 was two episodes of VS4. There was a general lack of drabbling this year, mainly due to me becoming a co-mod on primeval100, so only ten drabbles in 2010.
My standalone fic in general seems to have gone to the extremes of either very short ficlets, or else hugely long epic things. Longest individual fic was Fear, at 8000. Second longest was A Very Strange Night at 6650. A Very Strange Night was also my very first attempt to write threesome smut, and despite being quite worried by this prospect, I think it went okay. 2010 also saw another first with me writing fics that featured het sex scenes (eek!). I still maintain that writing sex scenes is bloody difficult, no matter how much practice I get at it, and in the A/C fic One Moment In Time I swear it took about twice as long to write the sex scene as it took to write the entire rest of the fic put together! (although it was my first real attempt at writing fully described het sex rather than glossed over fade to black).
Undoubtedly, though, my biggest achievement of the year has to have been the Big Bang fic, Hero. The final word count for that was 44,591, so it accounted for a large part of my total word count, and also accounted for about five months worth of writing time in the second half of the year, which is why my output of random short fics declined drastically from July onwards. Admittedly there was a lot of fic angst along the way (which telperion_15 will attest to), and there were a couple of points in the middle when I almost gave up on it, especially after I realised it had gone completely wrong and I had to ditch about 3000 words and go back and take it in a different direction. However, the November writing threads at primeval_denial came at just the right time, and gave me the motivation and support to have one final push and get the thing finished at last. Despite the problems along the way, I'm actually quite pleased with how it turned out, and it realised a lot of writing aims that I'd wanted to play with for a very long time, particularly the relationship between Connor and Cutter in a non-slashy sense.
Aims for 2011? Beating this year's word count would be nice, but I'm not sure it will happen. I'm hoping for many new bunnies with the new series of Primeval, we'll see what happens. I may also dip my toe in another fandom and try my hand at writing Merlin fic, as I keep having persistent little bunnies for Merlin and Arthur related angst and adventure. And really, that show is just too full of pretty men and slash that you can see from orbit, and I want to play with the pretty!
Happy new Year everyone. Not long to go now until Primeval. Squee!