2014--Fic Year in Review
Stories I wrote and posted in 2014:
JANUARY
The Hawk Who Would Not Be Broken. A Song of Ice and Fire - George R.R. Martin. None of the men in Lyanna's life understand her--not even Rhaegar. 217 words.
FEBRUARY
Sweets. The Belgariad/Mallorean series - David & Leigh Eddings. Garion thinks that bribing Zubrette with sweet things is a good way to get her to kiss him. Zubrette wishes he wouldn't. 628 words.
Message to a Lost King. A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin. After the Siege of Dragonstone, Loras Tyrell mentally composes a letter to Renly Baratheon. 502 words. Written for the Tourney of the Hand on LJ.
MARCH
Of Wood Wits, Bisimbi Bi Masa and Speculating Frogs. Ginen Universe - Nnedi Okorafor. “One [of the Great Explorers] came out of the jungle with strange green birds nesting in her hair and some even stranger disease that made her skin grow fish scales[.] But she also wrote three books about what she saw[.]” 6,660 words. Written for Sanguinity for Invisible Ficathon.
Five Scenes That I Wish The Pirate Fritton Had Included In Queen Lear. St. Trinian's 2: The Legend of Fritton's Gold (2009). Exactly what it says on the tin. 4,599 words. Written for Fenellaevangela for Invisible Ficathon.
APRIL
The Best Feather of Our Wing. Richard II - Shakespeare; 14th Century CE RPF. Of all the strange things that Anne of Bohemia has had to adjust to in becoming Queen of England, the oddest is the fact that her husband-like all nobles of Angevin birth-has wings. 909 words. Written for Angevin2 and Trope Bingo Round 3.
MAY
Sunshadow. A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin. How Melisandre went from an impoverished child of the North to a slave to a red priestess. 17,824 words. Written for Redcandle17 in Rare Women Fanfic Exchange (2014).
Turbulence (The Storm Warning Remix). Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis; Doctor Who (2005). Before her descendent Jadis was brought to Narnia, before she herself came to Charn, Lilith was a Carrionite, and her people had been banished by the Eternals to the Deep Darkness. 3,460 words. Written for Elizabeth Culmer (edenfalling) in Remix Madness 2014.
The Language of Deception. Game of Thrones (TV). How Petyr Baelish might have explained his wife's death to other lords in the Vale without a character excised from the show to act as his scapegoat. 1,032 words. Written for Continent-of-wild-endeavor on Tumblr.com.
JUNE
Dagon's Bargain. Crossover of Hamlet - Shakespeare and Cthulhu Mythos - H.P. Lovecraft. "I shall never be able to explain to my nephew that I killed my brother because I loved him." 9,115 words. Written for Skazka for Night on Fic Mountain 2014. (Basically, Yuletide in summer.)
AUGUST
A Heart Cleft With a Sword. A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin. Lady Stoneheart does not remember everything…yet she recalls far too much. 2,201 words. Written for Etoilecourageuse for GOT_exchange.
A Princess of Mars. Henry VI Part 2 -Shakespeare. Medieval steampunk/solarpunk, featuring Baconesque arcane computers, Richard II's clockwork doubles (called brassheads), a legend from the Middle Ages, Martian royalty, a trip to outer space, intersectionality, racebending, conspiracies, and populist magic which may or may not be real. Also: a cameo by an unintentional zombie. Part II of the Gimmors and Devices series. 21, 301 words. Written for La Reine Noire (lareinenoire) for Shakespeare's Histories Annual Ficathon and Lovefest VII (2014).
DECEMBER
The Sister of the Stranger. A Song of Ice and Fire - George R.R. Martin. Not long after he had been castrated, the boy who was not yet known as Varys began hearing about a baseborn dragonrider. 5,005 words. Written for La Reine Noire (lareinenoire) for GOT Exchange.
Come the Good Peasant to Cheer. 14th Century CE England RPF. AU. Edward the Black Prince--now Edward IV of England--has been king for four years. Now the peasants have rebelled, the Black Prince wants to declare war on them all, and his stubborn, determined queen, Joan of Kent, is desperately trying to prevent utter disaster. 13,323 words. Written for Angevin2 for Yuletide.
A Haven of Iron. Tam Lin (Traditional Ballad). After being kidnapped as a child and raised by fairies, Tam Lin has a difficult time adjusting to life among humans once more. 4,938 words. Written for Angelan for Yuletide.
***
I've omitted the questions about the sexiest story and the sexiest scene written this year. As all of the stories written were gen, even the few that involved pairings, I don't think that the word "sexy" really applies to any of them.
My best story of this year: I think that Dagon's Bargain was best, as that one actually got a review in an online magazine.
Most fun story to write: A Princess of Mars. The sequel to an earlier story, Gimmors and Devices, it gave me the chance to expand my medieval steampunk universe (this time adding in Sino-Indian settlements on Mars (no, not colonies; Mars is an independent planet with its own nations), to add some pulp science fiction elements to it, and to introduce some characters of color. I really, really enjoyed making Margaret of Anjou a badass botanist from Mars, a woman of color, and a POV character, as well as introducing two female characters for an upcoming spin-off, Pilot Malakar and Pilot Chen.
My favorite story of this year: A Princess of Mars, for the above mentioned reasons.
Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters: A Heart Cleft With a Sword. I never wrote from the POV of Catelyn Stark, a zombie, or Zombie!Catelyn before, and seeing things from her point of view made me realize that I hadn't even considered a substantial part of the tragedy that had happened to her.
Hardest story to write: Sunshadow. The story was written before A World of Ice and Fire was published…like, six months before. So there was very little information available in print or online for me to rely on when I was writing about the time of the Long Night, Skagos, Asshai, etc. That terrified me.
Biggest Disappointment: Of Wood Wits, Bisimbi Bi Masa, and Speculating Frogs. This focuses on a character mentioned in one line in Zahrah the Windseeker. This was one of my more risky stories, as Zahrah is, like all of Nnedi Okorafor's Ginen Universe tales, based on the folklore and legends from the region of West Africa. There is VERY little available online; mythology and folktale websites are ridiculously Eurocentric to the point where they exclude practically all stories from almost every other region. You can find the odd story by one of many Native American peoples; you can find specialized websites of Chinese, Japanese or Indian folktales. You can even find Central and South American ones. But Africa and Australia are excluded to a painful degree. Complicating matters is the fact that very few websites even mention what country or tribe a story or creature comes from. "Africa" is treated as if it's a country, and a rather small one, not a continent.
In the process of doing my research, I discovered that Ghana, which is one of the best known nations in West Africa, has laws against taking folklore out of their country... and this includes the internet. Ghanians regard their legends and stories as part of their heritage and, therefore, national treasures.
I also needed to look at photographs of West African forests and jungles so that I would know what unique but non-mystical plants and animals my lead character would see in the Forbidden Greeny Jungle.
And, just to make things more difficult, I was writing from the point of view of a black lesbian explorer about herself and two other explorers, one of whom was her lover and friend. The other of whom was another friend who happened to be genderqueer.
The explorer was telling the story in first person, a tense that I rarely use outside of Dresden Files stories, and in epistolary style through the medium of her journal, which was dotted with footnotes about her discoveries and observations of new species. Okorafor's explorers use the pattern of Linneaen taxonomy -genus and species-but, logically, in African languages rather than in Latin. (I've found words that were Ibo and Yoruba, for example.)
Add in HTML that allows the reader to jump from the main body of the text to the footnotes about those discoveries to the text once more.
Though I wasn't writing in as much of a vacuum here as I was with Sunshadow, Frogs was definitely the story that needed the hardest research. While I was writing it, I was terrified that I was going to offend someone. It didn't seem to, but it didn't seem to interest many people, either. That saddened me.
Biggest Surprise: Dagon's Surprise-or rather, being asked by the reviewer (a few months after the story had been posted) if she could review it. I think that they might have heard me squee on Jupiter.
Most Unintentionally Telling Story: Come the Good Peasant to Cheer. Read between the lines, and it becomes clear that this was written during a year when many of the poor and oppressed were fed up with cruel and unequal treatment and many of those with power were focusing on fighting an undeclared war against the protesters. This is my fantasy, I guess-someone in power deciding that force is NOT the answer and that listening to the leaders of the protests is far, far more important.
Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you'd predicted? I never know how much I'm going to write, but, as I discovered when I started adding up word counts, I wrote more than twice as much as I thought I had.
What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January 2014?: St. Trinian's 2: The Legend of Fritton's Gold (2009). I never even heard of that one before 2014.
Did you take any writing risks in 2014? Yes. I wrote more characters of color (Of Wood Wits, Bisimbi Bi Masa, and Speculating Frogs, Sunshadow, and A Princess of Mars), a genderqueer character (also Frogs), and an explicitly trans character (Five Scenes That I Wish The Pirate Fritton Had Included In Queen Lear). I'm trying to write more diversely, because, well, to quote Tumblr, representation matters.
Do you have any fanfic or profic goals for the New Year? I'd like to work on Gimmors-verse (which now consists of two longfics) and turn it into a published novel or two. It needs some extensive worldbuilding (because I am not interested in it becoming McEurope) as well as expansion of a lot of events that I know have happened but that I haven't written down. I'd also like to start writing the spin-off with Malakar and Chen. And I want to do well on my Smallfandombang story.
I'd like to thank the academy… Thanks go to angevin2 and lareinenoire, my very patient betas who come up with wonderful suggestions in their edits. They are an enormous help. I've learned a ton about writing from both of them.
JANUARY
The Hawk Who Would Not Be Broken. A Song of Ice and Fire - George R.R. Martin. None of the men in Lyanna's life understand her--not even Rhaegar. 217 words.
FEBRUARY
Sweets. The Belgariad/Mallorean series - David & Leigh Eddings. Garion thinks that bribing Zubrette with sweet things is a good way to get her to kiss him. Zubrette wishes he wouldn't. 628 words.
Message to a Lost King. A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin. After the Siege of Dragonstone, Loras Tyrell mentally composes a letter to Renly Baratheon. 502 words. Written for the Tourney of the Hand on LJ.
MARCH
Of Wood Wits, Bisimbi Bi Masa and Speculating Frogs. Ginen Universe - Nnedi Okorafor. “One [of the Great Explorers] came out of the jungle with strange green birds nesting in her hair and some even stranger disease that made her skin grow fish scales[.] But she also wrote three books about what she saw[.]” 6,660 words. Written for Sanguinity for Invisible Ficathon.
Five Scenes That I Wish The Pirate Fritton Had Included In Queen Lear. St. Trinian's 2: The Legend of Fritton's Gold (2009). Exactly what it says on the tin. 4,599 words. Written for Fenellaevangela for Invisible Ficathon.
APRIL
The Best Feather of Our Wing. Richard II - Shakespeare; 14th Century CE RPF. Of all the strange things that Anne of Bohemia has had to adjust to in becoming Queen of England, the oddest is the fact that her husband-like all nobles of Angevin birth-has wings. 909 words. Written for Angevin2 and Trope Bingo Round 3.
MAY
Sunshadow. A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin. How Melisandre went from an impoverished child of the North to a slave to a red priestess. 17,824 words. Written for Redcandle17 in Rare Women Fanfic Exchange (2014).
Turbulence (The Storm Warning Remix). Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis; Doctor Who (2005). Before her descendent Jadis was brought to Narnia, before she herself came to Charn, Lilith was a Carrionite, and her people had been banished by the Eternals to the Deep Darkness. 3,460 words. Written for Elizabeth Culmer (edenfalling) in Remix Madness 2014.
The Language of Deception. Game of Thrones (TV). How Petyr Baelish might have explained his wife's death to other lords in the Vale without a character excised from the show to act as his scapegoat. 1,032 words. Written for Continent-of-wild-endeavor on Tumblr.com.
JUNE
Dagon's Bargain. Crossover of Hamlet - Shakespeare and Cthulhu Mythos - H.P. Lovecraft. "I shall never be able to explain to my nephew that I killed my brother because I loved him." 9,115 words. Written for Skazka for Night on Fic Mountain 2014. (Basically, Yuletide in summer.)
AUGUST
A Heart Cleft With a Sword. A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin. Lady Stoneheart does not remember everything…yet she recalls far too much. 2,201 words. Written for Etoilecourageuse for GOT_exchange.
A Princess of Mars. Henry VI Part 2 -Shakespeare. Medieval steampunk/solarpunk, featuring Baconesque arcane computers, Richard II's clockwork doubles (called brassheads), a legend from the Middle Ages, Martian royalty, a trip to outer space, intersectionality, racebending, conspiracies, and populist magic which may or may not be real. Also: a cameo by an unintentional zombie. Part II of the Gimmors and Devices series. 21, 301 words. Written for La Reine Noire (lareinenoire) for Shakespeare's Histories Annual Ficathon and Lovefest VII (2014).
DECEMBER
The Sister of the Stranger. A Song of Ice and Fire - George R.R. Martin. Not long after he had been castrated, the boy who was not yet known as Varys began hearing about a baseborn dragonrider. 5,005 words. Written for La Reine Noire (lareinenoire) for GOT Exchange.
Come the Good Peasant to Cheer. 14th Century CE England RPF. AU. Edward the Black Prince--now Edward IV of England--has been king for four years. Now the peasants have rebelled, the Black Prince wants to declare war on them all, and his stubborn, determined queen, Joan of Kent, is desperately trying to prevent utter disaster. 13,323 words. Written for Angevin2 for Yuletide.
A Haven of Iron. Tam Lin (Traditional Ballad). After being kidnapped as a child and raised by fairies, Tam Lin has a difficult time adjusting to life among humans once more. 4,938 words. Written for Angelan for Yuletide.
***
I've omitted the questions about the sexiest story and the sexiest scene written this year. As all of the stories written were gen, even the few that involved pairings, I don't think that the word "sexy" really applies to any of them.
My best story of this year: I think that Dagon's Bargain was best, as that one actually got a review in an online magazine.
Most fun story to write: A Princess of Mars. The sequel to an earlier story, Gimmors and Devices, it gave me the chance to expand my medieval steampunk universe (this time adding in Sino-Indian settlements on Mars (no, not colonies; Mars is an independent planet with its own nations), to add some pulp science fiction elements to it, and to introduce some characters of color. I really, really enjoyed making Margaret of Anjou a badass botanist from Mars, a woman of color, and a POV character, as well as introducing two female characters for an upcoming spin-off, Pilot Malakar and Pilot Chen.
My favorite story of this year: A Princess of Mars, for the above mentioned reasons.
Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters: A Heart Cleft With a Sword. I never wrote from the POV of Catelyn Stark, a zombie, or Zombie!Catelyn before, and seeing things from her point of view made me realize that I hadn't even considered a substantial part of the tragedy that had happened to her.
Hardest story to write: Sunshadow. The story was written before A World of Ice and Fire was published…like, six months before. So there was very little information available in print or online for me to rely on when I was writing about the time of the Long Night, Skagos, Asshai, etc. That terrified me.
Biggest Disappointment: Of Wood Wits, Bisimbi Bi Masa, and Speculating Frogs. This focuses on a character mentioned in one line in Zahrah the Windseeker. This was one of my more risky stories, as Zahrah is, like all of Nnedi Okorafor's Ginen Universe tales, based on the folklore and legends from the region of West Africa. There is VERY little available online; mythology and folktale websites are ridiculously Eurocentric to the point where they exclude practically all stories from almost every other region. You can find the odd story by one of many Native American peoples; you can find specialized websites of Chinese, Japanese or Indian folktales. You can even find Central and South American ones. But Africa and Australia are excluded to a painful degree. Complicating matters is the fact that very few websites even mention what country or tribe a story or creature comes from. "Africa" is treated as if it's a country, and a rather small one, not a continent.
In the process of doing my research, I discovered that Ghana, which is one of the best known nations in West Africa, has laws against taking folklore out of their country... and this includes the internet. Ghanians regard their legends and stories as part of their heritage and, therefore, national treasures.
I also needed to look at photographs of West African forests and jungles so that I would know what unique but non-mystical plants and animals my lead character would see in the Forbidden Greeny Jungle.
And, just to make things more difficult, I was writing from the point of view of a black lesbian explorer about herself and two other explorers, one of whom was her lover and friend. The other of whom was another friend who happened to be genderqueer.
The explorer was telling the story in first person, a tense that I rarely use outside of Dresden Files stories, and in epistolary style through the medium of her journal, which was dotted with footnotes about her discoveries and observations of new species. Okorafor's explorers use the pattern of Linneaen taxonomy -genus and species-but, logically, in African languages rather than in Latin. (I've found words that were Ibo and Yoruba, for example.)
Add in HTML that allows the reader to jump from the main body of the text to the footnotes about those discoveries to the text once more.
Though I wasn't writing in as much of a vacuum here as I was with Sunshadow, Frogs was definitely the story that needed the hardest research. While I was writing it, I was terrified that I was going to offend someone. It didn't seem to, but it didn't seem to interest many people, either. That saddened me.
Biggest Surprise: Dagon's Surprise-or rather, being asked by the reviewer (a few months after the story had been posted) if she could review it. I think that they might have heard me squee on Jupiter.
Most Unintentionally Telling Story: Come the Good Peasant to Cheer. Read between the lines, and it becomes clear that this was written during a year when many of the poor and oppressed were fed up with cruel and unequal treatment and many of those with power were focusing on fighting an undeclared war against the protesters. This is my fantasy, I guess-someone in power deciding that force is NOT the answer and that listening to the leaders of the protests is far, far more important.
Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you'd predicted? I never know how much I'm going to write, but, as I discovered when I started adding up word counts, I wrote more than twice as much as I thought I had.
What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January 2014?: St. Trinian's 2: The Legend of Fritton's Gold (2009). I never even heard of that one before 2014.
Did you take any writing risks in 2014? Yes. I wrote more characters of color (Of Wood Wits, Bisimbi Bi Masa, and Speculating Frogs, Sunshadow, and A Princess of Mars), a genderqueer character (also Frogs), and an explicitly trans character (Five Scenes That I Wish The Pirate Fritton Had Included In Queen Lear). I'm trying to write more diversely, because, well, to quote Tumblr, representation matters.
Do you have any fanfic or profic goals for the New Year? I'd like to work on Gimmors-verse (which now consists of two longfics) and turn it into a published novel or two. It needs some extensive worldbuilding (because I am not interested in it becoming McEurope) as well as expansion of a lot of events that I know have happened but that I haven't written down. I'd also like to start writing the spin-off with Malakar and Chen. And I want to do well on my Smallfandombang story.
I'd like to thank the academy… Thanks go to angevin2 and lareinenoire, my very patient betas who come up with wonderful suggestions in their edits. They are an enormous help. I've learned a ton about writing from both of them.