All the other kids were doing it.
Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you'd predicted?
Um, I don't know what I would have predicted as I did have a feeling the university workload was going to kick in, but yeah... productively was way down. A rough count has me in at about 180,000 words of published fic this year, which is not even half of what I wrote in 2002. The final year project and editing my novel really ate the second half of the year, alas. And said project is likely to eat most of the beginning of next year, too.
What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January 2003?
I don't know that I'm that surprised by it, but I guess Hearts and Bones takes the crown for least predictable, being my first (and quite possibly only) Discworld fic. And the subject matter is... bizarre, but that's really nothing new with my brain.
What's your favorite story of the year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you happiest.
I think And the Tide Rushes In is my favourite part of the Further to Fly series so far. Partly because it ties together the Bartlet story arc that was kicked off a good four stories ago, and also because I really like the scenes between Jed and Stanley.
Did you take any writing risks this year? (See above for unexpected pairings, etc.) What did you learn from them?
I don't know that I did, really. Writing West Wing is totally effortless and comfortable at this stage. (And I'm itching to get back to it, some of you will probably be glad to know.) It'd been a while since I visited the HP fandom, but Learning Curve pretty much wrote itself. And although I've technically never written Discworld before, those books were the first "adult books" I ever read way back when I was about seven, and one of my biggest influences when I first started writing novels a few year later. So I'm actually very familiar with the style, and it wasn't much of a leap to write a piece of fic in it.
So, no risks. Egad, I'm happily boring even in my online life. You've got to admire my consistency.
Do you have any fanfic or profic goals for the New Year?
To finish the fic I'm writing now, and get back to FtF 10, stat. In addition to the interruptions of university work, there have been a few false starts, because I've discovered that plotting things out in too much detail is dangerous in fandoms other than the West Wing. I can only assume that's because with TWW fic, the plot is only a small part of the writing process - what counts most is the dialogue, the actual line-by-line writing of it. Whereas in other fandoms, working out the plot is a much larger aspect of the writing, so if I hash it out in too much detail, I feel like the story is already written, and my grasshopper brain gets bored and jumps to a new project.
So yeah, I want to get this fic actually finished this time. (But I'm still not going to tell you anything about it, just in case I don't.) It's standing at 12,000 words and, as explained above, I have a less than concrete idea of exactly where it's going. But I'm actually writing at a decent rate at the moment - over the holiday period, at least - so I'm optimistic that I will, eventually, finish the damn thing.
Original writing-wise, I want to finish my latest novel. It is, in a technical sense, actually finished, but I'm still thinking of rewriting aspects of it, so I want to go back over it and decide what to do with it. Hopefully, I can get that together fairly quickly, so I can squeeze more money out of my publishers to buy a multi-region DVD player get stuck into the next one.
Um, I don't know what I would have predicted as I did have a feeling the university workload was going to kick in, but yeah... productively was way down. A rough count has me in at about 180,000 words of published fic this year, which is not even half of what I wrote in 2002. The final year project and editing my novel really ate the second half of the year, alas. And said project is likely to eat most of the beginning of next year, too.
What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January 2003?
I don't know that I'm that surprised by it, but I guess Hearts and Bones takes the crown for least predictable, being my first (and quite possibly only) Discworld fic. And the subject matter is... bizarre, but that's really nothing new with my brain.
What's your favorite story of the year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you happiest.
I think And the Tide Rushes In is my favourite part of the Further to Fly series so far. Partly because it ties together the Bartlet story arc that was kicked off a good four stories ago, and also because I really like the scenes between Jed and Stanley.
Did you take any writing risks this year? (See above for unexpected pairings, etc.) What did you learn from them?
I don't know that I did, really. Writing West Wing is totally effortless and comfortable at this stage. (And I'm itching to get back to it, some of you will probably be glad to know.) It'd been a while since I visited the HP fandom, but Learning Curve pretty much wrote itself. And although I've technically never written Discworld before, those books were the first "adult books" I ever read way back when I was about seven, and one of my biggest influences when I first started writing novels a few year later. So I'm actually very familiar with the style, and it wasn't much of a leap to write a piece of fic in it.
So, no risks. Egad, I'm happily boring even in my online life. You've got to admire my consistency.
Do you have any fanfic or profic goals for the New Year?
To finish the fic I'm writing now, and get back to FtF 10, stat. In addition to the interruptions of university work, there have been a few false starts, because I've discovered that plotting things out in too much detail is dangerous in fandoms other than the West Wing. I can only assume that's because with TWW fic, the plot is only a small part of the writing process - what counts most is the dialogue, the actual line-by-line writing of it. Whereas in other fandoms, working out the plot is a much larger aspect of the writing, so if I hash it out in too much detail, I feel like the story is already written, and my grasshopper brain gets bored and jumps to a new project.
So yeah, I want to get this fic actually finished this time. (But I'm still not going to tell you anything about it, just in case I don't.) It's standing at 12,000 words and, as explained above, I have a less than concrete idea of exactly where it's going. But I'm actually writing at a decent rate at the moment - over the holiday period, at least - so I'm optimistic that I will, eventually, finish the damn thing.
Original writing-wise, I want to finish my latest novel. It is, in a technical sense, actually finished, but I'm still thinking of rewriting aspects of it, so I want to go back over it and decide what to do with it. Hopefully, I can get that together fairly quickly, so I can squeeze more money out of my publishers to buy a multi-region DVD player get stuck into the next one.