the year in fic meme
I was waiting until after secret_mutant reveals to do this and then I got distracted. ANYWAY.
This is fic only, no original stuff. And only things that have been finished and posted, no WsiP.
Torchwood:
Two Weeks' Notice - Crossover with The Invisible Man
And the Chaos is Calling Me
Pastries, Avoidance Tactics, and a Bottle of Scotch
Greetings From the Future!
Total: 4
Doctor Who:
They've All Gone to Look for America (The Doctor's Note Remix) (Crossover with The West Wing)
Twenty Questions
Next of Kin
Team Bonding (Crossover with White Collar)
Homesick
It's Only Time
Total: 6
Dead Poets Society:
Hold Me Tight and Tell Me You'll Miss Me (What Dreams May Come Remix)
Total: 1
Good Omens:
it giveth light unto all in the house (the let's have some wine remix)
Total: 1
X-Men: First Class:
Tongue-Tied and Useless
On the Mend
Perchance to Dream
Melted Ice Cream and Macaroni Art
Sick Day
Summer Follies
The Days are Short and the Years are Long
Kiss Me Like You Mean It
No Yesterdays on the Road
All I Need to Know
closer than anyone would ever get
The Most Important Meal of the Day
some sense of touch and a melody
cradles you and connects you to everything
JJ's Round-the-Clock Breakfast Bounty Platter (Crossover with Parks and Recreation)
i'm just a sucker, darling, i declare
the whole world is moving (and i'm standing still)
Catacombs
ashes to ashes, but always the ocean
you would hear me and know
For a Hundred Thousand Reasons (co-written with brilligspoons)
Genetics Isn't Sexy
gather near to us once more
Three Truths
Various XMFC ficlets
Life, In a Nutshell (co-written with brilligspoons)
Be My Thrill
and now you will not be alone any more
Miscommunication and Character Assassination
Total: 26 full length, 3 collections
(I only linked to full fics, but I did count ficlets in my word count. I'm just too lazy to link to all of them. There are a lot.)
Total story count: 41
Total Fandom count: 9+ (including crossovers, the plus being any ficlets in fandoms other than those listed above)
Total word count: 250,000*
* Okay, so it actually came out to 249,979, but I only did a rough estimate of how much of the daycare big bang I wrote instead of going through and figuring out exactly what I wrote and I lowballed the number, plus I wrote some anon stuff, so I am GIVING MYSELF THOSE TWENTY-ONE WORDS. It's a present to myself, okay?
So. Wow.
Overall Thoughts:
Um. Wow. So. X-Men: First Class happened. You may have heard me mention it, once or twice.
The one thing I will say is that, when I first started to add up my word count, I kept attributing it to spending three months unemployed. However, I wrote more in the three months following my unemployment than I did in the three months I didn't have a job, so... that puts the kibosh on that.
Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you'd predicted?
Ha. Hahaha. Um, more. I don't know that I had a number in mind at the start of the year, except to write more, but I think that, since my interest in Torchwood was already waning and there was no new fandom on the horizon, I would have predicted much, much less.
What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January?
Well, XMFC didn't come out until June and Canton didn't exist until April, so Doctor Who and XMFC are good bets.
What's your own favorite story of the year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you happiest?
This is really tough. I'm my own biggest fan XD
I love No Yesterdays on the Road and Next of Kin more than is probably socially acceptable, so I'll go with those.
Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?
Does not having a real climax in No Yesterdays on the Road count? XD Um, other than that, I wrote a shit ton of Id fic (basically all of daycare 'verse) and posted it publicly. I've been moving towards this for years--basically every fandom I've been in, I've had an AU in my head where my OTP (or favorite team) are super domestic and have babies and live happy lives together. XMFC is the first time I've written them down as completed stories and posted them for people other than me to read.
In addition to that, I was very wary of posting my Canton fics because the OC plays such a huge part. Clearly, they found an audience XD
My best story of this year:
Oh, Jesus. Best? I don't know. Um, I'm gonna go with some sense of touch and a melody, which managed to be canon compliant (ish) and an atmospheric character study and also porn.
My most popular story of this year:
Daycare Verse overall, probably. But No Yesterdays on the Road has the most hits AND the most Kudos, so it wins for single story, I guess. Hurrah!
Story of mine most under-appreciated by the universe, in my opinion:
JJ's Round-the-Clock Breakfast Bounty Platter. Guys. Not to brag, but I think my Leslie!voice was pretty good. And I still think this is hilarious.
Most fun story to write:
Miscommunication and Character Assassination. It was a different sort of Charles!voice and once I forced myself to write it, it came really easily.
Story with the single sexiest moment:
some sense of touch and a melody, because I think it was the only outright porn I wrote last year.
Story with the single sweetest moment:
Um, all of daycare? Hahaha, I mean, that's pretty much what daycare is. Specifically, maybe the proposal scene in For a Hundred Thousand Reasons or the end of cradles you and connects you to everything.
Most "Holy crap, that's wrong, even for you" story:
Nothing comes to mind. Everything was pretty tame. Even the anon stuff I wrote.
Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters:
No Yesterday on the Road made me much more comfortable writing Erik and also forced me to examine the end of the film from his perspective.
Hardest story to write:
For a Hundred Thousand Reasons. Large chunks of it were SUPER EASY to write, but the last bit was SO trying and I was SO frustrated and writing thousands of words a day without breaks and stressing out and freaking out and bitching to Becca NONSTOP and...yeesh. It was tough. But I'm actually kind of glad for it? I learned a lot from the whole experience.
Biggest Disappointment:
I don't think any of my posted stories were too disappointing? I'm more disappointed that I didn't get around to finishing some of my WsiP.
Biggest Surprise:
Canton, probably. While clearly I wasn't expecting XMFC, a new fandom isn't surprising to me. What's surprising is finding such a crazy, overwhelming desire to write for a fandom I was already in but not writing in. I love Doctor Who, but it's one of those shows that I'm super obsessive over without really feeling the need to create fanworks. I've written a fic here or there on request, but I've never really taken it on as a fic-writing fandom before. I churned out a whole universe, though, in a few weeks after having a really terrible dry spell. The Canton stories reminded me that I could actually write.
Most Unintentionally Telling Story:
cradles you and connects you to everything is 100% me. Everything in it. I had really only intended it to be a sort of info-dump story about education politics, but it turned into a love letter to New York. Whoops.
Plans for the next year:
Well, littledust and I are totally going to at least talk about the ~*magical AU*~ (aka the super happy fluffy domestic XMFC/DPS crossover of our hearts). I want to finish the sequel to No Yesterdays on the Road and write my crazy Alex/Darwin AU and the horror AU and there's more daycare verse and... well, I'm going to be busy, basically. I'm going to try and write more regularly and finish shit and...idk. Not totally slack off. I want to write at least this much next year. Hurrah!
For reading all of that, have some WsiP snippets.
Charles telling Erik about some of his childhood in the sequel to "No Yesterdays:"
"May I join you?" Charles asks hesitantly.
"It's your library," Erik says, but he shifts down the couch in clear invitation. Charles sits next to him, but leaves several inches of space between them.
"Good book?" Charles asks. Erik sighs and puts it on the table.
"Are we going to play this game tonight?" Erik asks.
"I suppose it's a bit late for that," Charles admits. He pauses, biting his lip and then says, "It was a nightmare, Erik. It's nothing to worry about."
"That wasn't nothing to worry about, Charles," Erik says. "I've been sleeping next to you for two months. I've been within shouting distance for almost a year. Nothing like that has every happened to you. Not after Darwin was killed, not after Cuba, not after you were kidnapped."
Charles closes his eyes and hangs his head.
"What was that, Charles?" Erik asks, though he regrets it as soon as the words leave his mouth. He knows exactly what it was and the look on Charles' face only confirms it. Erik sighs. "That name, Cain--when you were missing, I asked Raven who knew you were staying in the house. She mentioned Cain and when I asked who he was, she clammed up."
"He was--he is our stepbrother," Charles says. He sits up fully and rubs the back of his neck with a rueful half-smile.
"He hurt you," Erik says.
"A great many things in my life have hurt me, my dear. I'm sure a great many more will continue to hurt me in the future."
"Not all of those things give you nightmares so strong you wake the entire house," Erik says. Charles shrugs and Erik pulls out his hidden trump card. "You claim to know everything about me. You can give me this at least, can't you?"
"I--" Charles looks torn, embarrassed almost. "Really, Erik, next to the horrors of your childhood--"
"Next to nothing," Erik says. "It's not a contest, Charles. My pain doesn't lessen yours any, nor vice versa. You had a stepbrother. He hit you."
"Yes," Charles says.
"Your parents didn't stop it?"
Charles laughs at that, sharp and harsh, and seems almost startled by the sound. "My father died when I was young," he says. "I was eight. He had been the closest thing I had to a friend up until that point. When he was gone, there was no one and then there was Raven. I was able to convince my mother, the help, everyone that Raven was my sister, an orphaned niece of my father's whom my mother adopted to ease the loneliness in the house after my father's death. Having Raven--it was extraordinary. I'd never had--I'd never had a lot of things, but what I wanted more than anything was a companion and for a year I got that." He swallows hard and then looks away.
"Then came the Markos," he says.
A daycare ficlet in which Raven's got a cold and Erik's playing nurse:
"Everything hurts," Raven murmurs, wrapping her arms around Erik's neck and burying her face in his shoulder. "I want Daddy."
"Daddy's at work," Erik says. He kisses the top of her head. "Sorry, duck."
"Work is dumb," Raven says. "You don't have to go to work."
"That's because I was doing work here," Erik says. "I can bring my work home if I can't make it into the office. Daddy can't bring all the kids at daycare here, now can he?" A bit of a misnomer, admittedly--there are daycare kids coming in and out on a fairly regular basis, frequently more than Erik thinks should legally be allowed, but it makes Raven giggle.
"That's silly, Papa," she says. Then, after a moment, "What's your job, Papa?"
"I work for Uncle Tony," Erik says. "I'm an engineer."
Raven looks up at him, clearly dubious.
"I...make things," Erik says. "I...use numbers and computers to design things for doctors. Tools and...things."
Raven is still unconvinced and Erik says, "It's really very impressive. I'm very smart."
"Like Uncle Tony?" Raven asks and Erik sighs.
"I work very hard," he assures her.
"You should have a real job," Raven tells him. "Like a teacher or a fireman or a doctor or a mailman."
"Yes," Erik says dryly. "A mailman. Why didn't I think of that? I could have saved so much time that I wasted getting my master's degree."
Now I'm tired. Bedtime?
This is fic only, no original stuff. And only things that have been finished and posted, no WsiP.
Torchwood:
Two Weeks' Notice - Crossover with The Invisible Man
And the Chaos is Calling Me
Pastries, Avoidance Tactics, and a Bottle of Scotch
Greetings From the Future!
Total: 4
Doctor Who:
They've All Gone to Look for America (The Doctor's Note Remix) (Crossover with The West Wing)
Twenty Questions
Next of Kin
Team Bonding (Crossover with White Collar)
Homesick
It's Only Time
Total: 6
Dead Poets Society:
Hold Me Tight and Tell Me You'll Miss Me (What Dreams May Come Remix)
Total: 1
Good Omens:
it giveth light unto all in the house (the let's have some wine remix)
Total: 1
X-Men: First Class:
Tongue-Tied and Useless
On the Mend
Perchance to Dream
Melted Ice Cream and Macaroni Art
Sick Day
Summer Follies
The Days are Short and the Years are Long
Kiss Me Like You Mean It
No Yesterdays on the Road
All I Need to Know
closer than anyone would ever get
The Most Important Meal of the Day
some sense of touch and a melody
cradles you and connects you to everything
JJ's Round-the-Clock Breakfast Bounty Platter (Crossover with Parks and Recreation)
i'm just a sucker, darling, i declare
the whole world is moving (and i'm standing still)
Catacombs
ashes to ashes, but always the ocean
you would hear me and know
For a Hundred Thousand Reasons (co-written with brilligspoons)
Genetics Isn't Sexy
gather near to us once more
Three Truths
Various XMFC ficlets
Life, In a Nutshell (co-written with brilligspoons)
Be My Thrill
and now you will not be alone any more
Miscommunication and Character Assassination
Total: 26 full length, 3 collections
(I only linked to full fics, but I did count ficlets in my word count. I'm just too lazy to link to all of them. There are a lot.)
Total story count: 41
Total Fandom count: 9+ (including crossovers, the plus being any ficlets in fandoms other than those listed above)
Total word count: 250,000*
* Okay, so it actually came out to 249,979, but I only did a rough estimate of how much of the daycare big bang I wrote instead of going through and figuring out exactly what I wrote and I lowballed the number, plus I wrote some anon stuff, so I am GIVING MYSELF THOSE TWENTY-ONE WORDS. It's a present to myself, okay?
So. Wow.
Overall Thoughts:
Um. Wow. So. X-Men: First Class happened. You may have heard me mention it, once or twice.
The one thing I will say is that, when I first started to add up my word count, I kept attributing it to spending three months unemployed. However, I wrote more in the three months following my unemployment than I did in the three months I didn't have a job, so... that puts the kibosh on that.
Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you'd predicted?
Ha. Hahaha. Um, more. I don't know that I had a number in mind at the start of the year, except to write more, but I think that, since my interest in Torchwood was already waning and there was no new fandom on the horizon, I would have predicted much, much less.
What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January?
Well, XMFC didn't come out until June and Canton didn't exist until April, so Doctor Who and XMFC are good bets.
What's your own favorite story of the year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you happiest?
This is really tough. I'm my own biggest fan XD
I love No Yesterdays on the Road and Next of Kin more than is probably socially acceptable, so I'll go with those.
Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?
Does not having a real climax in No Yesterdays on the Road count? XD Um, other than that, I wrote a shit ton of Id fic (basically all of daycare 'verse) and posted it publicly. I've been moving towards this for years--basically every fandom I've been in, I've had an AU in my head where my OTP (or favorite team) are super domestic and have babies and live happy lives together. XMFC is the first time I've written them down as completed stories and posted them for people other than me to read.
In addition to that, I was very wary of posting my Canton fics because the OC plays such a huge part. Clearly, they found an audience XD
My best story of this year:
Oh, Jesus. Best? I don't know. Um, I'm gonna go with some sense of touch and a melody, which managed to be canon compliant (ish) and an atmospheric character study and also porn.
My most popular story of this year:
Daycare Verse overall, probably. But No Yesterdays on the Road has the most hits AND the most Kudos, so it wins for single story, I guess. Hurrah!
Story of mine most under-appreciated by the universe, in my opinion:
JJ's Round-the-Clock Breakfast Bounty Platter. Guys. Not to brag, but I think my Leslie!voice was pretty good. And I still think this is hilarious.
Most fun story to write:
Miscommunication and Character Assassination. It was a different sort of Charles!voice and once I forced myself to write it, it came really easily.
Story with the single sexiest moment:
some sense of touch and a melody, because I think it was the only outright porn I wrote last year.
Story with the single sweetest moment:
Um, all of daycare? Hahaha, I mean, that's pretty much what daycare is. Specifically, maybe the proposal scene in For a Hundred Thousand Reasons or the end of cradles you and connects you to everything.
Most "Holy crap, that's wrong, even for you" story:
Nothing comes to mind. Everything was pretty tame. Even the anon stuff I wrote.
Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters:
No Yesterday on the Road made me much more comfortable writing Erik and also forced me to examine the end of the film from his perspective.
Hardest story to write:
For a Hundred Thousand Reasons. Large chunks of it were SUPER EASY to write, but the last bit was SO trying and I was SO frustrated and writing thousands of words a day without breaks and stressing out and freaking out and bitching to Becca NONSTOP and...yeesh. It was tough. But I'm actually kind of glad for it? I learned a lot from the whole experience.
Biggest Disappointment:
I don't think any of my posted stories were too disappointing? I'm more disappointed that I didn't get around to finishing some of my WsiP.
Biggest Surprise:
Canton, probably. While clearly I wasn't expecting XMFC, a new fandom isn't surprising to me. What's surprising is finding such a crazy, overwhelming desire to write for a fandom I was already in but not writing in. I love Doctor Who, but it's one of those shows that I'm super obsessive over without really feeling the need to create fanworks. I've written a fic here or there on request, but I've never really taken it on as a fic-writing fandom before. I churned out a whole universe, though, in a few weeks after having a really terrible dry spell. The Canton stories reminded me that I could actually write.
Most Unintentionally Telling Story:
cradles you and connects you to everything is 100% me. Everything in it. I had really only intended it to be a sort of info-dump story about education politics, but it turned into a love letter to New York. Whoops.
Plans for the next year:
Well, littledust and I are totally going to at least talk about the ~*magical AU*~ (aka the super happy fluffy domestic XMFC/DPS crossover of our hearts). I want to finish the sequel to No Yesterdays on the Road and write my crazy Alex/Darwin AU and the horror AU and there's more daycare verse and... well, I'm going to be busy, basically. I'm going to try and write more regularly and finish shit and...idk. Not totally slack off. I want to write at least this much next year. Hurrah!
For reading all of that, have some WsiP snippets.
Charles telling Erik about some of his childhood in the sequel to "No Yesterdays:"
"May I join you?" Charles asks hesitantly.
"It's your library," Erik says, but he shifts down the couch in clear invitation. Charles sits next to him, but leaves several inches of space between them.
"Good book?" Charles asks. Erik sighs and puts it on the table.
"Are we going to play this game tonight?" Erik asks.
"I suppose it's a bit late for that," Charles admits. He pauses, biting his lip and then says, "It was a nightmare, Erik. It's nothing to worry about."
"That wasn't nothing to worry about, Charles," Erik says. "I've been sleeping next to you for two months. I've been within shouting distance for almost a year. Nothing like that has every happened to you. Not after Darwin was killed, not after Cuba, not after you were kidnapped."
Charles closes his eyes and hangs his head.
"What was that, Charles?" Erik asks, though he regrets it as soon as the words leave his mouth. He knows exactly what it was and the look on Charles' face only confirms it. Erik sighs. "That name, Cain--when you were missing, I asked Raven who knew you were staying in the house. She mentioned Cain and when I asked who he was, she clammed up."
"He was--he is our stepbrother," Charles says. He sits up fully and rubs the back of his neck with a rueful half-smile.
"He hurt you," Erik says.
"A great many things in my life have hurt me, my dear. I'm sure a great many more will continue to hurt me in the future."
"Not all of those things give you nightmares so strong you wake the entire house," Erik says. Charles shrugs and Erik pulls out his hidden trump card. "You claim to know everything about me. You can give me this at least, can't you?"
"I--" Charles looks torn, embarrassed almost. "Really, Erik, next to the horrors of your childhood--"
"Next to nothing," Erik says. "It's not a contest, Charles. My pain doesn't lessen yours any, nor vice versa. You had a stepbrother. He hit you."
"Yes," Charles says.
"Your parents didn't stop it?"
Charles laughs at that, sharp and harsh, and seems almost startled by the sound. "My father died when I was young," he says. "I was eight. He had been the closest thing I had to a friend up until that point. When he was gone, there was no one and then there was Raven. I was able to convince my mother, the help, everyone that Raven was my sister, an orphaned niece of my father's whom my mother adopted to ease the loneliness in the house after my father's death. Having Raven--it was extraordinary. I'd never had--I'd never had a lot of things, but what I wanted more than anything was a companion and for a year I got that." He swallows hard and then looks away.
"Then came the Markos," he says.
A daycare ficlet in which Raven's got a cold and Erik's playing nurse:
"Everything hurts," Raven murmurs, wrapping her arms around Erik's neck and burying her face in his shoulder. "I want Daddy."
"Daddy's at work," Erik says. He kisses the top of her head. "Sorry, duck."
"Work is dumb," Raven says. "You don't have to go to work."
"That's because I was doing work here," Erik says. "I can bring my work home if I can't make it into the office. Daddy can't bring all the kids at daycare here, now can he?" A bit of a misnomer, admittedly--there are daycare kids coming in and out on a fairly regular basis, frequently more than Erik thinks should legally be allowed, but it makes Raven giggle.
"That's silly, Papa," she says. Then, after a moment, "What's your job, Papa?"
"I work for Uncle Tony," Erik says. "I'm an engineer."
Raven looks up at him, clearly dubious.
"I...make things," Erik says. "I...use numbers and computers to design things for doctors. Tools and...things."
Raven is still unconvinced and Erik says, "It's really very impressive. I'm very smart."
"Like Uncle Tony?" Raven asks and Erik sighs.
"I work very hard," he assures her.
"You should have a real job," Raven tells him. "Like a teacher or a fireman or a doctor or a mailman."
"Yes," Erik says dryly. "A mailman. Why didn't I think of that? I could have saved so much time that I wasted getting my master's degree."
Now I'm tired. Bedtime?