In case anyone missed the significance...
Forgive me if this rambles, and also some of you may have seen an almost identical post on Tumblr, but I wanted to post it here, too, where a conversation could be comfortably had, if anyone is so inclined.
A few days ago, I posted chapter 34 of Treading Water. Nothing new - there were 33 other chapters posted over the past few months. What makes this one different is that it was the last chapter.
I finished, and posted, a nearly 200,000 word freaking Hunger Games NOVEL. That fic took up almost a year and a half of my life. When I started it, all I intended was to do something for NaNoWriMo and figured it would run a little over 50k. I wanted to know what Annie was doing while Finnick was in the arena and I wanted to rescue Finnick. I really didn’t plan to rewrite Catching Fire. It just worked out that way.
Sometime in September of 2011, I started writing up notes and planning out scenes and jotting down bits of dialogue. By the time November rolled around and I actually started writing the fic, the notes alone ran around 43k and I knew I was in trouble. The longest fic I had ever written before that was a Farscape fic called Left Behind, and it ran around 56k by the time it was finished. For years, most of my fic was in the 2 or 3k range and it was like pulling teeth to write more than 500 words in a day.
With TW (and as well with Victorious (also Finnick/Annie), when I did the Het Big Bang challenge last year), most days were easily a thousand words and one memorable day I topped 4,500 words in just that one day. It’s amazing the difference it makes when you’re writing something about which you’re passionate, even when they’re someone else’s characters.
I’ve always been more drawn to the secondary and tertiary characters more than the leads, and it turns out Hunger Games is no exception. Much as I love Katniss and Peeta, I don’t have much to say about them. Annie and Finnick, on the other hand… Annie in particular tends to be marginalized in fandom, and treated poorly even when she isn’t outright marginalized (I’ve ranted about that before, so I won’t repeat it), so I wanted to write something in which she was a character in her own right and not just some weird extension of Finnick. Going back through the chapters, it turns out that statistically speaking, TW is 50% Finnick’s point of view and 50% Annie’s. I think it ended up about 1,000 words more from Finnick’s POV, which is pretty good since he started out the one I wrote more easily.
Anyway, I just wanted to let some of that (the feels) out. I know most of you reading this blog aren’t all that interested in Finnick/Annie or TW, but if anyone wants to talk about the writing process or anything like that, I’d love to.
A few days ago, I posted chapter 34 of Treading Water. Nothing new - there were 33 other chapters posted over the past few months. What makes this one different is that it was the last chapter.
I finished, and posted, a nearly 200,000 word freaking Hunger Games NOVEL. That fic took up almost a year and a half of my life. When I started it, all I intended was to do something for NaNoWriMo and figured it would run a little over 50k. I wanted to know what Annie was doing while Finnick was in the arena and I wanted to rescue Finnick. I really didn’t plan to rewrite Catching Fire. It just worked out that way.
Sometime in September of 2011, I started writing up notes and planning out scenes and jotting down bits of dialogue. By the time November rolled around and I actually started writing the fic, the notes alone ran around 43k and I knew I was in trouble. The longest fic I had ever written before that was a Farscape fic called Left Behind, and it ran around 56k by the time it was finished. For years, most of my fic was in the 2 or 3k range and it was like pulling teeth to write more than 500 words in a day.
With TW (and as well with Victorious (also Finnick/Annie), when I did the Het Big Bang challenge last year), most days were easily a thousand words and one memorable day I topped 4,500 words in just that one day. It’s amazing the difference it makes when you’re writing something about which you’re passionate, even when they’re someone else’s characters.
I’ve always been more drawn to the secondary and tertiary characters more than the leads, and it turns out Hunger Games is no exception. Much as I love Katniss and Peeta, I don’t have much to say about them. Annie and Finnick, on the other hand… Annie in particular tends to be marginalized in fandom, and treated poorly even when she isn’t outright marginalized (I’ve ranted about that before, so I won’t repeat it), so I wanted to write something in which she was a character in her own right and not just some weird extension of Finnick. Going back through the chapters, it turns out that statistically speaking, TW is 50% Finnick’s point of view and 50% Annie’s. I think it ended up about 1,000 words more from Finnick’s POV, which is pretty good since he started out the one I wrote more easily.
Anyway, I just wanted to let some of that (the feels) out. I know most of you reading this blog aren’t all that interested in Finnick/Annie or TW, but if anyone wants to talk about the writing process or anything like that, I’d love to.