So I was considering doing a proper 'year in review' thing of all my fics, but...
... well. Here's my AO3 stats for 2012:
Author Subscriptions: 53
Kudos: 1139
Comment Threads: 143
Bookmarks: 249
Subscriptions: 86
Word Count: 440281
Hits: 43357
See that number, second from the bottom? That is an excellent reason why it would be exhausting and tiresome to write a 'this is what every story meant for me'.
A few shout-outs, though...
Most memorable: My two behemoths, March-Stalkers Mighty and In His Image, one AU and the other as non-AU as it's possible to get once you've brought Gabriel back to life, being a close reworking of the last episodes of season 5: both fascinating worlds that I continue to inhabit (and write extras for!). Both challenged me seriously as a writer, and both ended up very rewarding and taught me a lot. And, of course, there's the tiny fact that together they account for over 300k of that 440k, without even counting all their extras and timestamps. I swore when I started MSM that it wouldn't be another IHI - it was just meant to be a little Fox and the Hound-style AU, and I did try very hard (for a chapter or two) to keep it under 30k! MSM is actually threatening me with a sequel, being The Adventures Of Gabriel The Itinerant Pedlar And His Horse (And Sam, His New Apprentice), In Which They Possibly Eventually Get Over Gabriel's Issues Enough To Get Together. I think it'd be great fun to do an episodic sort of thing with a broader story arc behind it, sort of in the style of all those legends of Greek heroes and Arthurian knights who just wander around and encounter random bizarre characters/adventures; but I confess that I am now increasingly being interested in the stories my grandmother told of her grandfather, a Syrian pedlar wandering around rural Victoria in the early days of the last century (he came out to Australia in 1891), and of the Indian pedlar who used to visit her grandmother's house when my grandmother was young.
Funniest (to me): My pair of Dean-speaking-Shakespeare crackfics, which still make me dissolve into giggles.
Most fun to write: Probably Happiness is someone to lean on, with Dean and Gabriel as the owners of big floppy Sam-the-dog and carefully scheming Castiel-the-cat, told from Sam's point of view (what, I have beagles and I enjoy narrating the world from their perspective).
Most surprising: Um. A lot of my stories ended up doing things I didn't expect them to, but perhaps When thou sleepest, let them keep thee, which was meant to be just 'oh hey, I've never actually written a threesome have I' pwp. I wrote the first half of it, considered it finished, then one commenter pointed out a theme in Castiel's interactions with Sam that I'd put there intentionally but not given much thought to, or not in the words she used. It niggled at me, and I ended up writing a second half from Castiel's perspective, to work out just how these men would be working through these kinds of problems in such a complicated four-way relationship with so many issues between them. If I'd set out to answer or demonstrate that question in the first place, of course, it would have been much harder-hitting, less subtle, and have arisen less naturally out of the situation: it would have felt more like a crisis, I think, rather than just the little daily negotiation (but symbolic of more) that it ended up being, and I rather like that about it.
Most nerve-wracking to post: Definitely The Nature and Kynde of a Lyon. I do like alpha/knotting/heat fics in theory, and sometimes even in practice if they're done well, but it's the sort of thing I'd never really thought I could do myself because I can't do cheap disposable smut without considering consent issues and broader social implications of that sort of biological model. Which isn't to say that all such fics are cheap disposable smut (or that that's necessarily a bad thing in itself!) and that none of them take notice of those issues, but, like teacher/student porn, it has to be written very well and with a lot of respect for both characters for me to be comfortable with the power dynamics there. And of course there's the fact that there does often seem to be an element of dub-con fetishisation there, which I'm really not comfortable with. All of which probably explains why what was meant to be a quick 5k fic ended up being 30k, told from the points of view of four different characters: an alpha (Gabriel), a beta (Castiel), a child (Sam), and then the person going through his first heat (Dean). It felt important to explore the problems that each of them experienced not only with the biology but with the culture and society around it. Maybe it ended up a little heavy-handed, and I'm still not entirely comfortable with it, but I rather like it anyway. :)
Written under the most difficult circumstances: Definitely two of the most recent, An Acorn Button (an MSM timestamp) and Let them be joyful (an IHI one). I wrote both of them in the space of a single week, entirely with pen and paper, the second-last time I visited my grandmother. I was over there in her little country town to nurse her through a colonoscopy - and anyone who's gone through one will know what a messy, uncomfortable process that is, especially for a barely mobile 90-year-old who already has serious continence issues - and I have very vivid sense memories of sitting with my notebook in the hallway with my back against the door of the linen cupboard, listening to the noises coming from the toilet, just in case she needed my help; of escaping to the park for a few hours during her naps and sitting there in the sun looking out over the town, notebook on my knees, or stretched out on my stomach on my coat over the damp grass; of going to the nearest larger town for halfway decent coffee and lunch and sitting working there, in the old courthouse restaurant, and the lovely waiter who kept asking how my 'mum' was. That was the second-last time I visited her; the last time was just now. I went over on the 15 Dec to prepare her for another colonoscopy, got quite a bit of writing done for a sequel to La diritta via (which I'm doing for the Gabriel Big Bang), and then. well. Then there was the emergency room, and Granny deciding she didn't want the emergency surgery that would probably have killed her anyway and would have left her with very little quality of life, and then two very long days of sitting beside her hospital bed with a cluster of other family as she faded. 22 Dec she died, 3:25 pm, the night after my mother had a very vivid dream of my grandfather, who died in 1997, making his slow limping way back towards her, to come to take her home.
I haven't written a word since, except for thesis preparation; but it will come back.
All of that said, this year definitely won't be a 440k-word year: I'm finally starting my PhD, so that will be taking up most of my creative energy. I'm sure I'll need a little outlet, though, of short light-hearted fics, or possibly historical fics based on me coming across something random that I can't use in my thesis and going 'oo this is interesting', so I'll be around!
Stories on AO3, LJ, DW.