end of year fic round-up meme: 2007
Fic timeline, narrated by roga in 3rd person:
January
(End of the semester --> exam period --> productivity.)
Thrice as Nice (House/West Wing/Ally McBeal)
Three Dreams Stacy Had That Didn't Come True (House)
February
(Still end of the semester --> exam period --> productivity.)
Just A Day (House)
What Kind Of Week Has It Been (House MD/Firefly)
Seven Deep Dark Secrets That House Could Have Had (House)
March
(A few things happen here. 1. House episodes drop to airing at a frequency of once every three weeks. 2. roga is sick for a week or so and discovers illegal streamlined episodes of... everything. These will play a part in late April.)
Crack files (House)
April
(Remix deadline approaches --> roga procrastinates by writing other fics)
New York Boys, Jersey Girls (House/Sports Night)
The I Accidentally Slept With A Call Girl And I Don't Know What To Do Chatroom (House/West Wing)
Playing Doctors (or: five medical show crossovers that never happened) (ER, Grey's Anatomy, Scrubs, House)
Hi, Ma (Sunrise, Sunset Remix) (House)
(During this month, 3. the Big Student Strike starts, lasting until late May, meaning no school. This, along with #2, results in roga being being exposed to an embarrassing number of new TV shows, and my god yes, it is embarrassing: Heroes, FNL, Ugly Betty, Brothers & Sisters, Grey's Anatomy, Jericho, Supernatural, and finally and most devastatingly, Stargate. For comparison, the only shows I'd been following before that had been House and Lost.)
(--> No fics in May.)
June
(after years of paranoia of being googled, roga finally changes LJ username into this.)
Five Times ficlets (House)
July
(exam period begins again --> relative productivity, mainly in the WIP sector)
To Sing, To Soar (SGA)
Season's Greetings (Sports Night)
August
What The Ducklings Did On Their Summer Vacation (House/SGA)
September
(roga signs up for daysofawesome --> productivity)
A Medium Case of Culture Shock (SG-1)
Repeat As Necessary (Discworld/Bible)
Holy Mother of - Wait, No (Sports Night)
Ushpizzin (House/Bible)
The Yom Kippur Toss (Daily Show/Colbert Report)
(October - deadlines are over. Uni year "opens" with Big Faculty Strike. Last year's show repertoire boosted by Pushing Daisies, Private Practice, NCIS. No stress --> no fics.)
December
I sayeth unto thee (Prince of Egypt)
I Friend You, You Friend Him (Hercules: the Legenday Journeys)
All in all:
~58,000 words
21 stories, out of which:
9 crossovers (depending on how you count them)
13 House or House crossovers
2 Sports Night
6 one-time fandoms
3 boyslash or including boyslash
6 het or including het, kinda
0 girlslash
17 gen
2 wips from 2006 completed
9 current wips, 3 from 2006
My favorite story of 2007: Too hard to choose, and I wouldn't know how much the amount of comments I got influenced my decision anyway... Can I just say all my crossovers, equally? Because I love them all the same. I do. But okay, four of the House ones in particular, which I guess I can narrow down to What Kind of Week Has It Been (House/Firefly) and Playing Doctors. The first because it has Chase abducted into space - which still makes me pat myself on the back, let me tell you - and the second because it gave me so many lengths and scenarios and characters to play with. And I do think I captured some of the voices (Cox, JD) really well.
Biggest surprise: The response Seven Deep dark Secrets House Could Have Had got. It was 7 measly 100-word drabbles, but the timing and the pairing led to me breaking into the 3-comment-pages zone for the first and only time. Taught me all about momentary zeitgeist and the randomness of fandom.
Story most underappreciated by the universe, in my opinion: I guess Three Dreams Stacy Had That Didn't Come True (House), but only partially. It's a fic that presets three possible outcomes for Stacy's decisions: if she'd decided against House's operation and he'd lived, if she'd decided against it and he'd died, and if she'd decided not to take the job at PPTH in S2. I thought it was good - not extraordinary, but thought provoking and sympathetic to them both, and I loved the comments I'd gotten on it, which were far more detailed and insightful and thought-provoking than comments I was used to getting. But I always felt like it slipped under the radar, a little; whenever I witnessed discussions about the lack of House/Stacy fics, it was never mentioned. But I am very satisfied with the comments it did get, so. (And it's not all about the comments anyway! I know that. It was the question! Um.)
Most difficult story: Yeah, the stories I write don't tend to be very... difficult. At least not the ones I finish. What The Ducklings Did On Their Summer Vacation (House/SGA) took me a lot longer than expected, but that was because of my own writing blockages and non-existent self-discipline than any problems in the story; I'd figured out how it would look, I think, pretty early on. Ushpizzin (House/Bible) was also harder - I spent hours wracking my brain, trying to figure out what exactly the House characters/Biblical characters analogies would be. But it was for a deadline, and all in all took maybe two days to write, so 'difficult' is very relative. (And in truth, I'm a very lazy person. If it's difficult, I probably won't write it in the first place.)
Most fun story: Ooh, one of my yuletide (ETA: the Hercules one) fics was really fun to write, and read too, I think. It was a stocking stuffer which I wrote from about midnight to 6AM, and it really flowed easily. (I never know (in all the two years I've done this) whether yuletide fics should be referred to in ending year or upcoming year meme! Either way, both this year's yuletide fic and last year's yuletide fic (Scrubs) were fun.) But, again, it's too close a call to decide, since most of my fics are not exactly of the heavy sort. I am all for the crack! Fun, fun, fun.
Best fangirl moment(s): Being such a fangirl of someone else's works that I posted fic about their OCs ( A Medium Case of Culture Shock). Remixing someone else's fic ( Hi, Ma (Sunrise, Sunset Remix)), inventing my own OC to enter their universe, and then having them incorporate one of my characters back into theirs (deelaundry's Hi, Anna). And most importantly - downloading Psi and other IM clients, and starting to chat with people on my flist! Which leads to not only awesome conversations and new friends, and not only help with my own stories (or at least someone to listen to me whine about them), but granting me the privilege of betaing and being part of some truly awesome stories this year (and one Newly Award Winning Vid!). IM interaction, man, I tell ya. *smooches people I chat with* *asks all the others how I can find them? My details are in my profile!*
Easiest story to write: Forgoing all yuletide mentions, either one of the House crack ficlets or parts of Hi, Ma or Holy Mother of - Wait, No (Sports Night), simply because they're mostly dialogue, which is much easier for me than, like, anything else. I think my two Chase fics - Just A Day, and What Kind of Week Has It Been - were also easier. Not because the words came to me, but because I just sat myself down and wrote. Both of them had been post-eps, and I'd wanted to write them while they were fresh in my mind and in the minds of the readers. So I watched the episodes on Saturday morning and then just wrote, all day long, until they were done. With both of those stories, I think that if I'd stopped writing in the middle, they never would have gotten finished later on.
This year's theme and the story that demonstrates it most: Like last year, that would be my favorite genre, crossovers - almost half my fics are, and the way I feel most comfortable entering a new fandom (which we know this year I've had a lot of) is by crossing it over with one I know better. The other theme is Judaism, although that mostly shows around September because of the daysofawesome Jewish Character Ficathon. But it Judaism was also prominent in Hi, Ma, a bit in Season's Greetings, in one of my yuletide fics, and in a few not-yet-abandoned WIPs. Crossovers & Judaism are best demonstrated by the two crossovers I wrote with Biblical characters: Gedaliah and Death in Repeat As Necessary, and various House and Biblical characters in Ushpizzin.
Things I learned about writing in 2007: Mmm, talk to people over IM. It's work and play at the same time! And if I want to finish a story, I should just sit down and do it. Or sign up for something with a deadline.
Also, I learned that - well, I'm realizing just now that I've realized it - that I don't need to be a perfectionist in my writing. Writing takes me a long time as it is - I'm talking long, like less than 300 words an hour, a lot of the time. And many times it's because I'm trying to follow all these rules and tips I read in essays about writing, about what makes good prose, about what builds good characters and plot. And they do make my stories better, I've no doubt about that. But at the same time, I'm aware that my fics aren't any sort of masterpieces - most of the time, they're just there to entertain. To fly Chase off to space, or have people speak in Yiddish, or have JD enter a bar, dripping wet. And the writing is quickest when I just resign myself to that fact, and don't try - I hate to say it, but don't try to aim too high. Even if that means that there's too much dialogue and not enough internal thought, and that the stories lack that little something more that would have made them truly good. What I need to learn, I guess, is how to write that, and then how to have the patience to go back and edit, and edit well. Which is hard to do, because like I said, it's not as if I'm going for the Great Israeli Novel or anything. I still have to find the balance between 'easy' and 'good' and 'good enough', I guess.
Status of WIPs: I somewhat stupidly still intend to finish at least five of them. Stranger things have happened. (And queenzulu, I know I vowed one more completed fic by the end of the year, but then I wrote my second yuletide fic. Which TOTALLY COUNTS.)
And here is a link to the same meme from 2006), and a link to my newly organized Medium Sized List of Fics, which I hope is more comfortable to navigate now.
Wow, that felt like enough talking about myself for a year. I'll probably make a yuletide rec post tomorrow, before the authors are revealed. In the meantime, good day, good night, and good rest of 2007 :-)
January
(End of the semester --> exam period --> productivity.)
Thrice as Nice (House/West Wing/Ally McBeal)
Three Dreams Stacy Had That Didn't Come True (House)
February
(Still end of the semester --> exam period --> productivity.)
Just A Day (House)
What Kind Of Week Has It Been (House MD/Firefly)
Seven Deep Dark Secrets That House Could Have Had (House)
March
(A few things happen here. 1. House episodes drop to airing at a frequency of once every three weeks. 2. roga is sick for a week or so and discovers illegal streamlined episodes of... everything. These will play a part in late April.)
Crack files (House)
April
(Remix deadline approaches --> roga procrastinates by writing other fics)
New York Boys, Jersey Girls (House/Sports Night)
The I Accidentally Slept With A Call Girl And I Don't Know What To Do Chatroom (House/West Wing)
Playing Doctors (or: five medical show crossovers that never happened) (ER, Grey's Anatomy, Scrubs, House)
Hi, Ma (Sunrise, Sunset Remix) (House)
(During this month, 3. the Big Student Strike starts, lasting until late May, meaning no school. This, along with #2, results in roga being being exposed to an embarrassing number of new TV shows, and my god yes, it is embarrassing: Heroes, FNL, Ugly Betty, Brothers & Sisters, Grey's Anatomy, Jericho, Supernatural, and finally and most devastatingly, Stargate. For comparison, the only shows I'd been following before that had been House and Lost.)
(--> No fics in May.)
June
(after years of paranoia of being googled, roga finally changes LJ username into this.)
Five Times ficlets (House)
July
(exam period begins again --> relative productivity, mainly in the WIP sector)
To Sing, To Soar (SGA)
Season's Greetings (Sports Night)
August
What The Ducklings Did On Their Summer Vacation (House/SGA)
September
(roga signs up for daysofawesome --> productivity)
A Medium Case of Culture Shock (SG-1)
Repeat As Necessary (Discworld/Bible)
Holy Mother of - Wait, No (Sports Night)
Ushpizzin (House/Bible)
The Yom Kippur Toss (Daily Show/Colbert Report)
(October - deadlines are over. Uni year "opens" with Big Faculty Strike. Last year's show repertoire boosted by Pushing Daisies, Private Practice, NCIS. No stress --> no fics.)
December
I sayeth unto thee (Prince of Egypt)
I Friend You, You Friend Him (Hercules: the Legenday Journeys)
All in all:
~58,000 words
21 stories, out of which:
9 crossovers (depending on how you count them)
13 House or House crossovers
2 Sports Night
6 one-time fandoms
3 boyslash or including boyslash
6 het or including het, kinda
0 girlslash
17 gen
2 wips from 2006 completed
9 current wips, 3 from 2006
My favorite story of 2007: Too hard to choose, and I wouldn't know how much the amount of comments I got influenced my decision anyway... Can I just say all my crossovers, equally? Because I love them all the same. I do. But okay, four of the House ones in particular, which I guess I can narrow down to What Kind of Week Has It Been (House/Firefly) and Playing Doctors. The first because it has Chase abducted into space - which still makes me pat myself on the back, let me tell you - and the second because it gave me so many lengths and scenarios and characters to play with. And I do think I captured some of the voices (Cox, JD) really well.
Biggest surprise: The response Seven Deep dark Secrets House Could Have Had got. It was 7 measly 100-word drabbles, but the timing and the pairing led to me breaking into the 3-comment-pages zone for the first and only time. Taught me all about momentary zeitgeist and the randomness of fandom.
Story most underappreciated by the universe, in my opinion: I guess Three Dreams Stacy Had That Didn't Come True (House), but only partially. It's a fic that presets three possible outcomes for Stacy's decisions: if she'd decided against House's operation and he'd lived, if she'd decided against it and he'd died, and if she'd decided not to take the job at PPTH in S2. I thought it was good - not extraordinary, but thought provoking and sympathetic to them both, and I loved the comments I'd gotten on it, which were far more detailed and insightful and thought-provoking than comments I was used to getting. But I always felt like it slipped under the radar, a little; whenever I witnessed discussions about the lack of House/Stacy fics, it was never mentioned. But I am very satisfied with the comments it did get, so. (And it's not all about the comments anyway! I know that. It was the question! Um.)
Most difficult story: Yeah, the stories I write don't tend to be very... difficult. At least not the ones I finish. What The Ducklings Did On Their Summer Vacation (House/SGA) took me a lot longer than expected, but that was because of my own writing blockages and non-existent self-discipline than any problems in the story; I'd figured out how it would look, I think, pretty early on. Ushpizzin (House/Bible) was also harder - I spent hours wracking my brain, trying to figure out what exactly the House characters/Biblical characters analogies would be. But it was for a deadline, and all in all took maybe two days to write, so 'difficult' is very relative. (And in truth, I'm a very lazy person. If it's difficult, I probably won't write it in the first place.)
Most fun story: Ooh, one of my yuletide (ETA: the Hercules one) fics was really fun to write, and read too, I think. It was a stocking stuffer which I wrote from about midnight to 6AM, and it really flowed easily. (I never know (in all the two years I've done this) whether yuletide fics should be referred to in ending year or upcoming year meme! Either way, both this year's yuletide fic and last year's yuletide fic (Scrubs) were fun.) But, again, it's too close a call to decide, since most of my fics are not exactly of the heavy sort. I am all for the crack! Fun, fun, fun.
Best fangirl moment(s): Being such a fangirl of someone else's works that I posted fic about their OCs ( A Medium Case of Culture Shock). Remixing someone else's fic ( Hi, Ma (Sunrise, Sunset Remix)), inventing my own OC to enter their universe, and then having them incorporate one of my characters back into theirs (deelaundry's Hi, Anna). And most importantly - downloading Psi and other IM clients, and starting to chat with people on my flist! Which leads to not only awesome conversations and new friends, and not only help with my own stories (or at least someone to listen to me whine about them), but granting me the privilege of betaing and being part of some truly awesome stories this year (and one Newly Award Winning Vid!). IM interaction, man, I tell ya. *smooches people I chat with* *asks all the others how I can find them? My details are in my profile!*
Easiest story to write: Forgoing all yuletide mentions, either one of the House crack ficlets or parts of Hi, Ma or Holy Mother of - Wait, No (Sports Night), simply because they're mostly dialogue, which is much easier for me than, like, anything else. I think my two Chase fics - Just A Day, and What Kind of Week Has It Been - were also easier. Not because the words came to me, but because I just sat myself down and wrote. Both of them had been post-eps, and I'd wanted to write them while they were fresh in my mind and in the minds of the readers. So I watched the episodes on Saturday morning and then just wrote, all day long, until they were done. With both of those stories, I think that if I'd stopped writing in the middle, they never would have gotten finished later on.
This year's theme and the story that demonstrates it most: Like last year, that would be my favorite genre, crossovers - almost half my fics are, and the way I feel most comfortable entering a new fandom (which we know this year I've had a lot of) is by crossing it over with one I know better. The other theme is Judaism, although that mostly shows around September because of the daysofawesome Jewish Character Ficathon. But it Judaism was also prominent in Hi, Ma, a bit in Season's Greetings, in one of my yuletide fics, and in a few not-yet-abandoned WIPs. Crossovers & Judaism are best demonstrated by the two crossovers I wrote with Biblical characters: Gedaliah and Death in Repeat As Necessary, and various House and Biblical characters in Ushpizzin.
Things I learned about writing in 2007: Mmm, talk to people over IM. It's work and play at the same time! And if I want to finish a story, I should just sit down and do it. Or sign up for something with a deadline.
Also, I learned that - well, I'm realizing just now that I've realized it - that I don't need to be a perfectionist in my writing. Writing takes me a long time as it is - I'm talking long, like less than 300 words an hour, a lot of the time. And many times it's because I'm trying to follow all these rules and tips I read in essays about writing, about what makes good prose, about what builds good characters and plot. And they do make my stories better, I've no doubt about that. But at the same time, I'm aware that my fics aren't any sort of masterpieces - most of the time, they're just there to entertain. To fly Chase off to space, or have people speak in Yiddish, or have JD enter a bar, dripping wet. And the writing is quickest when I just resign myself to that fact, and don't try - I hate to say it, but don't try to aim too high. Even if that means that there's too much dialogue and not enough internal thought, and that the stories lack that little something more that would have made them truly good. What I need to learn, I guess, is how to write that, and then how to have the patience to go back and edit, and edit well. Which is hard to do, because like I said, it's not as if I'm going for the Great Israeli Novel or anything. I still have to find the balance between 'easy' and 'good' and 'good enough', I guess.
Status of WIPs: I somewhat stupidly still intend to finish at least five of them. Stranger things have happened. (And queenzulu, I know I vowed one more completed fic by the end of the year, but then I wrote my second yuletide fic. Which TOTALLY COUNTS.)
And here is a link to the same meme from 2006), and a link to my newly organized Medium Sized List of Fics, which I hope is more comfortable to navigate now.
Wow, that felt like enough talking about myself for a year. I'll probably make a yuletide rec post tomorrow, before the authors are revealed. In the meantime, good day, good night, and good rest of 2007 :-)