My Real Post for the evening.
Jan. 3rd, 2004 12:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
letterbladeFanfiction year in review meme, gacked from multiple of the Fiends (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tyraarane, icarusancalion, ekzekera). Belated. Long, terribly long, and rambly, and probably interesting only to those interested in [my] process, and probably containing only about 60 percent of what I actually wanted to say, but I need to post the bloody thing already.
1. Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you'd predicted?
Probably, in total, less, if only because I'd hoped/expected to get more of A Lexicon of Serpents done. *twitch* I feel like I did nothing big this year, because everything I did was either small or still a WIP. But I also feel like my style and involvement has advanced a lot this year.
2. What pairing (or genre or fandom) did you write that you would never have predicted in January 2003?
I never try to predict my pairings, because they do tend to be bizarre and I like them that way, so I'm going to pass on that. Actually, no. I wrote a bit of Tom/Ginny which I haven't posted. That I'd never have expected.
Fandom: I was planning to watch Bebop when I had the opportunity, but I didn't expect to get so slurped up into it and find it spawning some of my most intense and concentrated work yet. And I really didn't expect to return to Voyager, to return to writing about Suder (who I've been writing about since I was twelve), and in such a different way than I've yet written. (That's Talvi-Asumi, and I'll be talking more about that later.)
Genre: I didn't expect myself to be writing so much subtle, stylistically intense, contemplative stuff. (Online examples include Blue Bird Rhapsody and the first ficlet here. The two big WIPs are Talvi-Asumi and the OLDfic; again, I want to say all I have to say about those two in one place.) There were roots of it in my work for a while, and I've known about them, but somehow it's all become much more prevalent this year--perhaps because I haven't been working as much on Lexicon lately, and not doing that sort of more reality-grounded and plotty style at all.
3. What's your favorite story of the year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you happiest.
I'd almost have to do this one by fandom, break it down to one each from the three I've written in this year, but Red Bird Roulette probably takes the cake as it's actually finished. Or maybe because it's on my mind. It's still haunting me. It's probably the most intense thing I've written this year, both in nature and in what it was like to write it. Those last three lines and everything that went into them are seared into my mind as if forever, and there are phrases I am still turning over, a month or two after I wrote them and called them done. And there are parts that I love, simply love. I'd never put that much sheer effort and curiosity and detail into a simple physical description of somebody. Possibly the single paragraph I was most proud of and in love with in recent history (ie, the past couple of months) was that paragraph describing Spike, what Vicious has noticed about him. Often, when I'm writing, I feel like I'm chronicling vague images, fragments of movies, films and watercolors and distant memories and every story is painted in a different style. But in that paragraph, just for a moment, I was somehow writing about something present, something real and three-dimensional and existing in every sense; I was somehow writing about somebody who doesn't even exist but who I knew, even if only physically, and I spent most of a paragraph listing his flaws and idiosyncracies and that somehow made him even more beautiful. And there were other parts of Red Bird that were like that, but few quite as intensely. And there are some parts that still seem true.
For the other two fandoms: Sidhe and Nails and Sugar Cube Trails (often called the OLDfic) and Talvi-Asumi. I'm intensely proud of the last part of the OLDfic, the epilogue. I don't understand it at all, and I don't understand why it has to be, but somehow the rhythm of it means something terribly, terribly deeper than what actually happens. (And nobody's yet seen this part. Oh, I hope I can finish it off soon.) And I'm rather proud of the rest of the fic as well, just because it's stylistically rather different than most of my stuff, and trying to pin down Tam's voice forced me to simultaneously be more flowery and more concise. It was a fic that forced me to go over it, to actually edit it and try to make it better; all three of these fics I've listed here are, and I didn't expect that to happen either, but maybe that's why they are.
Talvi-Asumi came utterly out of nowhere, and in terrifying ambiguity from the first, and from somewhere very deep in my mind, probably where it had been fermenting ever since I first saw "Basics I" and Suder mentioned that he'd been talking to Kes and I wondered what the hell that conversation might be like. I've posted only cookies for that fic, and nothing yet particularly demonstrative of what it actually is. It came to me like no other fic has, and writing it was like writing no other fic has been. And it itself is...two people having long rambling conversations about nothing in particular but perhaps about everything, italicized and abstract and often ambiguous summaries, and long rambles about Vulcan linguistics. The closest thing to anything happening is a brief game with Vulcan hand signals. And yet it all is terribly important to me, and means something that lies very deep.
At the same time, this general trend sometimes scares me. At the shallow level simply because I'm putting more and more effort into less and less finished text; I'm losing the ability to spin out pages and pages of decent writing, the kind of writing you need to stitch a plot together, with relatively little effort; and I'm worrying terribly about this because I want to be able to write long things, and I have long ideas, and The Wintering is still waiting for me someday. At the deep level, I worry at times that I'm being too bogged down in style and subtlety at the expense of plot and character interaction, that I'm getting too vague and poetic and into a style I can only think of as intellislashy (thank you, HP fandom), and I want to be able to do more than that; and I worry that this style that has come to be my most involved and beloved work recently is something I could never translate to original fiction, and I want to be able to do more than fanfic.
4. Did you take any writing risks this year? (See above for unexpected pairings, etc.) What did you learn from them?
I suppose I took a risk in those stories where nothing happened, and lavishing all that attention and intensity upon them. Or really, I took a risk in letting myself fully accept that when "nothing happens" in a story that story can still be meaningful, deeply meaningful, and say interesting things. To me, that is. Some of this recent stuff has stuck very deeply, only as deeply as perhaps the DMVs, and those are very action-intense and plotty as well as containing the more contemplative side.
On a shallower level, I took a major stylistic/setup risk with Impossible, with that whole second-person-unindicated-dialogue-purely-odd thing. That I think worked.
I feel like I took some sort of risk, some sort of smut-writer-breaking-new-ground move, with the last scene of Red Bird. Perhaps simply because the idea was so intense in my mind. And that seems to have come off rather well. Although the riskiest part of Red Bird was the opening, the little italics thing, which I'm still not terribly fond of anymore but it seems to work quite well for others, give them the same effect it gave me when I first wrote it. So there other's opinions have prevailed upon me.
Not exactly a risk, perhaps, but I'm allowing myself new freedom in whether or not I have a beta. There are some pieces that I just don't feel like getting betaed, that I don't edit much myself, that I post pretty much first-draft; and for a while, especially in the HP fandom where there's much more of a formalized Thou Shalt Be Betaed, I'd get those pieces betaed, and get absolutely nothing out of the process. A Half a Conquest was the first fic I ever posted unbetaed in that fandom (not counting the unedited and not-really-posted chaos that is the Snake Pit continuation), but in my mind quite a few of my earlier one-shots seem unbetaed, simply because nobody I've ever worked with (including the delightfulmctabby, who's been fantastic with Lexicon and the OLDfic, and an RL friend of mine who is one of the most insightful and detailed editors I've met in a lit class or out of it) has ever managed to say anything useful about those many little two-page things that crawl out of me every once in a while. So eventually I gave up; Some People, Black Bird Jeopardy, and Blue Bird Rhapsody were all posted having never seen the light of beta, because I didn't particularly want or need to get them betaed. They were things to be written, posted, quick, done with. On the other paw, I knew nearly from the beginning that I wanted and needed a beta for the oft-mentioned Red Bird, and that I wanted ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif)
switchknife to be it; I needed somebody to bounce that off of, with the parts I loved and the last scene that was just aching to burst out of me and into somebody else's head and that wibbler of an opening. And I need a beta on the OLDfic, and I'll probably need several for Talvi-Asumi, if and when it ever reaches that point. (That fic, more than any other I've mentioned, I've realized I'm writing mainly for my own benefit. Readers are secondary, almost unnecessary at this point, and I doubt many people, even in that fandom, would understand it. Betas on the other hand, if I am ready for them, because that fic brings out the perfectionist in me. Damn Vulcans.) And with the short pieces, the little things, if I need to edit them myself, I can; I did ferocious things to The Passing Book (which I actually wrote, I believe, last year, but it lurked untouched in the depths of my computer for a long long while), all without a beta.
*gasps for breath*
And I could probably go on much longer about various things at various times and what readers have done for me, but I won't.
The failures on these risks: obviously there have also been times when no beta has meant nobody to catch stupid errors. And I found myself editing quite a few of those out of the short Bebop fics I posted sans beta, particularly Black Bird. (On the other paw, it wasn't after beta and editing and many readings and reviews by many people thattelepwen caught a very embarassing grammar error in So Sayeth Death [which I just realized is not yet on Skyehawke! meep!]. So, with due apologies to the gods monitoring annoying cliche use, nobody's perfect.) And I've probably scared some people off of some of my fics. But there are certain times when I want to post without a beta/editor and enjoy the freedom to do so in the online fanfic world. It's like going about naked.
5. Do you have any fanfic or profic goals for the New Year?
Fanfic: Finishing. Finishings are the only goals I ever need to set in fanfiction. The rest of it wrenches itself out of me whether I like it or not.
Original[notyetpro]fic: PriNoWriMo. And then doing good work for the short stories class I'm in next term. And then maybe applying to Odyssey. And probably doing some writing-related thing for my senior project. And...and...beginning. Launching. Getting back into the groove. Because I used to write original fic with far greater ease and flow. Really.
Hm. And here's last year's version. And I'm still only in the very preliminary phases of doing that wrap-up I rambled about at the end.
Which I still do want to do. Although at this moment that's secondary to following my muse through what it has to say about Bebop and assorted other anime.
*wince*
tyraarane, icarusancalion, ekzekera). Belated. Long, terribly long, and rambly, and probably interesting only to those interested in [my] process, and probably containing only about 60 percent of what I actually wanted to say, but I need to post the bloody thing already.1. Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you'd predicted?
Probably, in total, less, if only because I'd hoped/expected to get more of A Lexicon of Serpents done. *twitch* I feel like I did nothing big this year, because everything I did was either small or still a WIP. But I also feel like my style and involvement has advanced a lot this year.
2. What pairing (or genre or fandom) did you write that you would never have predicted in January 2003?
I never try to predict my pairings, because they do tend to be bizarre and I like them that way, so I'm going to pass on that. Actually, no. I wrote a bit of Tom/Ginny which I haven't posted. That I'd never have expected.
Fandom: I was planning to watch Bebop when I had the opportunity, but I didn't expect to get so slurped up into it and find it spawning some of my most intense and concentrated work yet. And I really didn't expect to return to Voyager, to return to writing about Suder (who I've been writing about since I was twelve), and in such a different way than I've yet written. (That's Talvi-Asumi, and I'll be talking more about that later.)
Genre: I didn't expect myself to be writing so much subtle, stylistically intense, contemplative stuff. (Online examples include Blue Bird Rhapsody and the first ficlet here. The two big WIPs are Talvi-Asumi and the OLDfic; again, I want to say all I have to say about those two in one place.) There were roots of it in my work for a while, and I've known about them, but somehow it's all become much more prevalent this year--perhaps because I haven't been working as much on Lexicon lately, and not doing that sort of more reality-grounded and plotty style at all.
3. What's your favorite story of the year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you happiest.
I'd almost have to do this one by fandom, break it down to one each from the three I've written in this year, but Red Bird Roulette probably takes the cake as it's actually finished. Or maybe because it's on my mind. It's still haunting me. It's probably the most intense thing I've written this year, both in nature and in what it was like to write it. Those last three lines and everything that went into them are seared into my mind as if forever, and there are phrases I am still turning over, a month or two after I wrote them and called them done. And there are parts that I love, simply love. I'd never put that much sheer effort and curiosity and detail into a simple physical description of somebody. Possibly the single paragraph I was most proud of and in love with in recent history (ie, the past couple of months) was that paragraph describing Spike, what Vicious has noticed about him. Often, when I'm writing, I feel like I'm chronicling vague images, fragments of movies, films and watercolors and distant memories and every story is painted in a different style. But in that paragraph, just for a moment, I was somehow writing about something present, something real and three-dimensional and existing in every sense; I was somehow writing about somebody who doesn't even exist but who I knew, even if only physically, and I spent most of a paragraph listing his flaws and idiosyncracies and that somehow made him even more beautiful. And there were other parts of Red Bird that were like that, but few quite as intensely. And there are some parts that still seem true.
For the other two fandoms: Sidhe and Nails and Sugar Cube Trails (often called the OLDfic) and Talvi-Asumi. I'm intensely proud of the last part of the OLDfic, the epilogue. I don't understand it at all, and I don't understand why it has to be, but somehow the rhythm of it means something terribly, terribly deeper than what actually happens. (And nobody's yet seen this part. Oh, I hope I can finish it off soon.) And I'm rather proud of the rest of the fic as well, just because it's stylistically rather different than most of my stuff, and trying to pin down Tam's voice forced me to simultaneously be more flowery and more concise. It was a fic that forced me to go over it, to actually edit it and try to make it better; all three of these fics I've listed here are, and I didn't expect that to happen either, but maybe that's why they are.
Talvi-Asumi came utterly out of nowhere, and in terrifying ambiguity from the first, and from somewhere very deep in my mind, probably where it had been fermenting ever since I first saw "Basics I" and Suder mentioned that he'd been talking to Kes and I wondered what the hell that conversation might be like. I've posted only cookies for that fic, and nothing yet particularly demonstrative of what it actually is. It came to me like no other fic has, and writing it was like writing no other fic has been. And it itself is...two people having long rambling conversations about nothing in particular but perhaps about everything, italicized and abstract and often ambiguous summaries, and long rambles about Vulcan linguistics. The closest thing to anything happening is a brief game with Vulcan hand signals. And yet it all is terribly important to me, and means something that lies very deep.
At the same time, this general trend sometimes scares me. At the shallow level simply because I'm putting more and more effort into less and less finished text; I'm losing the ability to spin out pages and pages of decent writing, the kind of writing you need to stitch a plot together, with relatively little effort; and I'm worrying terribly about this because I want to be able to write long things, and I have long ideas, and The Wintering is still waiting for me someday. At the deep level, I worry at times that I'm being too bogged down in style and subtlety at the expense of plot and character interaction, that I'm getting too vague and poetic and into a style I can only think of as intellislashy (thank you, HP fandom), and I want to be able to do more than that; and I worry that this style that has come to be my most involved and beloved work recently is something I could never translate to original fiction, and I want to be able to do more than fanfic.
4. Did you take any writing risks this year? (See above for unexpected pairings, etc.) What did you learn from them?
I suppose I took a risk in those stories where nothing happened, and lavishing all that attention and intensity upon them. Or really, I took a risk in letting myself fully accept that when "nothing happens" in a story that story can still be meaningful, deeply meaningful, and say interesting things. To me, that is. Some of this recent stuff has stuck very deeply, only as deeply as perhaps the DMVs, and those are very action-intense and plotty as well as containing the more contemplative side.
On a shallower level, I took a major stylistic/setup risk with Impossible, with that whole second-person-unindicated-dialogue-purely-odd thing. That I think worked.
I feel like I took some sort of risk, some sort of smut-writer-breaking-new-ground move, with the last scene of Red Bird. Perhaps simply because the idea was so intense in my mind. And that seems to have come off rather well. Although the riskiest part of Red Bird was the opening, the little italics thing, which I'm still not terribly fond of anymore but it seems to work quite well for others, give them the same effect it gave me when I first wrote it. So there other's opinions have prevailed upon me.
Not exactly a risk, perhaps, but I'm allowing myself new freedom in whether or not I have a beta. There are some pieces that I just don't feel like getting betaed, that I don't edit much myself, that I post pretty much first-draft; and for a while, especially in the HP fandom where there's much more of a formalized Thou Shalt Be Betaed, I'd get those pieces betaed, and get absolutely nothing out of the process. A Half a Conquest was the first fic I ever posted unbetaed in that fandom (not counting the unedited and not-really-posted chaos that is the Snake Pit continuation), but in my mind quite a few of my earlier one-shots seem unbetaed, simply because nobody I've ever worked with (including the delightful
mctabby, who's been fantastic with Lexicon and the OLDfic, and an RL friend of mine who is one of the most insightful and detailed editors I've met in a lit class or out of it) has ever managed to say anything useful about those many little two-page things that crawl out of me every once in a while. So eventually I gave up; Some People, Black Bird Jeopardy, and Blue Bird Rhapsody were all posted having never seen the light of beta, because I didn't particularly want or need to get them betaed. They were things to be written, posted, quick, done with. On the other paw, I knew nearly from the beginning that I wanted and needed a beta for the oft-mentioned Red Bird, and that I wanted switchknife to be it; I needed somebody to bounce that off of, with the parts I loved and the last scene that was just aching to burst out of me and into somebody else's head and that wibbler of an opening. And I need a beta on the OLDfic, and I'll probably need several for Talvi-Asumi, if and when it ever reaches that point. (That fic, more than any other I've mentioned, I've realized I'm writing mainly for my own benefit. Readers are secondary, almost unnecessary at this point, and I doubt many people, even in that fandom, would understand it. Betas on the other hand, if I am ready for them, because that fic brings out the perfectionist in me. Damn Vulcans.) And with the short pieces, the little things, if I need to edit them myself, I can; I did ferocious things to The Passing Book (which I actually wrote, I believe, last year, but it lurked untouched in the depths of my computer for a long long while), all without a beta.*gasps for breath*
And I could probably go on much longer about various things at various times and what readers have done for me, but I won't.
The failures on these risks: obviously there have also been times when no beta has meant nobody to catch stupid errors. And I found myself editing quite a few of those out of the short Bebop fics I posted sans beta, particularly Black Bird. (On the other paw, it wasn't after beta and editing and many readings and reviews by many people that
telepwen caught a very embarassing grammar error in So Sayeth Death [which I just realized is not yet on Skyehawke! meep!]. So, with due apologies to the gods monitoring annoying cliche use, nobody's perfect.) And I've probably scared some people off of some of my fics. But there are certain times when I want to post without a beta/editor and enjoy the freedom to do so in the online fanfic world. It's like going about naked.5. Do you have any fanfic or profic goals for the New Year?
Fanfic: Finishing. Finishings are the only goals I ever need to set in fanfiction. The rest of it wrenches itself out of me whether I like it or not.
Original[notyetpro]fic: PriNoWriMo. And then doing good work for the short stories class I'm in next term. And then maybe applying to Odyssey. And probably doing some writing-related thing for my senior project. And...and...beginning. Launching. Getting back into the groove. Because I used to write original fic with far greater ease and flow. Really.
Hm. And here's last year's version. And I'm still only in the very preliminary phases of doing that wrap-up I rambled about at the end.
Which I still do want to do. Although at this moment that's secondary to following my muse through what it has to say about Bebop and assorted other anime.
*wince*