Cathryn (formerly catslash) (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
remindmeofthe) wrote2010-01-03 10:45 pm
remindmeofthe) wrote2010-01-03 10:45 pm
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O HAY Yuletide reveal. Yeah, that kind of got lost for me in the last few days. I wrote "All of Denmark", a modernized Hamlet AU set at the beginning of WWII and drawing a little on actual events in Denmark at the time. It was fun to write and I thank my recipient for explicitly giving me permission to go for AUs or modernizations, so that I felt comfortable getting a little out there and settling on a premise that was a bit of a reach.
In the spirit of the thing, have that fic meme that's been going around!
Full-length fic:
"All Downhill From Here" - The Fix R; Reed/Violet, Grahame/Violet, Reed/Grahame. Approx. 1700 words.
"Old Road" - Supernatural/Watchmen movieverse, PG-13; gen AU. Approx. 2600 words.
"Just Like Everything Else" - The Fix, R; Reed/Grahame, prequel for "All Downhill From Here." Approx. 1600 words.
"Second Look" - Torchwood, PG-13; gen, unless you really really want it to be Owen/Ianto preslash. Approx. 6000 words.
"Full Circle" - Torchwood, PG; gen, AU. Approx. 1600 words.
untitled - Evita, R; Perón/Che. Approx. 700 words.
untitled - Dracula, the original novel, G; gen. Approx. 1200 words.
"Fixes What's Broke" - The Thick of It, PG-13; Nicola/Malcolm. Approx. 1200 words.
"All of Denmark" - Hamlet, PG; AU, gen. Approx. 1100 words.
Crossover snippets, requested or otherwise (and at some point I'll pull the requested ones into their own post; took me a year to do the last one, so it might be a while yet):
Supernatural/Dollhouse. Gen.
Supernatural/Les Misérables. Gen.
Doctor Who/Les Mis. Gen.
Good Omens/Les Mis. Gen.
The Fix/Torchwood. Grahame Chandler/Jack Harkness implied.
The Fix/Firefly/Milliways RP. Gen.
Chuck/Dollhouse. Gen.
Fandoms written in 2009
The Fix, Supernatural, Watchmen, Torchwood, Evita, Doctor Who, Dollhouse, Chuck, Good Omens, Firefly, Les Misérables, The Thick of It, Dracula, Hamlet.
Stats, etc.
Nine full-length fics, seven snippets (assuming that I remembered to put everything on the "fic" tag, which, let's pretend I did), for a total of sixteen fics in fourteen fandoms. I didn't do a word count on the snippets, but the full-length fics totalled roughly 17,700 words, for an average of about 1970.
I wrote almost all gen, with five fics focused on a total of seven pairings, two of which were het and one of which was incest (but got two fics). And, really, the hetfic was more gen, in my opinion, with the pairing being more of a catalyst for plot than the focus of it. Three of my fics were from a female perspective, the rest male. The most written fandom is a three-way tie between Supernatural, Les Misérables, and The Fix, but most of those were crossover snippets; aside from that crossover challenge, my fandoms were pretty evenly distributed, with one or two fics per fandom.
Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you'd predicted?
I never have expectations about how much I'm going to write, but I'm pretty astonished that I completed nine full-length fics. I would have guessed maybe five or six. I thought I'd written more snippets, but I guess I'm thinking of 2008, which I more or less did not stop writing snippets.
What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January?
Dracula fic, wtf. Not that I don't expect to write fic for nineteenth century novels, obviously, but I'd read and been bored by Dracula a long time ago, and never would have expected that reading it for a class would inspire me enough for a fic to get written.
"Fixes What's Broke" surprises me a little, too; much as it's not a shippy fic, it still has a non-canon het pairing front and center, and the number of those that I've written you could count on one hand and still have enough fingers left to hold a pen and write the number down. I'm not nearly as slash-focused as I used to be, but het is still not a thing that tends to interest me much.
What's your own favorite story of the year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you happiest?
"Second Look." I finished it, I finished it, I FUCKING FINISHED IT! That goddamn thing took me a year and countless permutations, and while I never quite consigned it to the fic scrapheap, I seriously doubted in my ability to ever get it done. I'm still not one hundred percent thrilled with the ending, but I'm so proud of having finished and posted a fic I invested so much thought and energy in struggling with, I can live with that.
Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?
I took a couple of runs at writing characters that make me nervous as a writer. The Doctor - specifically Ten, in this instance - and Malcolm Tucker are the types of characters that worry me. They're so distinctive, their personalities so strong and unique, with their own little quirks, that they are easier to screw up and overwrite than are most characters. I'm not comfortable with writing either of them, and writing Malcolm was especially difficult because I've had less exposure to him than I had to Ten at this point, but the stories I was writing required me to. So I did it anyway. I got quite a few compliments in comments on my characterization of Malcolm, which was a profound relief and a strong reminder that I need to try writing the characters that scare me the most more often. I can't improve if I don't push myself.
(I had trouble with Ianto in "Second Look," too, but that was mostly dealt with in 2008, and anyway my difficulty with him was the opposite: he's so underwritten/inconsistently written on the show that I had the worst time finding his personality before I could even write him. I didn't learn much except that writing fic for a show that doesn't fucking pay attention to some of its characters is a pain in the ass sometimes. And I already knew that.)
Do you have any fanfic or profic goals for the New Year?
To write stuff and have fun, at random, as I choose. And maybe to browse through the unfilled challenges list for Yuletide 2009. There's a TToI one I've already got my eye on . . .
From my past year of writing, what was ...
My best story
I really like "All Downhill From Here." The characterizations are solid, the style of the story - snide and with a plot that isn't quite believeable - fits the source material, and it's funny, dammit.
My most popular story
Going by comment count, "Old Road" by a mile. (So to speak.) This is due to fandom - it's no coincidence that it and "Three Things John Winchester Never Did With His Sons" are both my only full-length Supernatural fics and among the fics with the most comments I have ever, ever gotten.
Story of mine most under-appreciated by the universe, in my opinion
"All Downhill From Here." I blame the universe for not making The Fix infinitely more popular than it is. To be fair, though, it still got more comments than I thought it would, because my flist is awesome.
Most fun story to write
The Good Omens/Les Mis snippet. I cracked myself up with that, was surprised at how easily I slipped into GO's style even though I haven't read the book in a little while, and am still grateful to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
10littlebullets for suggesting it. ♥
Sexiest story
"Just Like Everything Else," by dint of the fact that it's the only thing I wrote that gets even close to explicitly sexual content.
Most "Holy crap, that's wrong, even for you" story
I'm not sure I have one of those this year. "Just Like Everything Else" is semi-explicit brotherly incest, sure, but that's not the wrongest thing I've ever written. That's not even close.
Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters
Man, all my fics do this, at least for characters I haven't given a ton of consideration to before. I learn a lot about them and often end up connected to them in a whole new way. Some of my favorite characters haven't become so until after I've written them. This year, I wrote for a lot of characters I'd already thought about in depth, but I think I can say that writing "Fixes What's Broke" reinforced my love for Nicola Murray, because Nicola is an intriguing character and writing about her required taking a closer look at why.
Hardest story to write
"Second Look." See above. It changed in my mind over and over, and it took me months to figure out where it was supposed to END. I kept making different decisions on when Owen would come back to his correct point in the timeline, and then going back to old decisions but with a twist, and then mixing two ideas into a new one, and it was going to be a long epic and it was going to be average length and I was going to go through the entire first series and part of the second and I was going to stop after "They Keep Killing Suzie" and OH MY FUCKING GOD I AM GOING CRAZY ALL OVER AGAIN JUST THINKING ABOUT IT. FUCK.
Biggest disappointment
"Full Circle." I was trying for something specific and didn't quite get there, and the result is disjointed, a little clumsy, and overdone. I usually get a decent number of comments on my Torchwood fic, despite my resolute disinterest in writing Jack/Ianto, but this one only got a few. And there's a very good reason for that - it didn't deserve more.
Most unintentionally telling story
. . . I have no idea. I think that's kinda the point; we tend not to notice what our writing says about ourselves until either some time (more than just a year) has passed or someone has pointed it out to us. I know I don't like writing smut and so tend to avoid it, and I know I don't write female characters very often, which I blame mostly on a dearth of female characters worth writing about. (Maybe it's worth noting that the women I did write fic about - Violet Chandler, Mary Winchester, and Nicola Murray - are all women willing to do less-than-moral things to get what they want?) So - any thoughts? What does my fic of the past year say about me?
In the spirit of the thing, have that fic meme that's been going around!
Full-length fic:
"All Downhill From Here" - The Fix R; Reed/Violet, Grahame/Violet, Reed/Grahame. Approx. 1700 words.
"Old Road" - Supernatural/Watchmen movieverse, PG-13; gen AU. Approx. 2600 words.
"Just Like Everything Else" - The Fix, R; Reed/Grahame, prequel for "All Downhill From Here." Approx. 1600 words.
"Second Look" - Torchwood, PG-13; gen, unless you really really want it to be Owen/Ianto preslash. Approx. 6000 words.
"Full Circle" - Torchwood, PG; gen, AU. Approx. 1600 words.
untitled - Evita, R; Perón/Che. Approx. 700 words.
untitled - Dracula, the original novel, G; gen. Approx. 1200 words.
"Fixes What's Broke" - The Thick of It, PG-13; Nicola/Malcolm. Approx. 1200 words.
"All of Denmark" - Hamlet, PG; AU, gen. Approx. 1100 words.
Crossover snippets, requested or otherwise (and at some point I'll pull the requested ones into their own post; took me a year to do the last one, so it might be a while yet):
Supernatural/Dollhouse. Gen.
Supernatural/Les Misérables. Gen.
Doctor Who/Les Mis. Gen.
Good Omens/Les Mis. Gen.
The Fix/Torchwood. Grahame Chandler/Jack Harkness implied.
The Fix/Firefly/Milliways RP. Gen.
Chuck/Dollhouse. Gen.
Fandoms written in 2009
The Fix, Supernatural, Watchmen, Torchwood, Evita, Doctor Who, Dollhouse, Chuck, Good Omens, Firefly, Les Misérables, The Thick of It, Dracula, Hamlet.
Stats, etc.
Nine full-length fics, seven snippets (assuming that I remembered to put everything on the "fic" tag, which, let's pretend I did), for a total of sixteen fics in fourteen fandoms. I didn't do a word count on the snippets, but the full-length fics totalled roughly 17,700 words, for an average of about 1970.
I wrote almost all gen, with five fics focused on a total of seven pairings, two of which were het and one of which was incest (but got two fics). And, really, the hetfic was more gen, in my opinion, with the pairing being more of a catalyst for plot than the focus of it. Three of my fics were from a female perspective, the rest male. The most written fandom is a three-way tie between Supernatural, Les Misérables, and The Fix, but most of those were crossover snippets; aside from that crossover challenge, my fandoms were pretty evenly distributed, with one or two fics per fandom.
Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you'd predicted?
I never have expectations about how much I'm going to write, but I'm pretty astonished that I completed nine full-length fics. I would have guessed maybe five or six. I thought I'd written more snippets, but I guess I'm thinking of 2008, which I more or less did not stop writing snippets.
What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January?
Dracula fic, wtf. Not that I don't expect to write fic for nineteenth century novels, obviously, but I'd read and been bored by Dracula a long time ago, and never would have expected that reading it for a class would inspire me enough for a fic to get written.
"Fixes What's Broke" surprises me a little, too; much as it's not a shippy fic, it still has a non-canon het pairing front and center, and the number of those that I've written you could count on one hand and still have enough fingers left to hold a pen and write the number down. I'm not nearly as slash-focused as I used to be, but het is still not a thing that tends to interest me much.
What's your own favorite story of the year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you happiest?
"Second Look." I finished it, I finished it, I FUCKING FINISHED IT! That goddamn thing took me a year and countless permutations, and while I never quite consigned it to the fic scrapheap, I seriously doubted in my ability to ever get it done. I'm still not one hundred percent thrilled with the ending, but I'm so proud of having finished and posted a fic I invested so much thought and energy in struggling with, I can live with that.
Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?
I took a couple of runs at writing characters that make me nervous as a writer. The Doctor - specifically Ten, in this instance - and Malcolm Tucker are the types of characters that worry me. They're so distinctive, their personalities so strong and unique, with their own little quirks, that they are easier to screw up and overwrite than are most characters. I'm not comfortable with writing either of them, and writing Malcolm was especially difficult because I've had less exposure to him than I had to Ten at this point, but the stories I was writing required me to. So I did it anyway. I got quite a few compliments in comments on my characterization of Malcolm, which was a profound relief and a strong reminder that I need to try writing the characters that scare me the most more often. I can't improve if I don't push myself.
(I had trouble with Ianto in "Second Look," too, but that was mostly dealt with in 2008, and anyway my difficulty with him was the opposite: he's so underwritten/inconsistently written on the show that I had the worst time finding his personality before I could even write him. I didn't learn much except that writing fic for a show that doesn't fucking pay attention to some of its characters is a pain in the ass sometimes. And I already knew that.)
Do you have any fanfic or profic goals for the New Year?
To write stuff and have fun, at random, as I choose. And maybe to browse through the unfilled challenges list for Yuletide 2009. There's a TToI one I've already got my eye on . . .
From my past year of writing, what was ...
My best story
I really like "All Downhill From Here." The characterizations are solid, the style of the story - snide and with a plot that isn't quite believeable - fits the source material, and it's funny, dammit.
My most popular story
Going by comment count, "Old Road" by a mile. (So to speak.) This is due to fandom - it's no coincidence that it and "Three Things John Winchester Never Did With His Sons" are both my only full-length Supernatural fics and among the fics with the most comments I have ever, ever gotten.
Story of mine most under-appreciated by the universe, in my opinion
"All Downhill From Here." I blame the universe for not making The Fix infinitely more popular than it is. To be fair, though, it still got more comments than I thought it would, because my flist is awesome.
Most fun story to write
The Good Omens/Les Mis snippet. I cracked myself up with that, was surprised at how easily I slipped into GO's style even though I haven't read the book in a little while, and am still grateful to
10littlebullets for suggesting it. ♥Sexiest story
"Just Like Everything Else," by dint of the fact that it's the only thing I wrote that gets even close to explicitly sexual content.
Most "Holy crap, that's wrong, even for you" story
I'm not sure I have one of those this year. "Just Like Everything Else" is semi-explicit brotherly incest, sure, but that's not the wrongest thing I've ever written. That's not even close.
Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters
Man, all my fics do this, at least for characters I haven't given a ton of consideration to before. I learn a lot about them and often end up connected to them in a whole new way. Some of my favorite characters haven't become so until after I've written them. This year, I wrote for a lot of characters I'd already thought about in depth, but I think I can say that writing "Fixes What's Broke" reinforced my love for Nicola Murray, because Nicola is an intriguing character and writing about her required taking a closer look at why.
Hardest story to write
"Second Look." See above. It changed in my mind over and over, and it took me months to figure out where it was supposed to END. I kept making different decisions on when Owen would come back to his correct point in the timeline, and then going back to old decisions but with a twist, and then mixing two ideas into a new one, and it was going to be a long epic and it was going to be average length and I was going to go through the entire first series and part of the second and I was going to stop after "They Keep Killing Suzie" and OH MY FUCKING GOD I AM GOING CRAZY ALL OVER AGAIN JUST THINKING ABOUT IT. FUCK.
Biggest disappointment
"Full Circle." I was trying for something specific and didn't quite get there, and the result is disjointed, a little clumsy, and overdone. I usually get a decent number of comments on my Torchwood fic, despite my resolute disinterest in writing Jack/Ianto, but this one only got a few. And there's a very good reason for that - it didn't deserve more.
Most unintentionally telling story
. . . I have no idea. I think that's kinda the point; we tend not to notice what our writing says about ourselves until either some time (more than just a year) has passed or someone has pointed it out to us. I know I don't like writing smut and so tend to avoid it, and I know I don't write female characters very often, which I blame mostly on a dearth of female characters worth writing about. (Maybe it's worth noting that the women I did write fic about - Violet Chandler, Mary Winchester, and Nicola Murray - are all women willing to do less-than-moral things to get what they want?) So - any thoughts? What does my fic of the past year say about me?
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thanks for adding me :D curious why tho
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I'm fascinated that you like it and you're across the pond!
recently i was at a conference with gordon brown's special advisor and someone asked her if it was like ttoi and she said 'only in the sense that it's a fun' and someone whispered 'yeah because she's malcolm tucker' and they got a DEATH GLARE!
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Hahaha that's hilarious!