Entry tags:
Author's Notes: Year in Review
I'm a few days late, but that's sort of my life these days *shrug* Oh, well. It's always fun to compile my yearly retrospective, so on with the show!
Well, today marks my fandom anniversary, as close as I can tell. I’m not exactly sure when I first dipped my toes into the fanfic/fanart world; I watched the Inuyasha anime and read the manga up-to-date sometime during the summer of 2007, and then started looking for fanart, which lead to fanfic, which lead to Christmas ’07 as a Tales from the House of the Moon timesink, which lead to even more reading of ‘major fandom works.’ But I *do* know that on March 11, 2008 I signed up for an account at Media Miner and posted the first three chapters of Every Heart, with no small amount of trepidation.
The rest, as they say, is history…
2008 in review | 2009 in review | 2010 in review | 2011 in review | 2012 in review | 2013 in review
Stats:
Story Stats:
Total words written (as accounted for in MS Word): 50,977
Total words by fandom:
• Baby-Sitters Club: 19,277
• Daria: 4,739
• Sweet Valley: 24,018
• Tangled: 2,943
Total stories written (started, WIP, completed): 12
• Total number of drabbles (100-500 words): 0
• Total number of oneshots (501+ words): 11
• Total number of completed multichapter fics: 0
• Total number of WIP multichapter fics: 2
• Total number of completed series: 0
• Total number of WIP series: 4
Most reviewed stories [title (FANDOM, pairing), # of reviews compiled across all archives]
• Fleeting (IY, Sesshoumaru/Kagome): 461
• Collected Works (IY, various): 202
• Fragments (IY, Miroku/Sango): 141
• The Best Friends You’ll Ever Have (BSC, various): 136
• Allegiance (IY, Sesshoumaru/Kagome): 118
Challenges:
Challenges started/ongoing: 3 (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
un_love_you prompt table, ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
babysitters100 prompt table, cottoncandy_bingo prompt table)
Challenges completed: 1 (Summer Mini Challenge prompt table)
Epics...
• Longest completed fic = Every Heart (73,171 words)
• Longest WIP fic = Fleeting (107,765 words)
2014 Goals ~ How did I do?
Here’s the list of goals I made at the end of last year’s post, as goals I wanted to accomplish this year…so: did I succeed, fail, or go off in a completely different direction?
• Finish Fleeting. Failed. Didn't even come close to updating in any form or fashion; my IY muse deserted me completely :(
• Finish mycottoncandy_bingo card. Failed, though I suppose filling 4 out of 5 prompts ain't bad :P Plus the comm kinda went bust, which sucked.
• Start writing BSC fic again. SUCCEEDED! In a major way, thanks tofandom_stocking and the CA Diaries exchange ♥
• Actually write for the Summer Mini Challenge. Succeeded! I finished a table for the very first time!!
• Up my recommendations game. Succeeded! I did update all of my rec lists, but only once. I am still woefully out of date :-/
But what are your thoughts on yaoi?
2014 was the first year that fandom, for me, expanded substantially beyond fanfic.
2014 started off promisingly. At the end of April, I continued on with mycottoncandy_bingo card by posting my first (and, to date, only) Tangled oneshot, “Homecoming.” It was a truly rare moment when the inspiration for a story hit so hard and strong that I had to drop everything so that I could tend to it. It’s a nice feeling; I wish it happened more often.
In May, I posted up my updated fic recs. I also started doing a light edit of Stacy in Bloom, partially in hopes that I would be able to pick it back up after over two years of latency. (My current record for reviving dead WIPs is 37 months, but this will probably surpass that, unfortunately.)
June saw two more prompts on my mycottoncandy_bingo card filled: an Enid-centric SVH Sophomores fic, “Like a Prayer” and the Daria fic that had been languishing on my hard drive for about six months, “A Hope of Doubt.” I also posted the tables for my annual Summer Mini Challenge.
Then came July, and the World Cup. Suddenly, my summer found a lot of excitement, personal fulfillment, and a new sports obsession.
I’ve been following World Cups since 2006. I was hooked on it because it was all my favorite tennis players could talk about during Roland Garros and Wimbledon that year. I flipped channels, found a couple of games, and started rooting for different teams to make it. One of those teams was Germany, which was enjoying a renaissance thanks to a youthful team and a youthful coach in the form of Jurgen Klinsmann. Germany ended up third that year, but it was a pretty decent showing for the hosts, and they became one of the teams of my heart ♥
I have very little memory of the 2010 WC. I remember the vuvuzelas, but not much else because I didn’t actually get to watch the games – I had to follow livecast commentary on my computer at work. My favorite teams did well – Germany came in third again, and the Netherlands were runners up – but I was bitterly, bitterly disappointed by the final. And I promptly put it in the back of my mind.
This time around, the World Cup was in Brazil, which meant the games were happening in my time zone and I could follow them – and watch them – in real time. I watched just about every game of the entire tournament. The group stage was thrilling and exciting and there was a bit media blitz here in the States because the USMNT had snagged Jurgen Klinsmann for their head coach. I went into the tourney curious about how far his US team could go given their woeful inability to actually play football, but it was the German team that pretty soon caught my eye, and I found myself rooting wholeheartedly for them. So many of the players were the same ones I’d cheered on eight years before, so there was a nice familiarity about the team for me. I felt like I knew these players, and they played in such a beautiful cohesive unit that it was hard not to fall for them.
There were plenty of other teams of my heart – including the Dutch Oranje Army – that did well. The US did surprisingly well, too, much to the delight of my supervisor at work. I was glad when Germany beat them, though, and headed into the knockout rounds as the winners of their group.
This time around, I followed the minute-by-minute match reporting on the Guardian’s website, and it was amazing. I also DVRed the games I wanted to see/keep, and it was a struggle finding stuff to delete so that I could get all of the coverage. ESPN’s coverage was truly kickass. They had some great commentators and analysts and the coverage was a football fan’s dream. Considering all I gripe about them for their lousy tennis coverage, this was a pleasant surprise, indeed.
Anyway. My July was eaten by the WC (and to a lesser extent Wimbledon) and I cried when Germany won. It was such an overwhelming moment of joy for me, because sport rarely goes my way. On top of the team winning the tournament, my personal standout star won the Golden Glove as best goalkeeper. Win-win, indeed.
I was a latecomer to the Manuel Neuer bandwagon, by German standards at least, but like a lot of the rest of the world, I discovered him because of his amazing performance at this tournament. I found a couple of great blogs on Tumblr and followed them and began to learn more about his career in Germany. I found the Bundesliga YouTube channel and glommed it over a weekend. As August rolled around, I knew that I had a new hobby: I was going to follow the Bundesliga for the first time through an entire season. A lot of the German national team plays in Germany, so why not?
After the World Cup, I contributed to a fanbook that one of the Tumblr people made to give to Neuer. The magic of the WC – and the inspiration of a new favorite athlete – reignited my creative side. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my first fic post-WC for my Summer Mini Challenge table was nominally about the World Cup. “Opposites Attract” was also my first BSC fic in over a year, and it gave me a new appreciation for one of my least-favorite characters, in the form of Abby Stevenson. Now that we had soccer to bond over, my block against her lifted.
Also in August, I caught most of the Every Simpsons Ever marathon on FXX, which turned me into a fan of the show about 25 years too late, LOL. I still enjoy watching reruns of the earlier seasons when they come on, and it’s my preferred way to relax and de-stress after work these days.
The Summer Mini Challenge really heated up in the home stretch of September, and I managed to finish a table for the very first time (I was very excited, LOL). I serialized my SVH sophomore-year fic after finishing Love is a Battlefield and Like to Get to Know You, my first foray into Steve/Tricia fic. Re-reading their part of the SVH canon gave me one of my unyielding canon conspiracy theories, and I finished out my table with the first two installments of Wish Upon a Star, my headcanon for Steve/Tricia in the final few months of her life. It’s basically multichaptered smut, which is not a strength of mine, but was a challenge I was willing to engage.
There were also some good old-fashioned wankfests last year, including the Neil Harman plagiarism scandal, which ruined the career of a beloved tennis writer, Kathleen Hale dramarama, and the Ellora’s Cave legal battle vs Dear Author. This really made me miss![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
psyco_chick32, my wank-watching partner-in-crime, because I’m sure she would’ve had some hilarious choice commentary on it all.
In November, the official film about the Germany World Cup win was released (in Germany, at least), and in December,fandom_stocking happened. I got on a real BSC kick for fandom_stocking, which was a lot of fun. I went back to my very favorite characters and OTPs to knock out some fics for some of my favorite people. There was The Day the Earth Turned Upside Down for baseballchica03, Double Date for desertvixen, and The Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing for ozqueen. I also indulged in a bit of schmoopy romance, writing an SVH Steve/Tricia Christmas fic, The First Noel, for mkrobinson.
The BSC lovefest continued into the new year, whenlucida announced the California Diaries Fic Exchange. I decided to sign up, even though I still owe giftfic from about five years ago, because I love these characters and agree that they deserve to have more fic in the world devoted to them. As part of the challenge, I ended up putting together two character guides, one for Jill Henderson and one for Carol Olson-Schafer. It was extremely helpful for me to compile these, not only because they pertained specifically to my giftee’s prompts, but because it was a good way to get through the high points of all 15 diaries without having to sit down and read through all of them.
I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I’d actually written more fic this year than last, because it felt like I spent more of my limited fannish time doing other things – following football (via radio, TV, and Tumblr), and tennis (albeit not as closely as I used to), and whining to myself about all the fic that I haven’t finished. I wish I had the time that I had when I was in grad school to devote to my writing, because I miss it a great deal, and I hate writing in fits and starts, but I’ll take something over nothing. Following football (and the Bundesliga in particular) has been interesting, especially as a fan in the US where football is not really a thing. I am now open about my intense love of the German NT, having purchased several jerseys and a fan scarf that I wore during the winter months as a regular scarf. Most of my Christmas goodies from 2014 revolved around the Beautiful Game and getting to know more about it. A DVR crash in late August forced me to upload the games onto my computer for preservation and safekeeping. Now I just need to find the time to do the same for the Champions League and European qualifying games… :) All I can say is, it’s a good thing I don’t get the channel that carries the Bundesliga in the US or else I wouldn’t have any recording space left at all, LOL.
My fannish interests have shifted away from Dreamwidth somewhat. Both Tumblr and Twitter played a bigger role in getting my fannish fix than DW or LJ. It makes me wistful, because I miss the communities we used to have, but I suppose this is time marching on. As long as I have the ability to, I’m going to write. It’s my strongest and most comforting creative outlet. I will never make money off of it, and it’s been a bit hard to come to terms with that, but we gotta do what we gotta do to keep ourselves sane. Here’s to another fun year of surprises and happiness!
Personal favorite stories (listed in chronological order)
• SVH Sophomores: Like a Prayer (June 3, 2014)
• Opposites Attract (August 29, 2014)
• SVH Sophomores: Love is a Battlefield (September 1, 2014)
• The Freshman Essay (February 27, 2015)
Goals for the next 12 months:
• Finish something. ANYTHING! There are so many fics that are inches away from completion. If I manage to finish any of them in the next twelve months, that will be a monumental achievement.
• Do another Baby-Sitters Club character guide. I have several characters in mind, and doing these also stokes my muse.
• Pie in the sky goal: update the KI OTP manifesto. Now that I have access to the full six seasons of Kids Incorporated, I really want to update my OTP manifesto to include every single moment.
Well, today marks my fandom anniversary, as close as I can tell. I’m not exactly sure when I first dipped my toes into the fanfic/fanart world; I watched the Inuyasha anime and read the manga up-to-date sometime during the summer of 2007, and then started looking for fanart, which lead to fanfic, which lead to Christmas ’07 as a Tales from the House of the Moon timesink, which lead to even more reading of ‘major fandom works.’ But I *do* know that on March 11, 2008 I signed up for an account at Media Miner and posted the first three chapters of Every Heart, with no small amount of trepidation.
The rest, as they say, is history…
2008 in review | 2009 in review | 2010 in review | 2011 in review | 2012 in review | 2013 in review
Stats:
Story Stats:
Total words written (as accounted for in MS Word): 50,977
Total words by fandom:
• Baby-Sitters Club: 19,277
• Daria: 4,739
• Sweet Valley: 24,018
• Tangled: 2,943
Total stories written (started, WIP, completed): 12
• Total number of drabbles (100-500 words): 0
• Total number of oneshots (501+ words): 11
• Total number of completed multichapter fics: 0
• Total number of WIP multichapter fics: 2
• Total number of completed series: 0
• Total number of WIP series: 4
Most reviewed stories [title (FANDOM, pairing), # of reviews compiled across all archives]
• Fleeting (IY, Sesshoumaru/Kagome): 461
• Collected Works (IY, various): 202
• Fragments (IY, Miroku/Sango): 141
• The Best Friends You’ll Ever Have (BSC, various): 136
• Allegiance (IY, Sesshoumaru/Kagome): 118
Challenges:
Challenges started/ongoing: 3 (
un_love_you prompt table, babysitters100 prompt table, cottoncandy_bingo prompt table)Challenges completed: 1 (Summer Mini Challenge prompt table)
Epics...
• Longest completed fic = Every Heart (73,171 words)
• Longest WIP fic = Fleeting (107,765 words)
2014 Goals ~ How did I do?
Here’s the list of goals I made at the end of last year’s post, as goals I wanted to accomplish this year…so: did I succeed, fail, or go off in a completely different direction?
• Finish Fleeting. Failed. Didn't even come close to updating in any form or fashion; my IY muse deserted me completely :(
• Finish my
cottoncandy_bingo card. Failed, though I suppose filling 4 out of 5 prompts ain't bad :P Plus the comm kinda went bust, which sucked.• Start writing BSC fic again. SUCCEEDED! In a major way, thanks to
fandom_stocking and the CA Diaries exchange ♥• Actually write for the Summer Mini Challenge. Succeeded! I finished a table for the very first time!!
• Up my recommendations game. Succeeded! I did update all of my rec lists, but only once. I am still woefully out of date :-/
But what are your thoughts on yaoi?
2014 was the first year that fandom, for me, expanded substantially beyond fanfic.
2014 started off promisingly. At the end of April, I continued on with my
cottoncandy_bingo card by posting my first (and, to date, only) Tangled oneshot, “Homecoming.” It was a truly rare moment when the inspiration for a story hit so hard and strong that I had to drop everything so that I could tend to it. It’s a nice feeling; I wish it happened more often.In May, I posted up my updated fic recs. I also started doing a light edit of Stacy in Bloom, partially in hopes that I would be able to pick it back up after over two years of latency. (My current record for reviving dead WIPs is 37 months, but this will probably surpass that, unfortunately.)
June saw two more prompts on my my
cottoncandy_bingo card filled: an Enid-centric SVH Sophomores fic, “Like a Prayer” and the Daria fic that had been languishing on my hard drive for about six months, “A Hope of Doubt.” I also posted the tables for my annual Summer Mini Challenge.Then came July, and the World Cup. Suddenly, my summer found a lot of excitement, personal fulfillment, and a new sports obsession.
I’ve been following World Cups since 2006. I was hooked on it because it was all my favorite tennis players could talk about during Roland Garros and Wimbledon that year. I flipped channels, found a couple of games, and started rooting for different teams to make it. One of those teams was Germany, which was enjoying a renaissance thanks to a youthful team and a youthful coach in the form of Jurgen Klinsmann. Germany ended up third that year, but it was a pretty decent showing for the hosts, and they became one of the teams of my heart ♥
I have very little memory of the 2010 WC. I remember the vuvuzelas, but not much else because I didn’t actually get to watch the games – I had to follow livecast commentary on my computer at work. My favorite teams did well – Germany came in third again, and the Netherlands were runners up – but I was bitterly, bitterly disappointed by the final. And I promptly put it in the back of my mind.
This time around, the World Cup was in Brazil, which meant the games were happening in my time zone and I could follow them – and watch them – in real time. I watched just about every game of the entire tournament. The group stage was thrilling and exciting and there was a bit media blitz here in the States because the USMNT had snagged Jurgen Klinsmann for their head coach. I went into the tourney curious about how far his US team could go given their woeful inability to actually play football, but it was the German team that pretty soon caught my eye, and I found myself rooting wholeheartedly for them. So many of the players were the same ones I’d cheered on eight years before, so there was a nice familiarity about the team for me. I felt like I knew these players, and they played in such a beautiful cohesive unit that it was hard not to fall for them.
There were plenty of other teams of my heart – including the Dutch Oranje Army – that did well. The US did surprisingly well, too, much to the delight of my supervisor at work. I was glad when Germany beat them, though, and headed into the knockout rounds as the winners of their group.
This time around, I followed the minute-by-minute match reporting on the Guardian’s website, and it was amazing. I also DVRed the games I wanted to see/keep, and it was a struggle finding stuff to delete so that I could get all of the coverage. ESPN’s coverage was truly kickass. They had some great commentators and analysts and the coverage was a football fan’s dream. Considering all I gripe about them for their lousy tennis coverage, this was a pleasant surprise, indeed.
Anyway. My July was eaten by the WC (and to a lesser extent Wimbledon) and I cried when Germany won. It was such an overwhelming moment of joy for me, because sport rarely goes my way. On top of the team winning the tournament, my personal standout star won the Golden Glove as best goalkeeper. Win-win, indeed.
I was a latecomer to the Manuel Neuer bandwagon, by German standards at least, but like a lot of the rest of the world, I discovered him because of his amazing performance at this tournament. I found a couple of great blogs on Tumblr and followed them and began to learn more about his career in Germany. I found the Bundesliga YouTube channel and glommed it over a weekend. As August rolled around, I knew that I had a new hobby: I was going to follow the Bundesliga for the first time through an entire season. A lot of the German national team plays in Germany, so why not?
After the World Cup, I contributed to a fanbook that one of the Tumblr people made to give to Neuer. The magic of the WC – and the inspiration of a new favorite athlete – reignited my creative side. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my first fic post-WC for my Summer Mini Challenge table was nominally about the World Cup. “Opposites Attract” was also my first BSC fic in over a year, and it gave me a new appreciation for one of my least-favorite characters, in the form of Abby Stevenson. Now that we had soccer to bond over, my block against her lifted.
Also in August, I caught most of the Every Simpsons Ever marathon on FXX, which turned me into a fan of the show about 25 years too late, LOL. I still enjoy watching reruns of the earlier seasons when they come on, and it’s my preferred way to relax and de-stress after work these days.
The Summer Mini Challenge really heated up in the home stretch of September, and I managed to finish a table for the very first time (I was very excited, LOL). I serialized my SVH sophomore-year fic after finishing Love is a Battlefield and Like to Get to Know You, my first foray into Steve/Tricia fic. Re-reading their part of the SVH canon gave me one of my unyielding canon conspiracy theories, and I finished out my table with the first two installments of Wish Upon a Star, my headcanon for Steve/Tricia in the final few months of her life. It’s basically multichaptered smut, which is not a strength of mine, but was a challenge I was willing to engage.
There were also some good old-fashioned wankfests last year, including the Neil Harman plagiarism scandal, which ruined the career of a beloved tennis writer, Kathleen Hale dramarama, and the Ellora’s Cave legal battle vs Dear Author. This really made me miss
psyco_chick32, my wank-watching partner-in-crime, because I’m sure she would’ve had some hilarious choice commentary on it all.In November, the official film about the Germany World Cup win was released (in Germany, at least), and in December,
fandom_stocking happened. I got on a real BSC kick for fandom_stocking, which was a lot of fun. I went back to my very favorite characters and OTPs to knock out some fics for some of my favorite people. There was The Day the Earth Turned Upside Down for baseballchica03, Double Date for desertvixen, and The Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing for ozqueen. I also indulged in a bit of schmoopy romance, writing an SVH Steve/Tricia Christmas fic, The First Noel, for mkrobinson.The BSC lovefest continued into the new year, when
lucida announced the California Diaries Fic Exchange. I decided to sign up, even though I still owe giftfic from about five years ago, because I love these characters and agree that they deserve to have more fic in the world devoted to them. As part of the challenge, I ended up putting together two character guides, one for Jill Henderson and one for Carol Olson-Schafer. It was extremely helpful for me to compile these, not only because they pertained specifically to my giftee’s prompts, but because it was a good way to get through the high points of all 15 diaries without having to sit down and read through all of them.I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I’d actually written more fic this year than last, because it felt like I spent more of my limited fannish time doing other things – following football (via radio, TV, and Tumblr), and tennis (albeit not as closely as I used to), and whining to myself about all the fic that I haven’t finished. I wish I had the time that I had when I was in grad school to devote to my writing, because I miss it a great deal, and I hate writing in fits and starts, but I’ll take something over nothing. Following football (and the Bundesliga in particular) has been interesting, especially as a fan in the US where football is not really a thing. I am now open about my intense love of the German NT, having purchased several jerseys and a fan scarf that I wore during the winter months as a regular scarf. Most of my Christmas goodies from 2014 revolved around the Beautiful Game and getting to know more about it. A DVR crash in late August forced me to upload the games onto my computer for preservation and safekeeping. Now I just need to find the time to do the same for the Champions League and European qualifying games… :) All I can say is, it’s a good thing I don’t get the channel that carries the Bundesliga in the US or else I wouldn’t have any recording space left at all, LOL.
My fannish interests have shifted away from Dreamwidth somewhat. Both Tumblr and Twitter played a bigger role in getting my fannish fix than DW or LJ. It makes me wistful, because I miss the communities we used to have, but I suppose this is time marching on. As long as I have the ability to, I’m going to write. It’s my strongest and most comforting creative outlet. I will never make money off of it, and it’s been a bit hard to come to terms with that, but we gotta do what we gotta do to keep ourselves sane. Here’s to another fun year of surprises and happiness!
Personal favorite stories (listed in chronological order)
• SVH Sophomores: Like a Prayer (June 3, 2014)
• Opposites Attract (August 29, 2014)
• SVH Sophomores: Love is a Battlefield (September 1, 2014)
• The Freshman Essay (February 27, 2015)
Goals for the next 12 months:
• Finish something. ANYTHING! There are so many fics that are inches away from completion. If I manage to finish any of them in the next twelve months, that will be a monumental achievement.
• Do another Baby-Sitters Club character guide. I have several characters in mind, and doing these also stokes my muse.
• Pie in the sky goal: update the KI OTP manifesto. Now that I have access to the full six seasons of Kids Incorporated, I really want to update my OTP manifesto to include every single moment.