Author's Notes: Year in Review

[luxken27]

I'm way late with this, but I guess better late than never? =)

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 | 2014 in review


Stats:

Story Stats:
Total words written (as accounted for in MS Word): ): 55,169 [52,062 published]

Total words by fandom:
• Baby-sitters Club: 13,128 [10,021 published]
• Ever After: 2,078
• Kids Incorporated: 7,012
• Monarch of the Glen: 23,280
• Sweet Valley High: 9,671

Total stories written (started, WIP, completed): 17
• Total number of drabbles (100-500 words): 0
• Total number of oneshots (501+ words): 11
• Total number of completed multichapter fics: 1
• Total number of WIP series: 3
• Total number of unpublished fics: 2

Most reviewed stories [title (FANDOM, pairing), # of reviews compiled across all archives]
• Fleeting (IY, Sesshoumaru/Kagome): 640
• The Best Friends You’ll Ever Have (BSC, various): 276
• Collected Works (IY, various): 181
• Fragments (IY, Miroku/Sango): 167
• Allegiance (IY, Sesshoumaru/Kagome): 128

Challenges:
Challenges started/ongoing: 4 (un_love_you prompt table, babysitters100 prompt table, Summer Mini Challenge prompt table, fandom_stocking holiday exchange)

Challenges completed: 2 (Summer Mini Challenge prompt table, fandom_stocking holiday exchange)

Epics...
• Longest completed fic = Every Heart (73,171 words)
• Longest WIP fic = Fleeting (107,765 words)


2015 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 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.
Done! =) I finished the multi-chapter Wish Upon a Star.

• Do another Baby-Sitters Club character guide. I have several characters in mind, and doing these also stokes my muse.
Done! =) I’ve added the Complete Guide to Charlie Thomas to my list of character guides.

• 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.
Nope – I barely touched much in the way of KI last year.


But what are your thoughts on yaoi?
“Fits and starts” doesn’t even begin to describe the fragmented fannish year that was 2015 for me.

I started my eighth year of fandom with the best of intentions, as I always do. I tried to get back into the writing game with two more entries in my “100 Songs That Have Moved Me” series in late March, but I got sucked into more wank-watching as the Ellora’s Cave lawsuit took another set of twists and turns, and then, of course, was the “e-book trees” bot that scraped random fics and ‘published’ them on a sketchy website for money – it grabbed four of mine, including at least one work-in-progress. I did have mine taken down before the sites themselves were wiped out, but it was still an annoying thing to have to deal with.

Mercifully, around the same time, I received a really sweet review for Fragments that reminded me that fanfic was worth writing, even years after the fact ♥

I had a wonderful hit of inspiration for a KI fic in May, and published the ooey-gooey lovefest that was Tell It to My Heart to celebrate my dearest KI friend’s birthday. It was a lot of fun to revisit one of the fandoms of my heart, and to write my oldest OTP from a fresh new angle. I think it also helped me, in the long run, with inspiration and experience that will help propel my epic fic Stacy in Bloom forward, even if there hasn’t been any evidence of it yet. I also finished up my multichapter smutfic Wish Upon a Star for the SVH fandom, and I was very proud (and relieved!) to not let yet another WIP drag on way too long. I started that fic as part of my 2014 Summer Mini Challenge fill, and the fact that I managed to finish it before the 2015 SMC was no mean feat.

I opened my fourth annual Summer Mini Challenge in June, but that wasn’t the biggest, most important, or even most exciting thing that happened that month for me. At the end of the month I received an email out of the blue from eggplantlady, apologizing for her role in the huge fight we had five years ago. To say I was surprised would be an understatement. I’ve often thought about that tumultuous period in my life, if only because it’s hard not to when thinking back to the good old days of having the “nice clique” in IY fandom, of the silly IYFG shenanigans, and of Kim, and how much I still miss her. I never blamed eggplantlady for any part of my flaming out of IY fandom, and I told her so – and we started piecing our friendship back together. It was – and still is – a really wonderful thing, because I miss those IY fandom days more than I care to admit most of the time, and with the end of the manga and LJ drift and life, in general, our group has slowly but surely gone our separate ways, so to have some of it come back together was really, really great. I’m very glad we’re friends again, and that IY has had a bit of a mini revival =) For this incarnation of my fandom identity, IY is where it all started, and it’s nice to still have that base, even if we have all moved on since.

July was a fairly productive month, with two more entries in my “100 Songs That Have Moved Me” series, and the first fill for my SMC table – Hit Me With Your Best Shot, a Sweet Valley Sophomores fic featuring my OT3 of Bruce Patman/Lila Fowler/tennis :D

I was still feeling somewhat restless, and decided to give myself a summer project: re-reading Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton series fifteen years after it was first published. Quinn is one of my all-time favorite authors, so I didn’t need much in the way of a push to jump back into her best-known series and perhaps rediscover a bit of my own writing mojo.

I only made it two books in before falling off a damn cliff into Monarch of the Glen near the end of my autumn vacation. I’d decided to have a movie-marathon-veg sort of day, and had just finished Ever After, in fact, when I decided that I wanted something distinctly British to watch and pulled the first series DVD off my shelf.

Oh, my God – it truly was like falling off a cliff. It was absolutely all-consuming – I couldn’t get enough. I could barely stop long enough to sleep, so weaning myself off of it enough to resume my heavy work schedule was incredibly difficult. I’d watch two-three episodes a night, sacrificing sleep for my squee, and sometimes squeeze in an episode before I left in the morning. I loved it, because there is nothing like that feeling of being in so deep with something so beautiful and wonderous and amazing ♥ I found an MotG tumblr and started chatting with the person who ran it, and we just kinda fed off of each other’s excitement. It was phenomenal :D

I ended up filling the rest of my SMC prompts with inspiration from that vacation – one Ever After oneshot and three pieces related to MotG – a oneshot, Fall Into the Sky; a writing exercise exploring the nuances of my favorite character, Lexie, and her confrontation with/reaction to Archie’s rejection of her feelings at the end of Series 2; and a 5K piece of meta exploring the exasperating cat-and-mouse relationship between Archie and Katrina, also in Series 2.

The MotG lovefest didn’t stop there – in October I published two more pieces, The Prodigal Son, a look at Lexie’s trepidation to the announcement of Archie’s return set before Series 1, and Paper Hearts, set during Series 3, which I described thusly: The easiest way to summarize this purpose of this story is to say "there wasn't enough kissing, so I added more kissing" :P

MotG giddiness also led me to learning how to make gifs. I spent a great deal of the fall and winter making gifsets and expanding my horizons to other series, namely KI – the introduction of regularly posted gifsets was a big hit at kidsincdaily. I don’t use anything difficult or sophisticated or expensive, and thus my gifs aren’t works of art, but they serve the purpose I need them to serve, which is squeeing, hehe :D

The only thing that slowed my MotG roll was knowing that halfway through the series, my OTP would leave – and not really being able to face that fact. I watched all the way up until the introduction of the series-destroying character in Series 4, and haven’t been able to move forward, not even as my ardor has cooled.

Life happened, as well, and I didn’t get back into the fannish swing of things until December rolled around – and with it, fandom_stocking. Somehow I got off on a huge Baby-sitters Club tangent – pretty much all I gifted was BSC work – and a spark ignited under my altship OTP of Charlie Thomas and Janine Kishi. I ended up writing a character guide for Charlie, and expanding my personal post-canon continuum into a full-blown series I named “Count Me In” after the very catchy Gary Lewis & the Playboys song of the same name.

I wrote four BSC fics for fandom_stocking, which were also added to my Best Friends collection as responses to my babysitters100 table: “En pointe” for lionessvalenti, “Cavorting with the Enemy” for baseballchica03 (an annual tradition, hehe), “Ante Up” for ozqueen, and “Of Music & Nail Polish” for imamaryanne. I also write a couple of as-of-yet unpublished fics that were inspired by my character guide to Charlie Thomas.

I was still mooning over “Count Me In” in the post-Christmas season, and ended up writing another piece of it – “A Question of Regret,” which I posted at the end of February.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that I’d written more last year than I had the year before, because it really did come in fits and starts. Sometimes it feels like a massive struggle to commit words to the page, mostly because I don’t feel like I have enough hours in the day to accomplish everything I need to (and want to). I work 50+ hours a week and still have to find time to fit in eating and sleeping and other hobbies. I am still a massive football fan, and am looking forward to the end of the domestic leagues, the latter stages of the Champions League, and the upcoming Euro 2016 tournament. Between that, Roland Garros, and Wimbledon, I have no idea when I’m going to have time to do the other things I want to accomplish – like finishing Fleeting, immersing myself into another TV series (Dr. Quinn, maybe?), finishing my Bridgerton re-reading project (and perhaps starting one for the Murder She Wrote novels), and committing more of my various fic series to paper.

And yes, I’d really like to finish Fleeting. I’ve been thinking about it quite a bit lately, and I’m hoping I can translate this momentum into the real thing, as I’ve only one more chapter and the epilogue left to write. It’s never too far from my mind, actually, even if it looks like I’ve forgotten about it. It’s a story that very much relies on me being in the right headspace, and somehow I’ve managed to maneuver myself back into it. So *fingers crossed* that I can get there, and finally put this one to rest. I’ve always had a hard time finishing my epic fics, and that is most definitely my magnum opus. I can see myself doing at least one more full series edit after completion, too – I want it to be perfect.


Personal favorite stories (listed in chronological order)
Tell It to My Heart (May 15, 2015)
Paper Hearts (October 18, 2015)
Cavorting with the Enemy (December 29, 2015)



Goals for the next 12 months:
• Finish something. ANYTHING! This seemed to work for me last year, so let’s get it a whirl again :D At the top of my list: finishing up Fleeting and the Bridgerton series re-read.
• Host another successful Summer Mini Challenge – which for me, personally, means completing a table for the third year in a row :D
• Continue to expand my horizons by writing in “new” fandoms. There are a couple of ideas bounding around in the back of my head that might find fruition sooner, rather than later.