Entry tags:
Author's Notes: Year in Review
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 | 2015 in review
Stats:
Story Stats:
Total words written (as accounted for in MS Word): 30,639
Total words by fandom:
• Baby-sitters Club: 12,251
• Daria: 2,019 [unpublished]
• Days of Our Lives: 2,015
• Kids Incorporated: 700
• Sweet Valley High: 13,654
Total stories written (started, WIP, completed): 11
Most reviewed stories [title (FANDOM, pairing), # of reviews compiled across all archives]
• Fleeting (IY, Sesshoumaru/Kagome): 642
• The Best Friends You’ll Ever Have (BSC, various): 308
• Collected Works (IY, various): 183
• Fragments (IY, Miroku/Sango): 167
• Allegiance (IY, Sesshoumaru/Kagome): 132
Challenges:
Challenges started/ongoing: 5 (![[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, Summer Mini Challenge prompt table, fandom_stocking holiday exchange, hetswap exchange)
Challenges completed: 3 (Summer Mini Challenge prompt table,fandom_stocking holiday exchange, hetswap exchange)
Epics...
• Longest completed fic = Every Heart (73,171 words)
• Longest WIP fic = Fleeting (107,765 words)
2016 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! 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.
Wow, I completely failed at this one. I did the opposite, in fact: started yet even more projects without finishing anything already on my plate *facepalm*
• Host another successful Summer Mini Challenge – which for me, personally, means completing a table for the third year in a row :D
Done! =)
• 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.
Nope - I didn't venture into any new fandoms last year - I barely had time for the ones I'm already active in :-/
2016: A Year in Review
Last year started off slowly. I published my first piece of fic in April, a little ficlet for KI, inspired by watching favorite song clips from 1985. Underneath the Starry Sky was actually a little prescient: it was the first piece of shameless domestic fluff for the year, but it was far from the only one.
Also in April, there was a revival, of sorts, of BSC fandom, with the nonnies over atfail_fandomanon sparking up discussion in several threads, which prompted ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ozqueen to dust off stoneybrook for awhile. This was a lot of fun, but it was also a little sad, because it reminded me of just how much I missed a vibrant, active BSC community.
I managed to fall off the cliff into my soap opera nostalgia around this time as well. I rediscovered the Last Blast teens from early 2000s Days of Our Lives, and started downloading clips to watch and gif. This obsession lasted for several months and sparked quite a few fandom follies. I started a sideblog,![[tumblr.com profile]](https://www.tumblr.com/favicon.ico)
classic-shelle. I used my stockpiled amazon points to buy the 50th anniversary Days coffee table book and fanfiction a published novel featuring my OTP. This was the guiltiest of guilty pleasures, but it was a ton of fun. I refined my gif skills (which I also put to use around this time, making performance gifsets for kidsincdaily), make a couple of new Tumblr acquaintances, and I wrote a 5K meta piece in June, comparing the storyline to that of my epic fandom opus Fleeting. I also wrote fic, even after promising myself I wouldn't. Obviously I have no self-control, LOL.
June was also the start of my annual Summer Mini Challenge. I had 11 SMCers this year as well as myself, and quite a few folks finished their tables (including me)! It was a lot of fun, as it usually is, even if it was on the quieter side this year.
I wrote 5 pieces in total, three for SVH and two for BSC. I had intended to only write SVH fic, focusing on my Sweet Valley Sophomores collection. I did that, but my fics also spawned a new series, 15-Love, following the Bruce/Lila summer fling prior to the start of the SVH canon. As the crunch deadline came, I switched gears, fulfilling the rest of my prompts with some BSC Charlie/Janine goodness :D
July was a huge month for me. Not only was it Euro 2016 time (and my babies Germany NT made it to the semis, a heartbreaking match they lost to hosts France), but I also went on a Designing Women kick, rewatching the first five seasons and deciding to start giffing Julia's speeches. The first one became my most popular Tumblr post by far, breaking 1K notes. I made it through the first fifteen episodes (none of which even came close to the response that the first Julia speech did), but have since put this project on hiatus.
I also had the most pleasant or surprises, when Avriel Hillman, aka TV Kristy, subscribed to my YouTube channel. I posted a video in her honor - the scene from The Baby-sitters Remember, recalling Kristy's Great Idea. I'm guessing she tweeted it or something, because it has received a surge of hits.
In August, I posted my final SMC pieces (The Cafeteria Conundrum and Stubborn). I also subscribed to my very first subscription box, The Nick Box. This is basically officially licensed nostalgia, so I was ALL ABOUT THAT, LOL. As much as I have enjoyed the boxes themselves (having received 2 thus far), the delivery has left much to be desired. I do not think I'll be re-upping my sub come August of this year.
At the end of August, I took my usual week-long vacation, and this year I fell headlong back into Daria and in connection, Linkin Park, as Mike Shinoda is my always-forever Trent Lane muse. I spent a very frustrating bit of time after my canon rewatch trying to write another Daria fic, but nothing was coming out right, so I stuck it in a drawer. I learned long ago to never delete my work, no matter how much I come to despise it, because chances are that I will be able to go back to it. And, sure enough, I've poked at it a bit over the last couple of weeks, and I think I can salvage it. Go figure :P
In September, my favorite currently-active tennis player, Stan Wawrinka, won the US Open, which capped my vacation in perfect style :D
October was fairly quiet. I did a series of Halloween posts forkidsincdaily. I cropped some classic Garfield cartoons for my Tumblr queue. And after the election fallout, I didn't feel like doing much of anything, except handing out hugs.
My fall fannish pursuits were mostly of the football variety, following Bayern Munich in the Bundesliga (and hoping against hope that RB Leipzig would stumble in their rise to the top). The final game of the season was absolutely delicious, as Bayern knocked Leipzig off their perch with a 3-0 win at home - the perfect way to start the winter break :D
I also fell headlong into classic Nancy Drew after discovering a cache of Applewood editions of the Mystery Stories series at my favorite secondhand store of awesome & win.impy was kind enough to send me the Appelwood edition of #7 The Clue in the Diary for Christmas ♥ My favorite Nancy Drew series is definitely Nancy Drew Files, which I also started to collect again.
I read quite a bit of Nancy Drew fic as well (most of it by the amazing![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
ndnickerson). I'm all about Ned/Nancy, and reading fic for them was strangely comforting. There's something about these characters that makes me feel very secure and indulgent, in a different way from any of my other nostalgia fandoms. I don't really know why, but when I need it, I knew exactly where to get my fix.
December brought the advent offandom_stocking, and my usual rush of Charlie/Janine feels :P fandom_stocking was pretty slim pickings this year; I only ended up posting 2 giftfics, and I've pretty much decided I'm not going to do the exchange anymore because it is so badly run. I'd rather give people giftfics that they will be able to see immediately instead of forcing them to wait a month for no good reason at all.
My fics were a hit, I think :) I wrote some Charlie + Patrick family dynamics forozqueen, The Final Goodbye, and some shameless domestic fluff for Desert Vixen, Just Janine. My very first fic of 2017 was also BSC post-canon Charlie/Janine, another installment of my Count Me In series, entitled Confession & Plea.
On a personal note, I joined the 21st century and received a Kindle for Christmas, which sent me out into the wilds of free e-books. I've kinda made it my personal challenge to only put freebies on my Kindle, with one notable exception -paynesgrey's work. I bought her first novel, Unbridled, pretty much the day she published it, and this year I received an autographed printed copy as well, which I treasure ♥ It's not that often I can say I know a published writer, after all! (I kinda love that my review is the top one at amazon, at least for the moment. How fitting :P)
2017 has started off on a rather quiet note. The biggest news is definitely that I FINALLY updated the KI OTP manifesto, after three years of angsting about how I needed to, now that all the source material is available. It took me about six months to complete, but I unveiled it on Valentine's Day to a wonderful reception ♥ The essay didn't change much from the original version posted in 2011, but I put my gif skills to the ultimate challenge. I ended up up with 738 gifs to tell the tale of my ultimate OTP.
At the end of February, I participated in thehetswap exchange, but authors haven't been revealed yet. I can say that I am pleasantly surprised by the response to my fic, and that I'm looking forward to writing up the author's notes for it. It represents yet another new direction that my muse has decided to wander towards, LOL.
Wow. Recounting everything makes me realize that I was far more active in fandom than I realized. My fic word count has dropped like a stone, but I have done a lot in other areas, especially on Tumblr and with![[twitter.com profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/e0caa790ec10/-/twitter.com/favicon.ico)
kidsincdaily. Maybe that's why, when I received a FF.net review of my original fic Every Heart a couple of days ago, I found it especially poignant. I love that people are still reading the very first stories I ever posted, and that I'm still here and going strong, nine years later. Fandom has definitely evolved since 2008; my interests have shifted, and I have very little time to devote to fannish pursuits because of so-called "real life." And yet, in spite of everything that's happened, I kinda love the fact that I still talk to my IY friends on a nearly daily basis.
I suppose I find that strangely comforting as well, knowing that even though all of our lives have changed since 2008, we still put forth the effort to keep in touch. I ♥ you guys!
Personal favorite stories (listed in chronological order)
Rendezvous (August 15, 2016)
Goals for the next 12 months:
• Finish Fleeting. It's time. I've been ruminating on it for awhile, and it really does need to just be done already.
• Write at least one new chapter of Stacy in Bloom. I've had such a resurgence of love for KI that I really want to get back into my epic head-canon.
• Host another successful Summer Mini Challenge. It was quiet last year, but we had a lot of fun, and I finished my table! Here's hoping I can repeat that feat for a fourth year in a row :D
• Gif more Designing Women Julia Sugarbaker speeches. This was a lot of fun last year, and ultimately ended up on hiatus because of other projects demanding attention. The Tumblr gif limit increase should make this much easier, too.
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 | 2015 in review
Stats:
Story Stats:
Total words written (as accounted for in MS Word): 30,639
Total words by fandom:
• Baby-sitters Club: 12,251
• Daria: 2,019 [unpublished]
• Days of Our Lives: 2,015
• Kids Incorporated: 700
• Sweet Valley High: 13,654
Total stories written (started, WIP, completed): 11
Most reviewed stories [title (FANDOM, pairing), # of reviews compiled across all archives]
• Fleeting (IY, Sesshoumaru/Kagome): 642
• The Best Friends You’ll Ever Have (BSC, various): 308
• Collected Works (IY, various): 183
• Fragments (IY, Miroku/Sango): 167
• Allegiance (IY, Sesshoumaru/Kagome): 132
Challenges:
Challenges started/ongoing: 5 (
un_love_you prompt table, babysitters100 prompt table, Summer Mini Challenge prompt table, fandom_stocking holiday exchange, hetswap exchange)Challenges completed: 3 (Summer Mini Challenge prompt table,
fandom_stocking holiday exchange, hetswap exchange)Epics...
• Longest completed fic = Every Heart (73,171 words)
• Longest WIP fic = Fleeting (107,765 words)
2016 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! 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.
Wow, I completely failed at this one. I did the opposite, in fact: started yet even more projects without finishing anything already on my plate *facepalm*
• Host another successful Summer Mini Challenge – which for me, personally, means completing a table for the third year in a row :D
Done! =)
• 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.
Nope - I didn't venture into any new fandoms last year - I barely had time for the ones I'm already active in :-/
2016: A Year in Review
Last year started off slowly. I published my first piece of fic in April, a little ficlet for KI, inspired by watching favorite song clips from 1985. Underneath the Starry Sky was actually a little prescient: it was the first piece of shameless domestic fluff for the year, but it was far from the only one.
Also in April, there was a revival, of sorts, of BSC fandom, with the nonnies over at
fail_fandomanon sparking up discussion in several threads, which prompted ozqueen to dust off stoneybrook for awhile. This was a lot of fun, but it was also a little sad, because it reminded me of just how much I missed a vibrant, active BSC community.I managed to fall off the cliff into my soap opera nostalgia around this time as well. I rediscovered the Last Blast teens from early 2000s Days of Our Lives, and started downloading clips to watch and gif. This obsession lasted for several months and sparked quite a few fandom follies. I started a sideblog,
kidsincdaily), make a couple of new Tumblr acquaintances, and I wrote a 5K meta piece in June, comparing the storyline to that of my epic fandom opus Fleeting. I also wrote fic, even after promising myself I wouldn't. Obviously I have no self-control, LOL.June was also the start of my annual Summer Mini Challenge. I had 11 SMCers this year as well as myself, and quite a few folks finished their tables (including me)! It was a lot of fun, as it usually is, even if it was on the quieter side this year.
I wrote 5 pieces in total, three for SVH and two for BSC. I had intended to only write SVH fic, focusing on my Sweet Valley Sophomores collection. I did that, but my fics also spawned a new series, 15-Love, following the Bruce/Lila summer fling prior to the start of the SVH canon. As the crunch deadline came, I switched gears, fulfilling the rest of my prompts with some BSC Charlie/Janine goodness :D
July was a huge month for me. Not only was it Euro 2016 time (and my babies Germany NT made it to the semis, a heartbreaking match they lost to hosts France), but I also went on a Designing Women kick, rewatching the first five seasons and deciding to start giffing Julia's speeches. The first one became my most popular Tumblr post by far, breaking 1K notes. I made it through the first fifteen episodes (none of which even came close to the response that the first Julia speech did), but have since put this project on hiatus.
I also had the most pleasant or surprises, when Avriel Hillman, aka TV Kristy, subscribed to my YouTube channel. I posted a video in her honor - the scene from The Baby-sitters Remember, recalling Kristy's Great Idea. I'm guessing she tweeted it or something, because it has received a surge of hits.
In August, I posted my final SMC pieces (The Cafeteria Conundrum and Stubborn). I also subscribed to my very first subscription box, The Nick Box. This is basically officially licensed nostalgia, so I was ALL ABOUT THAT, LOL. As much as I have enjoyed the boxes themselves (having received 2 thus far), the delivery has left much to be desired. I do not think I'll be re-upping my sub come August of this year.
At the end of August, I took my usual week-long vacation, and this year I fell headlong back into Daria and in connection, Linkin Park, as Mike Shinoda is my always-forever Trent Lane muse. I spent a very frustrating bit of time after my canon rewatch trying to write another Daria fic, but nothing was coming out right, so I stuck it in a drawer. I learned long ago to never delete my work, no matter how much I come to despise it, because chances are that I will be able to go back to it. And, sure enough, I've poked at it a bit over the last couple of weeks, and I think I can salvage it. Go figure :P
In September, my favorite currently-active tennis player, Stan Wawrinka, won the US Open, which capped my vacation in perfect style :D
October was fairly quiet. I did a series of Halloween posts for
kidsincdaily. I cropped some classic Garfield cartoons for my Tumblr queue. And after the election fallout, I didn't feel like doing much of anything, except handing out hugs.My fall fannish pursuits were mostly of the football variety, following Bayern Munich in the Bundesliga (and hoping against hope that RB Leipzig would stumble in their rise to the top). The final game of the season was absolutely delicious, as Bayern knocked Leipzig off their perch with a 3-0 win at home - the perfect way to start the winter break :D
I also fell headlong into classic Nancy Drew after discovering a cache of Applewood editions of the Mystery Stories series at my favorite secondhand store of awesome & win.
impy was kind enough to send me the Appelwood edition of #7 The Clue in the Diary for Christmas ♥ My favorite Nancy Drew series is definitely Nancy Drew Files, which I also started to collect again. I read quite a bit of Nancy Drew fic as well (most of it by the amazing
December brought the advent of
fandom_stocking, and my usual rush of Charlie/Janine feels :P fandom_stocking was pretty slim pickings this year; I only ended up posting 2 giftfics, and I've pretty much decided I'm not going to do the exchange anymore because it is so badly run. I'd rather give people giftfics that they will be able to see immediately instead of forcing them to wait a month for no good reason at all.My fics were a hit, I think :) I wrote some Charlie + Patrick family dynamics for
ozqueen, The Final Goodbye, and some shameless domestic fluff for Desert Vixen, Just Janine. My very first fic of 2017 was also BSC post-canon Charlie/Janine, another installment of my Count Me In series, entitled Confession & Plea.On a personal note, I joined the 21st century and received a Kindle for Christmas, which sent me out into the wilds of free e-books. I've kinda made it my personal challenge to only put freebies on my Kindle, with one notable exception -
paynesgrey's work. I bought her first novel, Unbridled, pretty much the day she published it, and this year I received an autographed printed copy as well, which I treasure ♥ It's not that often I can say I know a published writer, after all! (I kinda love that my review is the top one at amazon, at least for the moment. How fitting :P)2017 has started off on a rather quiet note. The biggest news is definitely that I FINALLY updated the KI OTP manifesto, after three years of angsting about how I needed to, now that all the source material is available. It took me about six months to complete, but I unveiled it on Valentine's Day to a wonderful reception ♥ The essay didn't change much from the original version posted in 2011, but I put my gif skills to the ultimate challenge. I ended up up with 738 gifs to tell the tale of my ultimate OTP.
At the end of February, I participated in the
hetswap exchange, but authors haven't been revealed yet. I can say that I am pleasantly surprised by the response to my fic, and that I'm looking forward to writing up the author's notes for it. It represents yet another new direction that my muse has decided to wander towards, LOL.Wow. Recounting everything makes me realize that I was far more active in fandom than I realized. My fic word count has dropped like a stone, but I have done a lot in other areas, especially on Tumblr and with
I suppose I find that strangely comforting as well, knowing that even though all of our lives have changed since 2008, we still put forth the effort to keep in touch. I ♥ you guys!
Personal favorite stories (listed in chronological order)
Rendezvous (August 15, 2016)
Goals for the next 12 months:
• Finish Fleeting. It's time. I've been ruminating on it for awhile, and it really does need to just be done already.
• Write at least one new chapter of Stacy in Bloom. I've had such a resurgence of love for KI that I really want to get back into my epic head-canon.
• Host another successful Summer Mini Challenge. It was quiet last year, but we had a lot of fun, and I finished my table! Here's hoping I can repeat that feat for a fourth year in a row :D
• Gif more Designing Women Julia Sugarbaker speeches. This was a lot of fun last year, and ultimately ended up on hiatus because of other projects demanding attention. The Tumblr gif limit increase should make this much easier, too.