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This is my third year doing these year-end wrap-ups. It's a nice tradition, and allows me to purge my guilt and shame over all the things I swore I was going to do but didn't so that I can move on with the new year.
In 2006, I wrote 19 fics and part of a novel. The part-of-a-novel part won't be coming under consideration here, and neither will two of the 19 fics. One of those missing stories is my contribution to a not-yet-published zine; the other is, to my mind, a completed story, but designed to be part of a trilogy, so I made the decision this summer when I finished it not to put it on the internet until all three were ready to go up together. So since neither of those is available for you to see right now, you won't be that interested in what I think of them.
Overall, then, what to say about this year? I finished the Alpha Centauri series, which is a big, big deal for me, as someone who a) loves that serious in a freaky weird way, and 2) hardly ever finishes anything. This was the year when I utterly failed to write any of the things I tried to write; someday I'm going to get used to the fact that you can't plan for anything in this life -- or I can't, at least. And that's not such a terrible thing, since a lot of the things I didn't try to write, but just wrote anyway, were the things I ended up liking best.
It seems like writing gets harder as I get older and more experienced, which is counterintuitive somehow. But it means more to me, too. I spent a lot of time this year thinking about things like why I do this and how I should be measuring things like "success" and "progress." Writing has always been a deeply communal thing for me -- it's *communication,* the point of it is to start a conversation, which sometimes you start literally, but more often you just hope you've started somehow, at some level, within your readers. But I don't know, this year it's felt like more of a private act, which I'm suspicious of, because my attitude has always been, if you're just writing for yourself, if the reader doesn't matter to you, then leave it on your hard drive where it belongs and don't invite other people in by publishing it on the internet, you know? There's something appalling to me about people who say, in effect, "Here, I'm showing this to you, I'm suggesting it as something you might want to read, but in reality I don't give a fuck what you think, so there."
And I still hold to that opinion, but at the same time, a lot of writing for me this past year has felt like something where the process was more valuable to me than the product necessarily was to you. So...I kind of want to apologize for that. *g* Hopefully this trend won't continue, or I'm in genuine danger of turning into some kind of fucking artist or whatever, and I never wanted to be that.
This is also the first year since, um, 2001 or something that I haven't written any popslash at all, which I guess means it really is a Former Fandom of mine now. I've heard a number of people talk about what effect they think the Popslash Era had on slash fandom as a whole, but I think none of them have really hit on what it meant to me. Popslash crystallized in my mind what fandom is to me, what it gives me, which is a set of skills and a motivation and a kind of open space to dig up the reality that lies behind the obvious. Because just like television has its TV Logic and its genre conventions, things that for better or for worse, we expect to see, following pop culture makes it abundantly clear that we're surrounded all the time by those kind of constructs in the allegedly real world. Everything is television, somehow; 90% of everything we're told or shown by everyone around us is told or shown to us in order to convey someone's sense of what the world is. We have images, iconography, category and allusion and concept. We rarely have access to what is going on within or beneath those things. If you've ever ridden the bus or an airplane or whatever and looked around at all those people and been totally overawed by the realization that every single one of them has an existence that's just as weird and fraught and important to them as yours is to you, then you know what I'm talking about. We see so much, and we know so little. In popslash I experienced that in a literalized way: you buy the magazines, you watch the interviews, you read the blind items, and you go around all the time asking yourself, But what really happened? Did he mean that, or is he just saying it? Can you fake this, or is it real? Reasonably, you assume some of it is real and some is for appearances' sake, and you're always trying to pry apart which is which, and what genuine motives give rise to the ungenuine edifices people construct around themselves. But the thing about RPF is, *you really do know that there really is a real person under there somewhere.* You'll never know that person; it's all deduction and playing the odds and postulating based on observable effects, like some kind of weird branch of theoretical physics, but there is a person to be known or not known.
Well, for me that was always the most important thing about writing fanfiction, even before popslash made me conscious of it: if the narrative of the show is what someone wanted us to see and hear and think about, I want to know what's under it. I've always had this desire to suggest that behind the requirements of the narrative and the industry, behind the conventions of genre, there's a *real universe* and *real people.* It's a game of what if, of course, because all writing is. I look at the screen and I see this character who is the hero of a action-comedy space opera, and I know that everything I see, *everything* I see, I see because writers and actors and directors wanted me to see this. But the game is, what if that's not actually true, what if it just looks that way? What if the reality is, there is a John Sheppard, he's a real person with his own whole life that I only have limited access to, will only ever have limited access to? What can I know about him and how could I know it? And that's how I try to do fandom, and that's how I try to write, and I think that's why it matters to me in a deeper way than just the fun hobby that it also totally is. Because this is where I practice not taking people for granted. This is how I train myself to have empathy, to look around that bus or that airplane and think, holy shit, these people who are just light refracting off my eyeballs are also whole people, real people, and whatever I ever think I know about anything, there's so much more there. Everytime you think you get it, there's a deeper level you can go to, and that's true of everything, and I think I'm better at getting to some of those levels because of what fandom taught me how to do. Popslash mattered to me because it made me realize consciously that everything is canon. We automatically, biologically, sort everything into narrative in our brains. Popslash taught me that there's never a wrong time to ask questions about the narrative, or to wonder what it is I'm not seeing yet.
So I hope I bring that to real life, and I can definitely see some of the ways that I'm bringing that mindset to the fiction I'm writing now. I think it's a good thing, but like I said, it's brought me to this weird place where I feel like as it gets easier to watch people from the outside, it gets harder to engage with them directly, and I have less and less actual, literal dialogue with fandom, which is sad. In fact, it's kind of a New Year's resolution of mine to get away from that, which may conceivably mean that I'll be posting more this year. We'll see.
My 17 stories were, for those of you playing along at home:
Five Things Jason Street Was the First to Say (Friday Night Lights, Jason/Lyla/Tim, 26k)
Moonlight In Your Soul (Darkside Remix) (SGA, remix of James Walkswithwind's Carson/Zelenka werewolf story, 12k)
Thirteen O'Clock (SGA, Rodney/Ronon, 48k)
In the Hands of Yes (SGA, Rodney/Ronon, 273k)
Fourteen Years (SGA, Ronon-centric for the flashfic 7 Deadly Sins challenge, 95k)
Headbanger's Ball (SGA, Teyla-centric OT4 for the flashfic Song & Dance challenge, 35k)
Daughters of Jerusalem (Firefly, River-centric for last year's Three Ships exchange, 72k)
Metropolis Girls (Smallville, Chloe/Lana/Lex for last year's Three Ships exchange, 59k)
The Miracle Worker (SGA, Rodney/Ronon, 25k)
Release Mechanism (SGA, Sheppard/Ronon for the flashfic Slave challenge, 68k)
Breathe You Deep (SGA, multiple pairings, angst/woe, 130k)
Charm City (Supernatural/Homicide crossover, Sam/Bayliss, 56k)
and the Alpha Centauri stories:
Commitment (part 6, 143k)
Romance (part 7, 83k)
Graceland (part 8, 271k)
Mutual Thing (aka the breakup, falling between 7 & 8, 24k)
To Say Nothing of the Parrot (aka arrr!, falling between 7 & 8, 17k)
1. My favorite story of this year (my own)
Graceland. Largely, of course, because it was the end of the series, and have I mentioned that I practically *never* actually end anything that I start, so there was a real sense of achievent for me. But I think one of the reasons I love it so much is that I had structured the whole series in a way that really made Sheppard the heavy -- not a villain, obviously, but the one who couldn't get his shit together, who couldn't say the right thing at the right time, the reason that everyone else kept hitting these walls. And I love Sheppard, and honestly I identified more with Sheppard in these stories than I did with the other two characters, so in a way I felt like this story was a kind of redemption for him. He finally manages to say the right thing, and that was fun and a relief for me. If there's one really core emotional element to the whole AlphaCen arc to me, it really is that whole Redemption of John Sheppard thing, where he first figures out how to recognize actual love when he feels it, even though it doesn't look like he expected it to look (that process really begins at the beginning of "Prime," when he's aware that there's this *thing* between him and Rodney that needs to be addressed, although it isn't til Rodney addresses it first that he knows quite what it is), and that's the Sheppard/McKay plotline, but then he's still not really emotionally finished, as it were, until he makes this jump from seeing Ronon as kind of free porn to seeing him as someone with his own real needs that he deserves to have met. And that really starts in "Commitment" when John's fantasies about him start bleeding from the sexual into these almost jarringly intimate little points of contact, and it finishes in "Graceland" basically (weirdly) when he agrees to go see Ghostbusters with Ronon, even recognizing that it means accepting a relationship he'll never have a chance to back out of again. He's no longer someone who needs the ability to back out and who only lets himself be in relationships he thinks he can walk away from. There are, as befits a Series Finale, several of those critical moments in the story, but that's the one that seems to me to finish off the Redemption of John Sheppard, and I'm especially fond of it because I felt so bad for making him kind of an inept asshole for so very long. *g*
2. My best story this year
Fourteen Years. This is one of those that I was talking about, where I never, ever tried or planned to write it, but there it was. When the 7 Deadly Sins challenge went up, I was thinking at work that evening about maybe feeling like wanting to write something, and I was kind of idly wondering how you could use that set of seven to structure a story, and I thought, hey, Ronon was a runner for seven years. And then it was just there, it was *so clear,* it was so fucking *obvious* how it had to be done that I was vaguely worried someone would write and post it before I had a chance. It seemed that inevitable to me. And I wrote it in this insane blur of speed over two days and skipped a bunch of classes and *couldn't stop writing,* because it unfolded exactly like I knew it was going to, and I still can't believe I did it, because normally the clearer it seems in your head, the more of a mess it is once you actually get it on the page. Looking back, the thing I love about it is this idea that, in a sense, we're the exact same people in adversity that we are in happiness, or at least that we can be -- that we have access to our whole range of humanity in our best years, our worst years, and everything in between. It really brings out, for me, one of my recurrent themes, or what I try to make a recurrent theme, which is that being human isn't cool in spite of pain and suffering, it's cool *in conjunction with* the pain and suffering. It's cool because it just *is,* and you either learn to love the whole thing, or you lose your ability to access your own humanity in any capacity. There's something vaguely Genesis-esque about the story to me, in the way it begins with "He had been a good person" and ends with "I'm good." It's that weird transcendent moment of looking at yourself, your life, and calling it good without leaving any parts out, without making exceptions. It is, in a very real way, the creation story of a human being.
3. Story most tragically underappreciated by the universe, in my opinion
Like last year, I don't know that I feel like I had one of these. The ones that didn't get much response, I usually felt didn't deserve all that much response. A lot of others seemed to strike a chord with people way more than I expected them to. I think of myself as, I guess, a niche writer in SGA; I don't ever imagine I'm going to be one of those people who writes the story that gets four pages of comments and everyone is talking about. I think I'm just a different kind of writer, and what I find interesting enough to write seems not to be in the mainstream of the fandom. And then all my non-SGA fics were in weird little dirt-road fandoms or fandoms where nobody knows me from Eve, so I definitely knew going in that those wouldn't rock the foundations of fandom or anything. Essentially I just go into everything hoping someone will like it, and fifteen or twenty comments feels like a zillion to me. I guess if I had to pick one, I'd say Headbanger's Ball, because there can *never* be enough love and appreciation for team porn.
4. Most fun story
Thirteen O'Clock. I don't know, it's just zippy and wonky in the way that only Rodney POV can ever really be. And it's a classic romantic comedy plotline, which I rarely, rarely, rarely do because there are so many people in fandom that are *so* fucking good at that kind of thing that I always figure, why should I spend my time turning out third-rate rom com when I can be doing what I really love to do instead, which are the high-drama character pieces. But this was just a whim, and I didn't think it would take very long, which it didn't, and I wanted to do something to help myself get the Rodney voice down and get a sense of the Rodney/Ronon dynamic for what I *really* wanted to do, which was "In the Hands of Yes." So I basically didn't care if it was third-rate, and oddly, it didn't turn out to be, anyway.
5. Most sexy story
Because I rarely if ever write stories like I used to write, where the sex is the centerpiece, I don't feel like I really have any stories that are wall-to-wall sexy -- the only two I did this year where the sex really *was* at the center were "Metropolis Girls" and "Charm City," and honestly I thought the porn was disappointing in both of those. I think for this one I'm going to go for "In the Hands of Yes," because I think it had the highest ratio of sex-I-thought-was-sexy to rest-of-story. I'm hardly ever pleased with my sex scenes, but I was like 85% pleased with Rodney and Ronon's wedding night, and then there were a couple of other quick sex scenes that I liked, too.
6. Story with single sexiest moment
This one's always easier, because I think I do sexy much better in moment-form. I really like the thing toward the end of "Romance" when Rodney is scientifically testing Ronon's willingness to spread his legs.
7. Most unintentionally "telling" story
Probably "Daughters of Jerusalem," which gives away my secret desire to live at a permanent slumber party. You think I'm joking, but I'm not.
8. "Holy crap, that's *wrong,* even for you" story
Breathe You Deep. I like to think it's the rare story where the relationship that ends in slow death by suffocation is the upbeat one.
9. Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters
Charm City. Like most people who watch Supernatural, I tend to be all about Dean, so it was kind of an offbeat choice for me, I guess, to do my one and only Supernatural story from Sam's perspective. But it did start to feel natural by the end, and I had a more visceral and less intellectual appreciation for the many stresses in Sam's life.
10. Hardest story to write
In the Hands of Yes. It was just, dude, so long. You have no idea, I felt like I was going to be writing that damn story for the rest of my natural life. I enjoyed writing it, basically, but it was really grueling.
11. Worst story
Moonlight in Your Soul (Darkside Remix). I was stubborn with this one, because I pulled James's name for the remix challenge, and she's written like a bazillion stories in lots of fandoms. But no, I had to pick this one. I wanted to do this one, because I love all things werewolf, and I always liked this version of Zelenka, so for sentimental reasons, I felt commited to it, and early on I had what I still think was a cool idea, which was to write it from the POV of Zelenka's wolf-mind. The story's cosmology had his personality remaining constant through different shapes, so I knew I was cheating it a little bit to postulate that there was a separate wolf-mind at all, but I liked the idea, and it brought out what I thought was a cool thing about the original story, which was Zelenka's sense of himself as an outsider, as non-human. However, the trouble I ran into is that "Moonlight" is an enormously dense story, where literally every single minute of Radek's time from the beginning of the story to the end is accounted for, and it's all from his POV. So there was nowhere to *put* new thoughts, except directly on top of the thoughts James had already written. And that's a really hard way to write for long periods of time, and moreover, I think would be totally annoying to read for long periods of time. So honestly, what sounded like a great idea on the surface was not so much a great idea. Only I didn't want to let go of it, because I'm stubborn that way. And, werewolves! So I forged ahead when I probably shouldn't have. And I think it came out all right, but it felt thin to me, and I still wish I'd come up with something better.
12. Easiest story to write
Release Mechanism. This was another one like "Fourteen Years" that, once I had the idea, seemed to fall ridiculously easily into place. And I may have mentioned, I'm one of those people who believes that dying is easy, but comedy is hard. But it's a pretty funny story, with a squishy, sweet little underbelly, and it's just pervy enough to be fun-pervy and not freaky-pervy, and it just felt really good to write and still feels good to re-read. I'm not 100% happy with the last scene, but other than that, it's just a pleasure for me.
13. Story I'd like to rewrite
5 Things Jason Street Was the First to Say. Actually, I wouldn't "rewrite" it so much as I would pull it apart and totally cannibalize it into an actual story. I'm sorry I posted it at all, really, because it's essentially a writing exercise, the kind of thing I do when I'm at the stage of thinking "What would I do if I were going to write Jason/Lyla/Tim?" Normally I do those little snippety things, and then I delete some of it and use some of it. I'm hardly ever foolish enough to post the whole damn thing. This would've been a good story, if I'd actually written it, but the fragments-of-a-story thing -- some people make it work, but I'm not really one of them.
14. Story I didn't write but will at some point, I swear
Ah, the annual ritual where I announce that I'm going to write ten different stories that I never write. Well, who am I to buck tradition? I'll finish the Teyla Has a Baby story! I'll write the other two parts of the Rent AU! *And* the high school AU, because who doesn't have a high school AU in them? Not me, I totally do! And I'll finish that Buffy story about Willow and her mother, and possibly 16 Instinctive Behaviors, too! Oh, and I'll write a Veronica/Duncan/Logan futurefic (with baby Lilly!) -- and that story where Nick Stokes adopts the little traumatized girl from "Gum Drops" -- and that Homicide futurefic where Frank makes Tim write "Frank's Daughter Is Not Adena Watson" ten thousand times on the metaphorical chalkboard of life -- fuck me, it'll be my Year of Kidfic, why the hell not! And the Ronon story that I can't get right, that'll fall into place and totally work out, and also, the other Ronon story where aliens make him get married to, like, an actual girl. Oh, and I'll finally write that Lex/Lana thing I've wanted to write forever, because there's nothing like watching Smallville do a plotline to make you think, "My version would totally have been better." Oh, and I'll finish the novel. Yeah.
In 2006, I wrote 19 fics and part of a novel. The part-of-a-novel part won't be coming under consideration here, and neither will two of the 19 fics. One of those missing stories is my contribution to a not-yet-published zine; the other is, to my mind, a completed story, but designed to be part of a trilogy, so I made the decision this summer when I finished it not to put it on the internet until all three were ready to go up together. So since neither of those is available for you to see right now, you won't be that interested in what I think of them.
Overall, then, what to say about this year? I finished the Alpha Centauri series, which is a big, big deal for me, as someone who a) loves that serious in a freaky weird way, and 2) hardly ever finishes anything. This was the year when I utterly failed to write any of the things I tried to write; someday I'm going to get used to the fact that you can't plan for anything in this life -- or I can't, at least. And that's not such a terrible thing, since a lot of the things I didn't try to write, but just wrote anyway, were the things I ended up liking best.
It seems like writing gets harder as I get older and more experienced, which is counterintuitive somehow. But it means more to me, too. I spent a lot of time this year thinking about things like why I do this and how I should be measuring things like "success" and "progress." Writing has always been a deeply communal thing for me -- it's *communication,* the point of it is to start a conversation, which sometimes you start literally, but more often you just hope you've started somehow, at some level, within your readers. But I don't know, this year it's felt like more of a private act, which I'm suspicious of, because my attitude has always been, if you're just writing for yourself, if the reader doesn't matter to you, then leave it on your hard drive where it belongs and don't invite other people in by publishing it on the internet, you know? There's something appalling to me about people who say, in effect, "Here, I'm showing this to you, I'm suggesting it as something you might want to read, but in reality I don't give a fuck what you think, so there."
And I still hold to that opinion, but at the same time, a lot of writing for me this past year has felt like something where the process was more valuable to me than the product necessarily was to you. So...I kind of want to apologize for that. *g* Hopefully this trend won't continue, or I'm in genuine danger of turning into some kind of fucking artist or whatever, and I never wanted to be that.
This is also the first year since, um, 2001 or something that I haven't written any popslash at all, which I guess means it really is a Former Fandom of mine now. I've heard a number of people talk about what effect they think the Popslash Era had on slash fandom as a whole, but I think none of them have really hit on what it meant to me. Popslash crystallized in my mind what fandom is to me, what it gives me, which is a set of skills and a motivation and a kind of open space to dig up the reality that lies behind the obvious. Because just like television has its TV Logic and its genre conventions, things that for better or for worse, we expect to see, following pop culture makes it abundantly clear that we're surrounded all the time by those kind of constructs in the allegedly real world. Everything is television, somehow; 90% of everything we're told or shown by everyone around us is told or shown to us in order to convey someone's sense of what the world is. We have images, iconography, category and allusion and concept. We rarely have access to what is going on within or beneath those things. If you've ever ridden the bus or an airplane or whatever and looked around at all those people and been totally overawed by the realization that every single one of them has an existence that's just as weird and fraught and important to them as yours is to you, then you know what I'm talking about. We see so much, and we know so little. In popslash I experienced that in a literalized way: you buy the magazines, you watch the interviews, you read the blind items, and you go around all the time asking yourself, But what really happened? Did he mean that, or is he just saying it? Can you fake this, or is it real? Reasonably, you assume some of it is real and some is for appearances' sake, and you're always trying to pry apart which is which, and what genuine motives give rise to the ungenuine edifices people construct around themselves. But the thing about RPF is, *you really do know that there really is a real person under there somewhere.* You'll never know that person; it's all deduction and playing the odds and postulating based on observable effects, like some kind of weird branch of theoretical physics, but there is a person to be known or not known.
Well, for me that was always the most important thing about writing fanfiction, even before popslash made me conscious of it: if the narrative of the show is what someone wanted us to see and hear and think about, I want to know what's under it. I've always had this desire to suggest that behind the requirements of the narrative and the industry, behind the conventions of genre, there's a *real universe* and *real people.* It's a game of what if, of course, because all writing is. I look at the screen and I see this character who is the hero of a action-comedy space opera, and I know that everything I see, *everything* I see, I see because writers and actors and directors wanted me to see this. But the game is, what if that's not actually true, what if it just looks that way? What if the reality is, there is a John Sheppard, he's a real person with his own whole life that I only have limited access to, will only ever have limited access to? What can I know about him and how could I know it? And that's how I try to do fandom, and that's how I try to write, and I think that's why it matters to me in a deeper way than just the fun hobby that it also totally is. Because this is where I practice not taking people for granted. This is how I train myself to have empathy, to look around that bus or that airplane and think, holy shit, these people who are just light refracting off my eyeballs are also whole people, real people, and whatever I ever think I know about anything, there's so much more there. Everytime you think you get it, there's a deeper level you can go to, and that's true of everything, and I think I'm better at getting to some of those levels because of what fandom taught me how to do. Popslash mattered to me because it made me realize consciously that everything is canon. We automatically, biologically, sort everything into narrative in our brains. Popslash taught me that there's never a wrong time to ask questions about the narrative, or to wonder what it is I'm not seeing yet.
So I hope I bring that to real life, and I can definitely see some of the ways that I'm bringing that mindset to the fiction I'm writing now. I think it's a good thing, but like I said, it's brought me to this weird place where I feel like as it gets easier to watch people from the outside, it gets harder to engage with them directly, and I have less and less actual, literal dialogue with fandom, which is sad. In fact, it's kind of a New Year's resolution of mine to get away from that, which may conceivably mean that I'll be posting more this year. We'll see.
My 17 stories were, for those of you playing along at home:
Five Things Jason Street Was the First to Say (Friday Night Lights, Jason/Lyla/Tim, 26k)
Moonlight In Your Soul (Darkside Remix) (SGA, remix of James Walkswithwind's Carson/Zelenka werewolf story, 12k)
Thirteen O'Clock (SGA, Rodney/Ronon, 48k)
In the Hands of Yes (SGA, Rodney/Ronon, 273k)
Fourteen Years (SGA, Ronon-centric for the flashfic 7 Deadly Sins challenge, 95k)
Headbanger's Ball (SGA, Teyla-centric OT4 for the flashfic Song & Dance challenge, 35k)
Daughters of Jerusalem (Firefly, River-centric for last year's Three Ships exchange, 72k)
Metropolis Girls (Smallville, Chloe/Lana/Lex for last year's Three Ships exchange, 59k)
The Miracle Worker (SGA, Rodney/Ronon, 25k)
Release Mechanism (SGA, Sheppard/Ronon for the flashfic Slave challenge, 68k)
Breathe You Deep (SGA, multiple pairings, angst/woe, 130k)
Charm City (Supernatural/Homicide crossover, Sam/Bayliss, 56k)
and the Alpha Centauri stories:
Commitment (part 6, 143k)
Romance (part 7, 83k)
Graceland (part 8, 271k)
Mutual Thing (aka the breakup, falling between 7 & 8, 24k)
To Say Nothing of the Parrot (aka arrr!, falling between 7 & 8, 17k)
1. My favorite story of this year (my own)
Graceland. Largely, of course, because it was the end of the series, and have I mentioned that I practically *never* actually end anything that I start, so there was a real sense of achievent for me. But I think one of the reasons I love it so much is that I had structured the whole series in a way that really made Sheppard the heavy -- not a villain, obviously, but the one who couldn't get his shit together, who couldn't say the right thing at the right time, the reason that everyone else kept hitting these walls. And I love Sheppard, and honestly I identified more with Sheppard in these stories than I did with the other two characters, so in a way I felt like this story was a kind of redemption for him. He finally manages to say the right thing, and that was fun and a relief for me. If there's one really core emotional element to the whole AlphaCen arc to me, it really is that whole Redemption of John Sheppard thing, where he first figures out how to recognize actual love when he feels it, even though it doesn't look like he expected it to look (that process really begins at the beginning of "Prime," when he's aware that there's this *thing* between him and Rodney that needs to be addressed, although it isn't til Rodney addresses it first that he knows quite what it is), and that's the Sheppard/McKay plotline, but then he's still not really emotionally finished, as it were, until he makes this jump from seeing Ronon as kind of free porn to seeing him as someone with his own real needs that he deserves to have met. And that really starts in "Commitment" when John's fantasies about him start bleeding from the sexual into these almost jarringly intimate little points of contact, and it finishes in "Graceland" basically (weirdly) when he agrees to go see Ghostbusters with Ronon, even recognizing that it means accepting a relationship he'll never have a chance to back out of again. He's no longer someone who needs the ability to back out and who only lets himself be in relationships he thinks he can walk away from. There are, as befits a Series Finale, several of those critical moments in the story, but that's the one that seems to me to finish off the Redemption of John Sheppard, and I'm especially fond of it because I felt so bad for making him kind of an inept asshole for so very long. *g*
2. My best story this year
Fourteen Years. This is one of those that I was talking about, where I never, ever tried or planned to write it, but there it was. When the 7 Deadly Sins challenge went up, I was thinking at work that evening about maybe feeling like wanting to write something, and I was kind of idly wondering how you could use that set of seven to structure a story, and I thought, hey, Ronon was a runner for seven years. And then it was just there, it was *so clear,* it was so fucking *obvious* how it had to be done that I was vaguely worried someone would write and post it before I had a chance. It seemed that inevitable to me. And I wrote it in this insane blur of speed over two days and skipped a bunch of classes and *couldn't stop writing,* because it unfolded exactly like I knew it was going to, and I still can't believe I did it, because normally the clearer it seems in your head, the more of a mess it is once you actually get it on the page. Looking back, the thing I love about it is this idea that, in a sense, we're the exact same people in adversity that we are in happiness, or at least that we can be -- that we have access to our whole range of humanity in our best years, our worst years, and everything in between. It really brings out, for me, one of my recurrent themes, or what I try to make a recurrent theme, which is that being human isn't cool in spite of pain and suffering, it's cool *in conjunction with* the pain and suffering. It's cool because it just *is,* and you either learn to love the whole thing, or you lose your ability to access your own humanity in any capacity. There's something vaguely Genesis-esque about the story to me, in the way it begins with "He had been a good person" and ends with "I'm good." It's that weird transcendent moment of looking at yourself, your life, and calling it good without leaving any parts out, without making exceptions. It is, in a very real way, the creation story of a human being.
3. Story most tragically underappreciated by the universe, in my opinion
Like last year, I don't know that I feel like I had one of these. The ones that didn't get much response, I usually felt didn't deserve all that much response. A lot of others seemed to strike a chord with people way more than I expected them to. I think of myself as, I guess, a niche writer in SGA; I don't ever imagine I'm going to be one of those people who writes the story that gets four pages of comments and everyone is talking about. I think I'm just a different kind of writer, and what I find interesting enough to write seems not to be in the mainstream of the fandom. And then all my non-SGA fics were in weird little dirt-road fandoms or fandoms where nobody knows me from Eve, so I definitely knew going in that those wouldn't rock the foundations of fandom or anything. Essentially I just go into everything hoping someone will like it, and fifteen or twenty comments feels like a zillion to me. I guess if I had to pick one, I'd say Headbanger's Ball, because there can *never* be enough love and appreciation for team porn.
4. Most fun story
Thirteen O'Clock. I don't know, it's just zippy and wonky in the way that only Rodney POV can ever really be. And it's a classic romantic comedy plotline, which I rarely, rarely, rarely do because there are so many people in fandom that are *so* fucking good at that kind of thing that I always figure, why should I spend my time turning out third-rate rom com when I can be doing what I really love to do instead, which are the high-drama character pieces. But this was just a whim, and I didn't think it would take very long, which it didn't, and I wanted to do something to help myself get the Rodney voice down and get a sense of the Rodney/Ronon dynamic for what I *really* wanted to do, which was "In the Hands of Yes." So I basically didn't care if it was third-rate, and oddly, it didn't turn out to be, anyway.
5. Most sexy story
Because I rarely if ever write stories like I used to write, where the sex is the centerpiece, I don't feel like I really have any stories that are wall-to-wall sexy -- the only two I did this year where the sex really *was* at the center were "Metropolis Girls" and "Charm City," and honestly I thought the porn was disappointing in both of those. I think for this one I'm going to go for "In the Hands of Yes," because I think it had the highest ratio of sex-I-thought-was-sexy to rest-of-story. I'm hardly ever pleased with my sex scenes, but I was like 85% pleased with Rodney and Ronon's wedding night, and then there were a couple of other quick sex scenes that I liked, too.
6. Story with single sexiest moment
This one's always easier, because I think I do sexy much better in moment-form. I really like the thing toward the end of "Romance" when Rodney is scientifically testing Ronon's willingness to spread his legs.
7. Most unintentionally "telling" story
Probably "Daughters of Jerusalem," which gives away my secret desire to live at a permanent slumber party. You think I'm joking, but I'm not.
8. "Holy crap, that's *wrong,* even for you" story
Breathe You Deep. I like to think it's the rare story where the relationship that ends in slow death by suffocation is the upbeat one.
9. Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters
Charm City. Like most people who watch Supernatural, I tend to be all about Dean, so it was kind of an offbeat choice for me, I guess, to do my one and only Supernatural story from Sam's perspective. But it did start to feel natural by the end, and I had a more visceral and less intellectual appreciation for the many stresses in Sam's life.
10. Hardest story to write
In the Hands of Yes. It was just, dude, so long. You have no idea, I felt like I was going to be writing that damn story for the rest of my natural life. I enjoyed writing it, basically, but it was really grueling.
11. Worst story
Moonlight in Your Soul (Darkside Remix). I was stubborn with this one, because I pulled James's name for the remix challenge, and she's written like a bazillion stories in lots of fandoms. But no, I had to pick this one. I wanted to do this one, because I love all things werewolf, and I always liked this version of Zelenka, so for sentimental reasons, I felt commited to it, and early on I had what I still think was a cool idea, which was to write it from the POV of Zelenka's wolf-mind. The story's cosmology had his personality remaining constant through different shapes, so I knew I was cheating it a little bit to postulate that there was a separate wolf-mind at all, but I liked the idea, and it brought out what I thought was a cool thing about the original story, which was Zelenka's sense of himself as an outsider, as non-human. However, the trouble I ran into is that "Moonlight" is an enormously dense story, where literally every single minute of Radek's time from the beginning of the story to the end is accounted for, and it's all from his POV. So there was nowhere to *put* new thoughts, except directly on top of the thoughts James had already written. And that's a really hard way to write for long periods of time, and moreover, I think would be totally annoying to read for long periods of time. So honestly, what sounded like a great idea on the surface was not so much a great idea. Only I didn't want to let go of it, because I'm stubborn that way. And, werewolves! So I forged ahead when I probably shouldn't have. And I think it came out all right, but it felt thin to me, and I still wish I'd come up with something better.
12. Easiest story to write
Release Mechanism. This was another one like "Fourteen Years" that, once I had the idea, seemed to fall ridiculously easily into place. And I may have mentioned, I'm one of those people who believes that dying is easy, but comedy is hard. But it's a pretty funny story, with a squishy, sweet little underbelly, and it's just pervy enough to be fun-pervy and not freaky-pervy, and it just felt really good to write and still feels good to re-read. I'm not 100% happy with the last scene, but other than that, it's just a pleasure for me.
13. Story I'd like to rewrite
5 Things Jason Street Was the First to Say. Actually, I wouldn't "rewrite" it so much as I would pull it apart and totally cannibalize it into an actual story. I'm sorry I posted it at all, really, because it's essentially a writing exercise, the kind of thing I do when I'm at the stage of thinking "What would I do if I were going to write Jason/Lyla/Tim?" Normally I do those little snippety things, and then I delete some of it and use some of it. I'm hardly ever foolish enough to post the whole damn thing. This would've been a good story, if I'd actually written it, but the fragments-of-a-story thing -- some people make it work, but I'm not really one of them.
14. Story I didn't write but will at some point, I swear
Ah, the annual ritual where I announce that I'm going to write ten different stories that I never write. Well, who am I to buck tradition? I'll finish the Teyla Has a Baby story! I'll write the other two parts of the Rent AU! *And* the high school AU, because who doesn't have a high school AU in them? Not me, I totally do! And I'll finish that Buffy story about Willow and her mother, and possibly 16 Instinctive Behaviors, too! Oh, and I'll write a Veronica/Duncan/Logan futurefic (with baby Lilly!) -- and that story where Nick Stokes adopts the little traumatized girl from "Gum Drops" -- and that Homicide futurefic where Frank makes Tim write "Frank's Daughter Is Not Adena Watson" ten thousand times on the metaphorical chalkboard of life -- fuck me, it'll be my Year of Kidfic, why the hell not! And the Ronon story that I can't get right, that'll fall into place and totally work out, and also, the other Ronon story where aliens make him get married to, like, an actual girl. Oh, and I'll finally write that Lex/Lana thing I've wanted to write forever, because there's nothing like watching Smallville do a plotline to make you think, "My version would totally have been better." Oh, and I'll finish the novel. Yeah.
So I'm something of a perpetual lurker...
Date: 2007-02-04 02:27 pm (UTC)From: (Anonymous)