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So here's that meme, My Year In Fic. Also, and this is sort of an interesting thing, I changed my major today. Since I am now officially an English major (and I would like for anyone who happens to remember the many, many times I have made fun of English majors over the course of my life, I would implore them out of kindness not to make the obvious point here), I suppose there's now something constructive about sitting around picking apart my stories time and time again. But, back to my point.
Basically I felt like I didn't write a goddamn thing in 2004, but in looking back I actually did produce seven stories, which is probably not that much less than usual for me. These included:
4 popslash stories, 3 due South
4 longish stories, 3 "flash" fics (I didn't count nine snippets I wrote early in the year)
2 holiday gift fics written in the space of one week *altogether,* so frankly I think I deserve double points for those, if not hazard pay
no (0) Timbertrick sex, but 4 instances of thwarted and/or inappropriate attraction between them
3 future-/post-series fics
1 AU
1 Trace appearance
these stories are, alphabetically:
As He's In It (26k? Or so my computer claims, but I don't see how it can possibly be that long; it's *not* the same length as Sugar Rush)
Fire & Rain (251k)
Nightshift (59k)
Passeggiata (18k)
Sugar Rush (26k)
Sibylla ti theleis (55k)
They Say That Rock Is Dead (56k)
My favorite story this year (of my own) Fire & Rain This one was really my baby (not to say, my vanity project), and it absorbed most of the first half of 2004. It went through one major restructuring and four beta readers. I had scenes written out on notecards that I moved back and forth across the living room floor (scaring cats away the entire time) in order to get the timeline shuffled just the way I wanted it. If I hadn't loved that story, I definitely would have abandoned it as too dense, too difficult, and too inaccessible. But I did love it.
My best story this year Sibylla ti theleis This one is 55k and seems to me much longer than that, because I managed to vacuum-pack it so tight with *stuff* that it seems like you spend forever unwinding it as you read. Which I think is a virtue, at least in this case. I spent about three weeks tinkering with a page of notes for this story, and then due to deadline crunch, I had to sit down and write it in about two days. Sometimes that kills a story, but in this case I think what happened is that I wrote it much more tightly and intensely than usual; I didn't have time to meander around playing with words as I often do because of how under the gun I was. Every single line had to do *something* important, and better yet if I could get it to do two or three things. I often have to edit a story two or three times to get it as clean and effective as I think Sybilla was in that single draft.
Story most tragically underappreciated by the universe, in my opinion Nightshift I don't know, maybe it's the dearth of people who are truly passionate about Joey stories, or maybe not everybody relates to a science fiction AU. I thought this one was really cool and creative, and had a sort of different take on some of those pop themes like image vs. reality and the seductiveness of manufactured fantasies and the performer/audience relationship and the quasi-incestuousness of dating people who are tied to you intimately in other ways. I'm not sure anybody actually read it, but I was quite proud of it. Maybe they did read it and just didn't see anything to make a fuss about. I'm proud of it anyway.
Most fun story Passeggiata This is one of the few stories I wrote this year that qualifies as "fun" in the sense of being basically uplifting and hopefully making people smile. Also, it was fun to write because it was so low-stress. I hadn't promised it to anybody or anything like that, so I was just on my way home from class and stopped off at a bookstore to do about an hour's reading of travel guides to Italy, and then I wrote it that night and it was done and that was that, totally painless. The What It Is I See In You series has always been fun for me to write, because they're short and pretty snappy and super-romantic, and I always kind of come away from them feeling good.
Most sexy story Sugar Rush This one is sheerly kink-fic, ostensibly written for Mary, but let's face it, Mary and I have a lot of the same kinks. Chris perving on the babies is one of the big ones that we share. I also have a thing about sexy stories that don't necessarily cumulate in actual sex per se (cf my entire Sentinel oeuvre).
Story with single sexiest moment You know, a lot of what I wrote this year was fairly low-grade in terms of its porn content. Also, I have odd taste in what I think the sexy moments are; it's often the little things that really do it for me. That said, I think my favorite was the Miami flashback toward the end of Fire & Rain. I think it's sexy because it's so new to them; they're not old enough or experienced enough to be jaded yet, so there's this particularly raw, even innocent, type of passion that I think is much more appealing than if they were staging some kind of scene.
Most unintentionally *telling* story They Say That Rock Is Dead I drew what was going on in that story from canon, as best I could, and not from my own life, but I think there's a lot of me leaving my hometown and all the friends I loved in Justin leaving the group -- all the fallout of that, the anger and sense of betrayal other people have for him, his own mixed feelings about the tradeoffs he's made. I think the Chris and Justin fight was more cathartic for me than I ever expected it to be.
"Holy crap, that's *wrong,* even for you" story Sibylla ti theleis While there was a dust-up going on in popslash over whether or not it was appropriate to write death-fic for a Secret Santa gift (consensus seemed to be that it was not), there I was over in dS with a SeSa story about Fraser putting his affairs in order while he bleeds to death internally. Fortunately, no one seemed to mind, possibly because I never came right out and sealed Fraser's fate one way or the other. Still, on reflection it was a little warped for the season of peace and joy.
Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters Nightshift I think -- I don't know if the writing of it shifted my perceptions, but I do think I took the characters in some different directions than my usual default expectations of them. I made Chris the successful one, the most socially powerful character in the story, and took away Justin's child-stardom and made him a struggling actor/free-spirit type, which I think reverses my common understanding of them, which is that Chris is sort of the one on the margins of fame and Justin is constrained and cultivated, bansai-tree like, by the nearly lifelong demand for publicity and perfectionism. I made Joey a more conflicted character than I usually do, because usually I see Joey as very happy and warm, and I have trouble writing a Joey who really lets things get to him. Lance is less outgoing and more introspective in this story than I think he usually is; I had to imagine what Lance would have become if all his life he'd had to constantly lower his expectations, rather than having his wildest dreams exceeded when he was still a teenager. So I really put them all in places that I don't think they've been in real life and had to ask myself what happens next.
Hardest story to write Fire & Rain I mentioned some of the logistical difficulties above; the sheer amount of information and the wonky time structure I used for the overhauled draft (the original version was written in a straight A, B, C style, chronologically, all the Freddy stuff first, then Carlos, then Trace; I look back at it now and wonder what the hell I was thinking) made it creatively very difficult to do. I doubt it will surprise anyone to know it was also emotionally hard to write; because these were three off-pairings and three characters that the fandom didn't "know," I had to build investment in the relationships before I moved the plot, so I really had an excuse to give free reign to my romanticism and create the three most likeable secret celebrity boyfriends I could manage, and then tear them down. Add to that the way I'm weird about Trace, and it was honestly very wrenching at times. A lot of the stops and starts in writing it were just to get my nerve up to go the place I needed the story to go next. As far as I can remember, Fire & Rain has the dubious distinction of being the only story that I cried while writing, during the Trace speech that ends with the real answer to "how come you love me?"
Worst story They Say That Rock Is Dead I don't think this is a *bad* story, as such -- I've been dissed in the past as being overly arrogant about my writing, and I don't think I am, but I can say that I like all the stories of mine you've ever read, because if I'm not at least basically happy with it, rest assured, I'm not going to put it on the Internet. However, this story has the widest gap between the way it came out on the page and the way it was in my head, the story I think it should have been. This was one of those situations where I think I buckled under the deadline pressure, and that had I been plodding along at my own slow, anal-retentive pace, I might have been able to bring out a lot of moods and undertones that didn't really make it into this story.
Easiest story to write As He's In It Literally, I was stocking the beer cooler at work one night and thinking (you know those arcane pieces of trivia get stuck in your head when you're doing something repetitive) about which side of the bed was the right and which was the left. After I'd wasted some time on that, I thought what I usually think about anything that wanders through my neural pathways, which is, "I wonder if I can use that in a story somewhere?" I had the idea of someone saying "I never understood how that worked," and that it could have this whole second meaning of never understanding how *any* of it worked, bed-sharing and relationships as a whole. And the appropriate character for that seemed to be Fraser, because of his emotional illiteracy and his interest in language. So when I went home I sat down in front of the computer with basically nothing but that in my head, and the whole story just thudded out right then and there. There was one paragraph I had to tinker over for a good twenty minutes (the "did he kiss you?" paragraph), but other than that, I just sat down and did it in one long take and posted it immediately and that was it. No fuss, no muss. And I thought it came out pretty well.
Story I'd like to revise
Basically I felt like I didn't write a goddamn thing in 2004, but in looking back I actually did produce seven stories, which is probably not that much less than usual for me. These included:
4 popslash stories, 3 due South
4 longish stories, 3 "flash" fics (I didn't count nine snippets I wrote early in the year)
2 holiday gift fics written in the space of one week *altogether,* so frankly I think I deserve double points for those, if not hazard pay
no (0) Timbertrick sex, but 4 instances of thwarted and/or inappropriate attraction between them
3 future-/post-series fics
1 AU
1 Trace appearance
these stories are, alphabetically:
As He's In It (26k? Or so my computer claims, but I don't see how it can possibly be that long; it's *not* the same length as Sugar Rush)
Fire & Rain (251k)
Nightshift (59k)
Passeggiata (18k)
Sugar Rush (26k)
Sibylla ti theleis (55k)
They Say That Rock Is Dead (56k)
My favorite story this year (of my own) Fire & Rain This one was really my baby (not to say, my vanity project), and it absorbed most of the first half of 2004. It went through one major restructuring and four beta readers. I had scenes written out on notecards that I moved back and forth across the living room floor (scaring cats away the entire time) in order to get the timeline shuffled just the way I wanted it. If I hadn't loved that story, I definitely would have abandoned it as too dense, too difficult, and too inaccessible. But I did love it.
My best story this year Sibylla ti theleis This one is 55k and seems to me much longer than that, because I managed to vacuum-pack it so tight with *stuff* that it seems like you spend forever unwinding it as you read. Which I think is a virtue, at least in this case. I spent about three weeks tinkering with a page of notes for this story, and then due to deadline crunch, I had to sit down and write it in about two days. Sometimes that kills a story, but in this case I think what happened is that I wrote it much more tightly and intensely than usual; I didn't have time to meander around playing with words as I often do because of how under the gun I was. Every single line had to do *something* important, and better yet if I could get it to do two or three things. I often have to edit a story two or three times to get it as clean and effective as I think Sybilla was in that single draft.
Story most tragically underappreciated by the universe, in my opinion Nightshift I don't know, maybe it's the dearth of people who are truly passionate about Joey stories, or maybe not everybody relates to a science fiction AU. I thought this one was really cool and creative, and had a sort of different take on some of those pop themes like image vs. reality and the seductiveness of manufactured fantasies and the performer/audience relationship and the quasi-incestuousness of dating people who are tied to you intimately in other ways. I'm not sure anybody actually read it, but I was quite proud of it. Maybe they did read it and just didn't see anything to make a fuss about. I'm proud of it anyway.
Most fun story Passeggiata This is one of the few stories I wrote this year that qualifies as "fun" in the sense of being basically uplifting and hopefully making people smile. Also, it was fun to write because it was so low-stress. I hadn't promised it to anybody or anything like that, so I was just on my way home from class and stopped off at a bookstore to do about an hour's reading of travel guides to Italy, and then I wrote it that night and it was done and that was that, totally painless. The What It Is I See In You series has always been fun for me to write, because they're short and pretty snappy and super-romantic, and I always kind of come away from them feeling good.
Most sexy story Sugar Rush This one is sheerly kink-fic, ostensibly written for Mary, but let's face it, Mary and I have a lot of the same kinks. Chris perving on the babies is one of the big ones that we share. I also have a thing about sexy stories that don't necessarily cumulate in actual sex per se (cf my entire Sentinel oeuvre).
Story with single sexiest moment You know, a lot of what I wrote this year was fairly low-grade in terms of its porn content. Also, I have odd taste in what I think the sexy moments are; it's often the little things that really do it for me. That said, I think my favorite was the Miami flashback toward the end of Fire & Rain. I think it's sexy because it's so new to them; they're not old enough or experienced enough to be jaded yet, so there's this particularly raw, even innocent, type of passion that I think is much more appealing than if they were staging some kind of scene.
Most unintentionally *telling* story They Say That Rock Is Dead I drew what was going on in that story from canon, as best I could, and not from my own life, but I think there's a lot of me leaving my hometown and all the friends I loved in Justin leaving the group -- all the fallout of that, the anger and sense of betrayal other people have for him, his own mixed feelings about the tradeoffs he's made. I think the Chris and Justin fight was more cathartic for me than I ever expected it to be.
"Holy crap, that's *wrong,* even for you" story Sibylla ti theleis While there was a dust-up going on in popslash over whether or not it was appropriate to write death-fic for a Secret Santa gift (consensus seemed to be that it was not), there I was over in dS with a SeSa story about Fraser putting his affairs in order while he bleeds to death internally. Fortunately, no one seemed to mind, possibly because I never came right out and sealed Fraser's fate one way or the other. Still, on reflection it was a little warped for the season of peace and joy.
Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters Nightshift I think -- I don't know if the writing of it shifted my perceptions, but I do think I took the characters in some different directions than my usual default expectations of them. I made Chris the successful one, the most socially powerful character in the story, and took away Justin's child-stardom and made him a struggling actor/free-spirit type, which I think reverses my common understanding of them, which is that Chris is sort of the one on the margins of fame and Justin is constrained and cultivated, bansai-tree like, by the nearly lifelong demand for publicity and perfectionism. I made Joey a more conflicted character than I usually do, because usually I see Joey as very happy and warm, and I have trouble writing a Joey who really lets things get to him. Lance is less outgoing and more introspective in this story than I think he usually is; I had to imagine what Lance would have become if all his life he'd had to constantly lower his expectations, rather than having his wildest dreams exceeded when he was still a teenager. So I really put them all in places that I don't think they've been in real life and had to ask myself what happens next.
Hardest story to write Fire & Rain I mentioned some of the logistical difficulties above; the sheer amount of information and the wonky time structure I used for the overhauled draft (the original version was written in a straight A, B, C style, chronologically, all the Freddy stuff first, then Carlos, then Trace; I look back at it now and wonder what the hell I was thinking) made it creatively very difficult to do. I doubt it will surprise anyone to know it was also emotionally hard to write; because these were three off-pairings and three characters that the fandom didn't "know," I had to build investment in the relationships before I moved the plot, so I really had an excuse to give free reign to my romanticism and create the three most likeable secret celebrity boyfriends I could manage, and then tear them down. Add to that the way I'm weird about Trace, and it was honestly very wrenching at times. A lot of the stops and starts in writing it were just to get my nerve up to go the place I needed the story to go next. As far as I can remember, Fire & Rain has the dubious distinction of being the only story that I cried while writing, during the Trace speech that ends with the real answer to "how come you love me?"
Worst story They Say That Rock Is Dead I don't think this is a *bad* story, as such -- I've been dissed in the past as being overly arrogant about my writing, and I don't think I am, but I can say that I like all the stories of mine you've ever read, because if I'm not at least basically happy with it, rest assured, I'm not going to put it on the Internet. However, this story has the widest gap between the way it came out on the page and the way it was in my head, the story I think it should have been. This was one of those situations where I think I buckled under the deadline pressure, and that had I been plodding along at my own slow, anal-retentive pace, I might have been able to bring out a lot of moods and undertones that didn't really make it into this story.
Easiest story to write As He's In It Literally, I was stocking the beer cooler at work one night and thinking (you know those arcane pieces of trivia get stuck in your head when you're doing something repetitive) about which side of the bed was the right and which was the left. After I'd wasted some time on that, I thought what I usually think about anything that wanders through my neural pathways, which is, "I wonder if I can use that in a story somewhere?" I had the idea of someone saying "I never understood how that worked," and that it could have this whole second meaning of never understanding how *any* of it worked, bed-sharing and relationships as a whole. And the appropriate character for that seemed to be Fraser, because of his emotional illiteracy and his interest in language. So when I went home I sat down in front of the computer with basically nothing but that in my head, and the whole story just thudded out right then and there. There was one paragraph I had to tinker over for a good twenty minutes (the "did he kiss you?" paragraph), but other than that, I just sat down and did it in one long take and posted it immediately and that was it. No fuss, no muss. And I thought it came out pretty well.
Story I'd like to revise
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So here's that meme, My Year In Fic. Also, and this is sort of an interesting thing, I changed my major today. Since I am now officially an English major (and I would like for anyone who happens to remember the many, many times I have made fun of English majors over the course of my life, I would implore them out of kindness not to make the obvious point here), I suppose there's now something constructive about sitting around picking apart my stories time and time again. But, back to my point.
Basically I felt like I didn't write a goddamn thing in 2004, but in looking back I actually did produce seven stories, which is probably not that much less than usual for me. These included:
4 popslash stories, 3 due South
4 longish stories, 3 "flash" fics (I didn't count nine snippets I wrote early in the year)
2 holiday gift fics written in the space of one week *altogether,* so frankly I think I deserve double points for those, if not hazard pay
no (0) Timbertrick sex, but 4 instances of thwarted and/or inappropriate attraction between them
3 future-/post-series fics
1 AU
1 Trace appearance
these stories are, alphabetically:
<a href="http://www.livejournal.com/users/hth_the_first/7619.html#cutid1">As He's In It</a> (26k? Or so my computer claims, but I don't see how it can possibly be that long; it's *not* the same length as Sugar Rush)
<a href="http://www.waxjism.org/betty/rps-fire.html">Fire & Rain</a> (251k)
<a href="http://www.waxjism.org/betty/au-nightshift.html">Nightshift</a> (59k)
<a href="http://www.livejournal.com/community/ds_flashfiction/286160.html">Passeggiata</a> (18k)
<a href="http://www.waxjism.org/betty/rps-sugar.html">Sugar Rush</a> (26k)
<a href="http://www.livejournal.com/users/ds_seekritsanta/10051.html#cutid1">Sibylla ti theleis</a> (55k)
<a href="http://www.juppy.org/santa/stories.php?ForAuthorID=32&Year=2004">They Say That Rock Is Dead</a> (56k)
<lj-cut text=and the winners are>
<b>My favorite story this year (of my own)</b> <a href="http://www.waxjism.org/betty/rps-fire.html">Fire & Rain</a> This one was really my baby (not to say, my vanity project), and it absorbed most of the first half of 2004. It went through one major restructuring and four beta readers. I had scenes written out on notecards that I moved back and forth across the living room floor (scaring cats away the entire time) in order to get the timeline shuffled just the way I wanted it. If I hadn't loved that story, I definitely would have abandoned it as too dense, too difficult, and too inaccessible. But I did love it.
<b>My best story this year</b> <a href="http://www.livejournal.com/users/ds_seekritsanta/10051.html#cutid1">Sibylla ti theleis</a> This one is 55k and seems to me much longer than that, because I managed to vacuum-pack it so tight with *stuff* that it seems like you spend forever unwinding it as you read. Which I think is a virtue, at least in this case. I spent about three weeks tinkering with a page of notes for this story, and then due to deadline crunch, I had to sit down and write it in about two days. Sometimes that kills a story, but in this case I think what happened is that I wrote it much more tightly and intensely than usual; I didn't have time to meander around playing with words as I often do because of how under the gun I was. Every single line had to do *something* important, and better yet if I could get it to do two or three things. I often have to edit a story two or three times to get it as clean and effective as I think Sybilla was in that single draft.
<b>Story most tragically underappreciated by the universe, in my opinion</b> <a href="http://www.waxjism.org/betty/au-nightshift.html">Nightshift</a> I don't know, maybe it's the dearth of people who are truly passionate about Joey stories, or maybe not everybody relates to a science fiction AU. I thought this one was really cool and creative, and had a sort of different take on some of those pop themes like image vs. reality and the seductiveness of manufactured fantasies and the performer/audience relationship and the quasi-incestuousness of dating people who are tied to you intimately in other ways. I'm not sure anybody actually read it, but I was quite proud of it. Maybe they did read it and just didn't see anything to make a fuss about. I'm proud of it anyway.
<b>Most fun story</b> <a href="http://www.livejournal.com/community/ds_flashfiction/286160.html">Passeggiata</a> This is one of the few stories I wrote this year that qualifies as "fun" in the sense of being basically uplifting and hopefully making people smile. Also, it was fun to write because it was so low-stress. I hadn't promised it to anybody or anything like that, so I was just on my way home from class and stopped off at a bookstore to do about an hour's reading of travel guides to Italy, and then I wrote it that night and it was done and that was that, totally painless. The What It Is I See In You series has always been fun for me to write, because they're short and pretty snappy and super-romantic, and I always kind of come away from them feeling good.
<b>Most sexy story</b> <a href="http://www.waxjism.org/betty/rps-sugar.html">Sugar Rush</a> This one is sheerly kink-fic, ostensibly written for Mary, but let's face it, Mary and I have a lot of the same kinks. Chris perving on the babies is one of the big ones that we share. I also have a thing about sexy stories that don't necessarily cumulate in actual sex per se (cf my entire Sentinel oeuvre).
<b>Story with single sexiest moment</b> You know, a lot of what I wrote this year was fairly low-grade in terms of its porn content. Also, I have odd taste in what I think the sexy moments are; it's often the little things that really do it for me. That said, I think my favorite was the Miami flashback toward the end of <a href="http://www.waxjism.org/betty/rps-fire.html">Fire & Rain</a>. I think it's sexy because it's so new to them; they're not old enough or experienced enough to be jaded yet, so there's this particularly raw, even innocent, type of passion that I think is much more appealing than if they were staging some kind of scene.
<b>Most unintentionally *telling* story</b> <a href="http://www.juppy.org/santa/stories.php?ForAuthorID=32&Year=2004">They Say That Rock Is Dead</a> I drew what was going on in that story from canon, as best I could, and not from my own life, but I think there's a lot of me leaving my hometown and all the friends I loved in Justin leaving the group -- all the fallout of that, the anger and sense of betrayal other people have for him, his own mixed feelings about the tradeoffs he's made. I think the Chris and Justin fight was more cathartic for me than I ever expected it to be.
<b>"Holy crap, that's *wrong,* even for you" story</b> <a href="http://www.livejournal.com/users/ds_seekritsanta/10051.html#cutid1">Sibylla ti theleis</a> While there was a dust-up going on in popslash over whether or not it was appropriate to write death-fic for a Secret Santa gift (consensus seemed to be that it was not), there I was over in dS with a SeSa story about Fraser putting his affairs in order while he bleeds to death internally. Fortunately, no one seemed to mind, possibly because I never came right out and sealed Fraser's fate one way or the other. Still, on reflection it was a little warped for the season of peace and joy.
<b>Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters</b> <a href="http://www.waxjism.org/betty/au-nightshift.html">Nightshift</a> I think -- I don't know if the writing of it shifted my perceptions, but I do think I took the characters in some different directions than my usual default expectations of them. I made Chris the successful one, the most socially powerful character in the story, and took away Justin's child-stardom and made him a struggling actor/free-spirit type, which I think reverses my common understanding of them, which is that Chris is sort of the one on the margins of fame and Justin is constrained and cultivated, bansai-tree like, by the nearly lifelong demand for publicity and perfectionism. I made Joey a more conflicted character than I usually do, because usually I see Joey as very happy and warm, and I have trouble writing a Joey who really lets things get to him. Lance is less outgoing and more introspective in this story than I think he usually is; I had to imagine what Lance would have become if all his life he'd had to constantly lower his expectations, rather than having his wildest dreams exceeded when he was still a teenager. So I really put them all in places that I don't think they've been in real life and had to ask myself what happens next.
<b>Hardest story to write</b> <a href="http://www.waxjism.org/betty/rps-fire.html">Fire & Rain</a> I mentioned some of the logistical difficulties above; the sheer amount of information and the wonky time structure I used for the overhauled draft (the original version was written in a straight A, B, C style, chronologically, all the Freddy stuff first, then Carlos, then Trace; I look back at it now and wonder what the hell I was thinking) made it creatively very difficult to do. I doubt it will surprise anyone to know it was also emotionally hard to write; because these were three off-pairings and three characters that the fandom didn't "know," I had to build investment in the relationships before I moved the plot, so I really had an excuse to give free reign to my romanticism and create the three most likeable secret celebrity boyfriends I could manage, and then tear them down. Add to that the way I'm weird about Trace, and it was honestly very wrenching at times. A lot of the stops and starts in writing it were just to get my nerve up to go the place I needed the story to go next. As far as I can remember, Fire & Rain has the dubious distinction of being the only story that I cried while writing, during the Trace speech that ends with the real answer to "how come you love me?"
<b>Worst story</b> <a href="http://www.juppy.org/santa/stories.php?ForAuthorID=32&Year=2004">They Say That Rock Is Dead</a> I don't think this is a *bad* story, as such -- I've been dissed in the past as being overly arrogant about my writing, and I don't think I am, but I can say that I like all the stories of mine you've ever read, because if I'm not at least basically happy with it, rest assured, I'm not going to put it on the Internet. However, this story has the widest gap between the way it came out on the page and the way it was in my head, the story I think it should have been. This was one of those situations where I think I buckled under the deadline pressure, and that had I been plodding along at my own slow, anal-retentive pace, I might have been able to bring out a lot of moods and undertones that didn't really make it into this story.
<i>Easiest story to write</b> <a href="http://www.livejournal.com/users/hth_the_first/7619.html#cutid1">As He's In It</a> Literally, I was stocking the beer cooler at work one night and thinking (you know those arcane pieces of trivia get stuck in your head when you're doing something repetitive) about which side of the bed was the right and which was the left. After I'd wasted some time on that, I thought what I usually think about anything that wanders through my neural pathways, which is, "I wonder if I can use that in a story somewhere?" I had the idea of someone saying "I never understood how that worked," and that it could have this whole second meaning of never understanding how *any* of it worked, bed-sharing and relationships as a whole. And the appropriate character for that seemed to be Fraser, because of his emotional illiteracy and his interest in language. So when I went home I sat down in front of the computer with basically nothing but that in my head, and the whole story just thudded out right then and there. There was one paragraph I had to tinker over for a good twenty minutes (the "did he kiss you?" paragraph), but other than that, I just sat down and did it in one long take and posted it immediately and that was it. No fuss, no muss. And I thought it came out pretty well.
<b>Story I'd like to revise</b> <a href="http://www.juppy.org/santa/stories.php?ForAuthorID=32&Year=2004They Say That Rock Is Dead</a> Like I said, I think if I'd had more time with it, I could have pulled things together that were kind of left dangling. I like everything to have something to do with everything else in a story, and that one felt to me more like a bunch of things that happened sort of concurrently with no clear through-line to the whole thing. I think that's what's really missing. Maybe. I don't know, it needs something. I don't have any specific revisions to make to <a href="http://www.waxjism.org/betty/au-nightshift.html">Nightshift</a>, but I've always thought I'd like to play around with that universe -- other stories maybe, or honestly what it would really make is a great movie script or comic book; it's very visual in that way to me, where most of my stuff just is not.
<b>Story I didn't write but will at some point, I swear</b> I got, like, THIRTY of them! But mainly Go Changing, my staggeringly long definitive!Timbertrick that I've been working on for, like, two years now. 2005 is the year! Really! Also, the other four parts of the prison AU, my Easy Rider motorcycle-shop AU, and hopefully some of the other things I've been kicking around in my head for a while. I also have some FPS that's been back-burnered for ages -- some X-Files, some Buffy, some Smallville -- that I might wrap up sometime this year. Also, I sometimes get struck by things that have to be written NOW NOW NOW, and there's no telling what those will be *g* Anyway, I'd like to be more productive this year than I was last (although, really, Fire & Rain was *251k,* or basically the equivalent of five stories at my usual length), although with school and all I haven't felt up to setting any hard and fast goals. Except for Go Changing! Dammit.
Basically I felt like I didn't write a goddamn thing in 2004, but in looking back I actually did produce seven stories, which is probably not that much less than usual for me. These included:
4 popslash stories, 3 due South
4 longish stories, 3 "flash" fics (I didn't count nine snippets I wrote early in the year)
2 holiday gift fics written in the space of one week *altogether,* so frankly I think I deserve double points for those, if not hazard pay
no (0) Timbertrick sex, but 4 instances of thwarted and/or inappropriate attraction between them
3 future-/post-series fics
1 AU
1 Trace appearance
these stories are, alphabetically:
<a href="http://www.livejournal.com/users/hth_the_first/7619.html#cutid1">As He's In It</a> (26k? Or so my computer claims, but I don't see how it can possibly be that long; it's *not* the same length as Sugar Rush)
<a href="http://www.waxjism.org/betty/rps-fire.html">Fire & Rain</a> (251k)
<a href="http://www.waxjism.org/betty/au-nightshift.html">Nightshift</a> (59k)
<a href="http://www.livejournal.com/community/ds_flashfiction/286160.html">Passeggiata</a> (18k)
<a href="http://www.waxjism.org/betty/rps-sugar.html">Sugar Rush</a> (26k)
<a href="http://www.livejournal.com/users/ds_seekritsanta/10051.html#cutid1">Sibylla ti theleis</a> (55k)
<a href="http://www.juppy.org/santa/stories.php?ForAuthorID=32&Year=2004">They Say That Rock Is Dead</a> (56k)
<lj-cut text=and the winners are>
<b>My favorite story this year (of my own)</b> <a href="http://www.waxjism.org/betty/rps-fire.html">Fire & Rain</a> This one was really my baby (not to say, my vanity project), and it absorbed most of the first half of 2004. It went through one major restructuring and four beta readers. I had scenes written out on notecards that I moved back and forth across the living room floor (scaring cats away the entire time) in order to get the timeline shuffled just the way I wanted it. If I hadn't loved that story, I definitely would have abandoned it as too dense, too difficult, and too inaccessible. But I did love it.
<b>My best story this year</b> <a href="http://www.livejournal.com/users/ds_seekritsanta/10051.html#cutid1">Sibylla ti theleis</a> This one is 55k and seems to me much longer than that, because I managed to vacuum-pack it so tight with *stuff* that it seems like you spend forever unwinding it as you read. Which I think is a virtue, at least in this case. I spent about three weeks tinkering with a page of notes for this story, and then due to deadline crunch, I had to sit down and write it in about two days. Sometimes that kills a story, but in this case I think what happened is that I wrote it much more tightly and intensely than usual; I didn't have time to meander around playing with words as I often do because of how under the gun I was. Every single line had to do *something* important, and better yet if I could get it to do two or three things. I often have to edit a story two or three times to get it as clean and effective as I think Sybilla was in that single draft.
<b>Story most tragically underappreciated by the universe, in my opinion</b> <a href="http://www.waxjism.org/betty/au-nightshift.html">Nightshift</a> I don't know, maybe it's the dearth of people who are truly passionate about Joey stories, or maybe not everybody relates to a science fiction AU. I thought this one was really cool and creative, and had a sort of different take on some of those pop themes like image vs. reality and the seductiveness of manufactured fantasies and the performer/audience relationship and the quasi-incestuousness of dating people who are tied to you intimately in other ways. I'm not sure anybody actually read it, but I was quite proud of it. Maybe they did read it and just didn't see anything to make a fuss about. I'm proud of it anyway.
<b>Most fun story</b> <a href="http://www.livejournal.com/community/ds_flashfiction/286160.html">Passeggiata</a> This is one of the few stories I wrote this year that qualifies as "fun" in the sense of being basically uplifting and hopefully making people smile. Also, it was fun to write because it was so low-stress. I hadn't promised it to anybody or anything like that, so I was just on my way home from class and stopped off at a bookstore to do about an hour's reading of travel guides to Italy, and then I wrote it that night and it was done and that was that, totally painless. The What It Is I See In You series has always been fun for me to write, because they're short and pretty snappy and super-romantic, and I always kind of come away from them feeling good.
<b>Most sexy story</b> <a href="http://www.waxjism.org/betty/rps-sugar.html">Sugar Rush</a> This one is sheerly kink-fic, ostensibly written for Mary, but let's face it, Mary and I have a lot of the same kinks. Chris perving on the babies is one of the big ones that we share. I also have a thing about sexy stories that don't necessarily cumulate in actual sex per se (cf my entire Sentinel oeuvre).
<b>Story with single sexiest moment</b> You know, a lot of what I wrote this year was fairly low-grade in terms of its porn content. Also, I have odd taste in what I think the sexy moments are; it's often the little things that really do it for me. That said, I think my favorite was the Miami flashback toward the end of <a href="http://www.waxjism.org/betty/rps-fire.html">Fire & Rain</a>. I think it's sexy because it's so new to them; they're not old enough or experienced enough to be jaded yet, so there's this particularly raw, even innocent, type of passion that I think is much more appealing than if they were staging some kind of scene.
<b>Most unintentionally *telling* story</b> <a href="http://www.juppy.org/santa/stories.php?ForAuthorID=32&Year=2004">They Say That Rock Is Dead</a> I drew what was going on in that story from canon, as best I could, and not from my own life, but I think there's a lot of me leaving my hometown and all the friends I loved in Justin leaving the group -- all the fallout of that, the anger and sense of betrayal other people have for him, his own mixed feelings about the tradeoffs he's made. I think the Chris and Justin fight was more cathartic for me than I ever expected it to be.
<b>"Holy crap, that's *wrong,* even for you" story</b> <a href="http://www.livejournal.com/users/ds_seekritsanta/10051.html#cutid1">Sibylla ti theleis</a> While there was a dust-up going on in popslash over whether or not it was appropriate to write death-fic for a Secret Santa gift (consensus seemed to be that it was not), there I was over in dS with a SeSa story about Fraser putting his affairs in order while he bleeds to death internally. Fortunately, no one seemed to mind, possibly because I never came right out and sealed Fraser's fate one way or the other. Still, on reflection it was a little warped for the season of peace and joy.
<b>Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters</b> <a href="http://www.waxjism.org/betty/au-nightshift.html">Nightshift</a> I think -- I don't know if the writing of it shifted my perceptions, but I do think I took the characters in some different directions than my usual default expectations of them. I made Chris the successful one, the most socially powerful character in the story, and took away Justin's child-stardom and made him a struggling actor/free-spirit type, which I think reverses my common understanding of them, which is that Chris is sort of the one on the margins of fame and Justin is constrained and cultivated, bansai-tree like, by the nearly lifelong demand for publicity and perfectionism. I made Joey a more conflicted character than I usually do, because usually I see Joey as very happy and warm, and I have trouble writing a Joey who really lets things get to him. Lance is less outgoing and more introspective in this story than I think he usually is; I had to imagine what Lance would have become if all his life he'd had to constantly lower his expectations, rather than having his wildest dreams exceeded when he was still a teenager. So I really put them all in places that I don't think they've been in real life and had to ask myself what happens next.
<b>Hardest story to write</b> <a href="http://www.waxjism.org/betty/rps-fire.html">Fire & Rain</a> I mentioned some of the logistical difficulties above; the sheer amount of information and the wonky time structure I used for the overhauled draft (the original version was written in a straight A, B, C style, chronologically, all the Freddy stuff first, then Carlos, then Trace; I look back at it now and wonder what the hell I was thinking) made it creatively very difficult to do. I doubt it will surprise anyone to know it was also emotionally hard to write; because these were three off-pairings and three characters that the fandom didn't "know," I had to build investment in the relationships before I moved the plot, so I really had an excuse to give free reign to my romanticism and create the three most likeable secret celebrity boyfriends I could manage, and then tear them down. Add to that the way I'm weird about Trace, and it was honestly very wrenching at times. A lot of the stops and starts in writing it were just to get my nerve up to go the place I needed the story to go next. As far as I can remember, Fire & Rain has the dubious distinction of being the only story that I cried while writing, during the Trace speech that ends with the real answer to "how come you love me?"
<b>Worst story</b> <a href="http://www.juppy.org/santa/stories.php?ForAuthorID=32&Year=2004">They Say That Rock Is Dead</a> I don't think this is a *bad* story, as such -- I've been dissed in the past as being overly arrogant about my writing, and I don't think I am, but I can say that I like all the stories of mine you've ever read, because if I'm not at least basically happy with it, rest assured, I'm not going to put it on the Internet. However, this story has the widest gap between the way it came out on the page and the way it was in my head, the story I think it should have been. This was one of those situations where I think I buckled under the deadline pressure, and that had I been plodding along at my own slow, anal-retentive pace, I might have been able to bring out a lot of moods and undertones that didn't really make it into this story.
<i>Easiest story to write</b> <a href="http://www.livejournal.com/users/hth_the_first/7619.html#cutid1">As He's In It</a> Literally, I was stocking the beer cooler at work one night and thinking (you know those arcane pieces of trivia get stuck in your head when you're doing something repetitive) about which side of the bed was the right and which was the left. After I'd wasted some time on that, I thought what I usually think about anything that wanders through my neural pathways, which is, "I wonder if I can use that in a story somewhere?" I had the idea of someone saying "I never understood how that worked," and that it could have this whole second meaning of never understanding how *any* of it worked, bed-sharing and relationships as a whole. And the appropriate character for that seemed to be Fraser, because of his emotional illiteracy and his interest in language. So when I went home I sat down in front of the computer with basically nothing but that in my head, and the whole story just thudded out right then and there. There was one paragraph I had to tinker over for a good twenty minutes (the "did he kiss you?" paragraph), but other than that, I just sat down and did it in one long take and posted it immediately and that was it. No fuss, no muss. And I thought it came out pretty well.
<b>Story I'd like to revise</b> <a href="http://www.juppy.org/santa/stories.php?ForAuthorID=32&Year=2004They Say That Rock Is Dead</a> Like I said, I think if I'd had more time with it, I could have pulled things together that were kind of left dangling. I like everything to have something to do with everything else in a story, and that one felt to me more like a bunch of things that happened sort of concurrently with no clear through-line to the whole thing. I think that's what's really missing. Maybe. I don't know, it needs something. I don't have any specific revisions to make to <a href="http://www.waxjism.org/betty/au-nightshift.html">Nightshift</a>, but I've always thought I'd like to play around with that universe -- other stories maybe, or honestly what it would really make is a great movie script or comic book; it's very visual in that way to me, where most of my stuff just is not.
<b>Story I didn't write but will at some point, I swear</b> I got, like, THIRTY of them! But mainly Go Changing, my staggeringly long definitive!Timbertrick that I've been working on for, like, two years now. 2005 is the year! Really! Also, the other four parts of the prison AU, my Easy Rider motorcycle-shop AU, and hopefully some of the other things I've been kicking around in my head for a while. I also have some FPS that's been back-burnered for ages -- some X-Files, some Buffy, some Smallville -- that I might wrap up sometime this year. Also, I sometimes get struck by things that have to be written NOW NOW NOW, and there's no telling what those will be *g* Anyway, I'd like to be more productive this year than I was last (although, really, Fire & Rain was *251k,* or basically the equivalent of five stories at my usual length), although with school and all I haven't felt up to setting any hard and fast goals. Except for Go Changing! Dammit.
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Date: 2005-01-13 07:22 pm (UTC)From:::g::
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Date: 2005-01-13 07:56 pm (UTC)From:But then, I didn't have any plans for it this year, but it kind of worked out that way. So hey. Glad you're happy!
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Date: 2005-03-14 08:31 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2005-02-25 01:45 pm (UTC)From:And damn *looks at your list* I recced three of those, too!
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Date: 2005-03-14 08:31 am (UTC)From: