down to the wire once again
Dec. 31st, 2024 08:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hexmixsnagging this year-in-review fic meme from rionaleonhart bc it looked like a lot of fun and also just a great way to conceptualize how much i've actually written. it both feels like a lot and also like not enough, as i never hit as many of my goals as i'd like to (ain't that just the way), so i think it'll be both cool and helpful to go back through everything c:
number of fics written in 2024: 11 + continued work on all i need is some sunshine + 5 drabbles (all of them are over here at SqWA!
fandoms: Resident Evil Village, Tombstone, Evil West, The Mummy (1999), Final Fantasy VIII (+ started a short fic for The Passenger that i wasn't able to finish, but tacking that on here since i did technically write for it lol)
total wordcount for 2024: 282,224 according to SqWA (a lil misleading bc most of the chapters i posted for sunshine were written last year and merely edited/added onto, and a huge chunk of that word count is from that fic, but if i add up everything minus sunshine it's uh...132,000 words or thereabouts :V)
best title: i kinda like dis manibus (Tombstone, Johnny Ringo/Doc) bc i had fun scrolling thru a bunch of suitable schoolboy latin phrases, but i also really like oh, bury us alive (RE8, Heisenberg/Ethan) bc it's so darkly funny considering the fic lmao.
worst title: bury me in clouds of white (FF8, Seifer/Zell). tho i'd decided on it before i'd titled oh, bury us alive, i completely forgot that's what i'd decided on, and then bury us went up first, so when i went to post clouds of white i had a "uh oh" moment. additionally, tho i picked the lyrics myself from a song i have long associated with Seifer, i was still never really satisfied with it. unfortunately this fic was just "that one where time compression fucked shit up" since 2017 so part of the problem i'm having may have just been having to call it literally anything else lol.
best first line: Eventually, Miranda leaves her alone. [blood on the roots, Mia-centric]
worst first line: The president’s aide hollered at him from inside the transport, her fingers scrambling to hold back her windblown hair from her face. [bury me in clouds of white, FF8, Seifer/Zell]
gonna keep picking on clouds of white but honestly there are several i could pick from that are all in media res which i was equally unsatisfied with.
best last line: Anger and shame and fear moved him, like a puppet, and when he remembered Holliday’s handkerchief, when he felt the silk of it snag at his fingertips as he removed it, he knew he couldn’t pluck their strings from his skin. [dis manibus]
worst last line: there's a lot that are just like "he wouldn't" or "he got to work" or "he didn't look" that aren't great on their own but work well in context. i mean aside from the fact that i apparently end fics the same way a lot lmao.
looking back, did you write more than you thought you would this year, less than you thought, or about what you predicted?
less than i hoped lol. i did think i'd be able to get a lot more finished, and there are a few fics i was sure that i'd get done (part of the reason i am posting this meme so late lol) and then didn't :c
what pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted last year?
i mean both johnny ringo/doc holliday having hatesex in an alley and, well, fic for 1999's The Mummy in general but like especially not Imhotep/Jonathan lol.
what’s your favorite story this year? not the most popular, but the one that makes you the happiest.
i still think that blood on the roots (RE8, Mia-centric) is my best written fic, but if i were to say the one that makes me the happiest?? uhhh probably the Jesse/Chester monsterfucking Evil West fic i never finished lmao. it's the one i was having the most fun with writing, anyway c:
okay, NOW your most popular story.
unquestionably all i need is some sunshine (RE8, Heisenberg/Ethan) lol. it has an unfair advantage due to being both part of a long-running series as well as being the last fic i posted to ao3 before i switched to SqWA, so it's basically the only fic getting new readers lol.
story most underappreciated by the universe?
normally i'd be tempted to say any of the Evil West fic i've written but considering how small the fandom is i think those fics may have actually reached the entirety of their intended audience lol. if i was to go simply by stats it would be dis manibus (Tombstone, Johnny Ringo/Doc) with only 14 hits.
story that could have been better?
ough.....bury me in clouds of white (FF8, Seifer/Zell), like by quite a bit, unfortunately. largely bc i was so rushed, trying to hit a deadline, and so i wasn't able to spend as much time on it as i wanted/it needed.
sexiest story?
i haven't reread it since i wrote it actually, but i'm still gonna say prob fool's gold (Evil West, Jesse/Edgar) due to the whole sex pollen/marathon sex thing lol.
saddest story?
possibly let the bindweed grow (RE8, Karl/Ethan) just based on the whole cyclical nature of the premise. not time loop, but time loop-adjacent, certainly.
most fun?
three's a crowd and two's in love and i can't sleep alone (The Mummy, Imhotep/Jonathan) is definitely the funniest i think, at least of what i finished & posted. a lot of that is bc i was writing from the POV of the comic relief character lmao, so it's like baked in to how i hear his voice.
story with single sweetest moment?
lightning strike (Evil West, Vergil/Jesse) maybe? once again kind of necessitated by the POV character (thank u, Vergil). there's some softer moments in all i need is some sunshine that were posted this year too (the pool chapter comes to mind), but honestly Vergil fits more with "sweet" for me hahah.
most fucked-up story?
oh HANDS DOWN oh, bury us alive (RE8, Heisenberg/Ethan). this was the one i was simply referring to as "fucked up rich people" for like a year lol but is also basically just "the torture fic," wherein i actually wore myself out writing gore and violence (something i usually have no trouble with). also my first time writing noncon! wowee.
hardest story to write?
in some respects it was oh, bury us alive, due to the above mentioned exhaustion/burnout from writing like 70k words of whump. but in many other respects it's all i need is some sunshine (RE8, Heisenberg/Ethan). my perfectionism acts up more with sunshine than any other fic, largely bc of how long i've been working on the series/how invested i am in it. this makes it hard to work on in general, but sunshine had the double curse of having been re-written so many times, so i get irritated going back to edit things in a way i don't with other fics. it's been even worse this year bc i'm in the homestretch!!! only 1.5 more chapters to go!!! which means more pressure to make it perfect aaaa!!!!!
easiest/most fun story to write?
let the bindweed grow (RE8, Heisenberg/Ethan) was a lot of fun for me to write due to the setting (post-game trapped-in-the-megamycete nonsense), the genre (angst), and the writing style (i just went ham ngl). i also churned this baby out in like one night?? like just sat down and wrote the whole thing. coulda kept going too but i needed to sleep lol.
did any stories shift your perception of the characters?
i don't think so?? i mean i guess writing dis manibus made me actually think about Johnny Ringo as a character rather than just the dude Doc kills at the end of Tombstone. also was really putting both Karl and Ethan thru it in oh, bury us alive, which meant considering how they would react under an excessively extreme situation, but that didn't really change my perception of them as characters.
most overdue story?
definitely bury me in clouds of white. started it in 2017 and finally forced myself to finish it (with the help of![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
wipbigbang.) don't think i did the original idea justice, but i can always come back to it :)
did you take any writing risks this year? what did you learn from them?
wrote more smut lol. trying to write more for practice and do think i'm improving but i've also learned i just don't have a lot of patience for writing sex scenes lmao. it's prob the ace thing, but i get bored more often than not (which is like the last thing u want from a sex scene lol). practice really does help tho, as it usually does.
also wrote a lot of characters i was really feeling a lil shaky wrt capturing their "voices." Johnny Ringo, Jonathan, Chester, etc. it was certainly a challenge but one i had fun with!
i guess also the "mushroom mode" chapter in sunshine, largely due to attempting to render the "voice" of the mold. i dabbled in this a bit in in the spirit that i crave several years back, when there's the crossover between Ethan and the megamycete, but this is the first time i've attempted to 1) do it for a prolonged period of time and 2) actually force the mold into a limited third person POV. which meant i had to sit here and think about how mold would think lmao. ended up basically writing prose poetry, which was fun, but genuinely pretty difficult to transition back into Ethan's normal thought patterns/narration. went thru a few versions before i settled on something i liked, and i do think it's probably one of the best things i've written, not just this year, but in general. i'm still really proud of what i ended up with! (so again i think what i've learned is that practice is good? keep trying? poetry is fun?)
finishing with barely 30 minutes to spare, but that's been 2024 as far as fic goes! maybe didn't hit all of my goals but i did write a heck of a lot. here's to finishing some more stuff in 2025!
rionaleonhart bc it looked like a lot of fun and also just a great way to conceptualize how much i've actually written. it both feels like a lot and also like not enough, as i never hit as many of my goals as i'd like to (ain't that just the way), so i think it'll be both cool and helpful to go back through everything c:number of fics written in 2024: 11 + continued work on all i need is some sunshine + 5 drabbles (all of them are over here at SqWA!
fandoms: Resident Evil Village, Tombstone, Evil West, The Mummy (1999), Final Fantasy VIII (+ started a short fic for The Passenger that i wasn't able to finish, but tacking that on here since i did technically write for it lol)
total wordcount for 2024: 282,224 according to SqWA (a lil misleading bc most of the chapters i posted for sunshine were written last year and merely edited/added onto, and a huge chunk of that word count is from that fic, but if i add up everything minus sunshine it's uh...132,000 words or thereabouts :V)
best title: i kinda like dis manibus (Tombstone, Johnny Ringo/Doc) bc i had fun scrolling thru a bunch of suitable schoolboy latin phrases, but i also really like oh, bury us alive (RE8, Heisenberg/Ethan) bc it's so darkly funny considering the fic lmao.
worst title: bury me in clouds of white (FF8, Seifer/Zell). tho i'd decided on it before i'd titled oh, bury us alive, i completely forgot that's what i'd decided on, and then bury us went up first, so when i went to post clouds of white i had a "uh oh" moment. additionally, tho i picked the lyrics myself from a song i have long associated with Seifer, i was still never really satisfied with it. unfortunately this fic was just "that one where time compression fucked shit up" since 2017 so part of the problem i'm having may have just been having to call it literally anything else lol.
best first line: Eventually, Miranda leaves her alone. [blood on the roots, Mia-centric]
worst first line: The president’s aide hollered at him from inside the transport, her fingers scrambling to hold back her windblown hair from her face. [bury me in clouds of white, FF8, Seifer/Zell]
gonna keep picking on clouds of white but honestly there are several i could pick from that are all in media res which i was equally unsatisfied with.
best last line: Anger and shame and fear moved him, like a puppet, and when he remembered Holliday’s handkerchief, when he felt the silk of it snag at his fingertips as he removed it, he knew he couldn’t pluck their strings from his skin. [dis manibus]
worst last line: there's a lot that are just like "he wouldn't" or "he got to work" or "he didn't look" that aren't great on their own but work well in context. i mean aside from the fact that i apparently end fics the same way a lot lmao.
looking back, did you write more than you thought you would this year, less than you thought, or about what you predicted?
less than i hoped lol. i did think i'd be able to get a lot more finished, and there are a few fics i was sure that i'd get done (part of the reason i am posting this meme so late lol) and then didn't :c
what pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted last year?
i mean both johnny ringo/doc holliday having hatesex in an alley and, well, fic for 1999's The Mummy in general but like especially not Imhotep/Jonathan lol.
what’s your favorite story this year? not the most popular, but the one that makes you the happiest.
i still think that blood on the roots (RE8, Mia-centric) is my best written fic, but if i were to say the one that makes me the happiest?? uhhh probably the Jesse/Chester monsterfucking Evil West fic i never finished lmao. it's the one i was having the most fun with writing, anyway c:
okay, NOW your most popular story.
unquestionably all i need is some sunshine (RE8, Heisenberg/Ethan) lol. it has an unfair advantage due to being both part of a long-running series as well as being the last fic i posted to ao3 before i switched to SqWA, so it's basically the only fic getting new readers lol.
story most underappreciated by the universe?
normally i'd be tempted to say any of the Evil West fic i've written but considering how small the fandom is i think those fics may have actually reached the entirety of their intended audience lol. if i was to go simply by stats it would be dis manibus (Tombstone, Johnny Ringo/Doc) with only 14 hits.
story that could have been better?
ough.....bury me in clouds of white (FF8, Seifer/Zell), like by quite a bit, unfortunately. largely bc i was so rushed, trying to hit a deadline, and so i wasn't able to spend as much time on it as i wanted/it needed.
sexiest story?
i haven't reread it since i wrote it actually, but i'm still gonna say prob fool's gold (Evil West, Jesse/Edgar) due to the whole sex pollen/marathon sex thing lol.
saddest story?
possibly let the bindweed grow (RE8, Karl/Ethan) just based on the whole cyclical nature of the premise. not time loop, but time loop-adjacent, certainly.
most fun?
three's a crowd and two's in love and i can't sleep alone (The Mummy, Imhotep/Jonathan) is definitely the funniest i think, at least of what i finished & posted. a lot of that is bc i was writing from the POV of the comic relief character lmao, so it's like baked in to how i hear his voice.
story with single sweetest moment?
lightning strike (Evil West, Vergil/Jesse) maybe? once again kind of necessitated by the POV character (thank u, Vergil). there's some softer moments in all i need is some sunshine that were posted this year too (the pool chapter comes to mind), but honestly Vergil fits more with "sweet" for me hahah.
most fucked-up story?
oh HANDS DOWN oh, bury us alive (RE8, Heisenberg/Ethan). this was the one i was simply referring to as "fucked up rich people" for like a year lol but is also basically just "the torture fic," wherein i actually wore myself out writing gore and violence (something i usually have no trouble with). also my first time writing noncon! wowee.
hardest story to write?
in some respects it was oh, bury us alive, due to the above mentioned exhaustion/burnout from writing like 70k words of whump. but in many other respects it's all i need is some sunshine (RE8, Heisenberg/Ethan). my perfectionism acts up more with sunshine than any other fic, largely bc of how long i've been working on the series/how invested i am in it. this makes it hard to work on in general, but sunshine had the double curse of having been re-written so many times, so i get irritated going back to edit things in a way i don't with other fics. it's been even worse this year bc i'm in the homestretch!!! only 1.5 more chapters to go!!! which means more pressure to make it perfect aaaa!!!!!
easiest/most fun story to write?
let the bindweed grow (RE8, Heisenberg/Ethan) was a lot of fun for me to write due to the setting (post-game trapped-in-the-megamycete nonsense), the genre (angst), and the writing style (i just went ham ngl). i also churned this baby out in like one night?? like just sat down and wrote the whole thing. coulda kept going too but i needed to sleep lol.
did any stories shift your perception of the characters?
i don't think so?? i mean i guess writing dis manibus made me actually think about Johnny Ringo as a character rather than just the dude Doc kills at the end of Tombstone. also was really putting both Karl and Ethan thru it in oh, bury us alive, which meant considering how they would react under an excessively extreme situation, but that didn't really change my perception of them as characters.
most overdue story?
definitely bury me in clouds of white. started it in 2017 and finally forced myself to finish it (with the help of
wipbigbang.) don't think i did the original idea justice, but i can always come back to it :)did you take any writing risks this year? what did you learn from them?
wrote more smut lol. trying to write more for practice and do think i'm improving but i've also learned i just don't have a lot of patience for writing sex scenes lmao. it's prob the ace thing, but i get bored more often than not (which is like the last thing u want from a sex scene lol). practice really does help tho, as it usually does.
also wrote a lot of characters i was really feeling a lil shaky wrt capturing their "voices." Johnny Ringo, Jonathan, Chester, etc. it was certainly a challenge but one i had fun with!
i guess also the "mushroom mode" chapter in sunshine, largely due to attempting to render the "voice" of the mold. i dabbled in this a bit in in the spirit that i crave several years back, when there's the crossover between Ethan and the megamycete, but this is the first time i've attempted to 1) do it for a prolonged period of time and 2) actually force the mold into a limited third person POV. which meant i had to sit here and think about how mold would think lmao. ended up basically writing prose poetry, which was fun, but genuinely pretty difficult to transition back into Ethan's normal thought patterns/narration. went thru a few versions before i settled on something i liked, and i do think it's probably one of the best things i've written, not just this year, but in general. i'm still really proud of what i ended up with! (so again i think what i've learned is that practice is good? keep trying? poetry is fun?)
finishing with barely 30 minutes to spare, but that's been 2024 as far as fic goes! maybe didn't hit all of my goals but i did write a heck of a lot. here's to finishing some more stuff in 2025!
