Fanfic Year in Review 2021

[igenlode]

Stats

List of Completed Fics

At this point it's starting to get repetitive to say, yet again, that 'thanks to continuing work I haven't completed much this year' -- despite the fact that I *have* been writing pretty much constantly, six days a week at least, I have published very little. The only difference is that it isn't currently 'the Swedish story' holding matters up, though I have managed a certain amount of editing work on that.

All the new work is on my AO3 account only.

Appraisal (700 words)
Fandom: Harry Potter
Characters: Harry, Snape (sort of)
Summary: Harry Potter arrives back at Hogwarts to take up a new job. He has to run the gauntlet of a predecessor's approval.

A Thing of Value (500 words)
Fandom: A Tale of Two Cities (book)
Characters: Sydney Carton, the little seamstress
Summary: Perception on the brink of death can be hard to bear. Or it can be a blessing.

For Valentine (3000 words)
Fandom: The Yellow Poppy (D.K.Broster)
Characters: Valentine, Gaston de Trélan, Comte de Brencourt, Roland de Céligny, Abbé Chassin
Summary: When the Comte de Brencourt first knew Valentine, before the Revolution, she had been an estranged aristocratic wife. The memory of her fate has haunted him ever since. Now honour, loyalty and love come into conflict.

Total number

Three (with only one of those being over a thousand words!)

Total word count

About 4,000 words.

Plus another 55,000 or so, at a *very* rough estimate, on Hertha. (I am currently on the final page of the third of three 60-page manuscript books, of which about two-and-a-half consist of Hertha and which hold approximately 450 words/page, varying enormously according to writing conditions, and last year I estimated that I had done about 10,000 words on the story at that point).

Ship/character breakdown

Raoul/Christine one, sort of (if you count the still unfinished Hertha-story)
Sydney Carton/Lucie Manette, one
Valentine and her husband, one (plus the canonically unrequited de Brencourt/Valentine)

Specifics

Best/worst title

"Appraisal" is probably the best, out of a very small pool. "For Valentine" probably the worst, since although it does sum up the theme of the story fairly well it sounds inadvertently like a 'Valentine's Day fic' :-(

Best/worst summary

Again, the best is "Appraisal" and the worst "For Valentine"; I'm pretty sure there is *something* wrong with the tenses in that one, but I couldn't smooth it out. (I did actively want to make the division between the three time periods, but it doesn't sound right.)

Best/worst first line

"A Thing of Value" is the best, I think, especially if you can count the whole of the first paragraph to go with it.
"For Valentine" is the worst (The phoenix on the signet emerald mocked him in memory), made awkward purely and simply by the length constrictions of drabble format. Which is ironic, since so far as I can remember that was one sentence I never actually edited -- my rather crude drabble-writing technique tends to be to write the beginning straight off and then to edit the end down ferociously in an attempt to squeeze it in :-p

Best/worst last line

He knew only the split-second rasp of the blade's fall, and the assenting leap that lifted his soul in answer -- it was the image I wanted for the fic as a whole, and a nicely turned phrase. Worst, I'm afraid, is "For Valentine" *again* (So too, falling from her lips after all that had passed, did the simple word 'friend') -- here it's very much the theme for that particular drabble, but it's tortuously expressed. I was trying to bring out the emphasis on 'friend' by sending it to the rear of the sentence, but the result is a mess.
(It might work better if I removed the 'falling from her lips' altogether and deployed those four words somewhere else, but part of the problem is that I haven't covered anywhere what Valentine actually *said*, or indeed that she said anything in particular...)

General questions

Looking back, did you write more fics than you thought you would this year, less than you thought, or about what you predicted?

I would have predicted finishing off Hertha quite early on in the year -- I only had three scenes or so originally visualised (the opening gala, the masquerade, and the post-Final Lair scene) and certainly didn't set out to write a novel-length OC fic, which is what it has ended up being. I was expecting it to be another summarised retelling of canon like "If I Were Vicomte" or "Christmas as it ought not to be".

I'm not sure I would have predicted necessarily writing a lot of stories after that. "The Double Agents de Chagny" *would* be a novel-length story, I think, and not one that I feel up to tackling at the moment, if ever. I've forgotten what the Sunset Boulevard idea I had was, other than that it involved Norma shooting *herself* despite the fact that Joe thinks he has saved everybody by going back home with his tail between his legs; there was a scene with Betty, as well -- a soliloquy for each character going in their separate directions for the sake of the others. I think Betty was *probably* going to Artie...

The other queued idea is the Stephen King Christine crossover, which might have stood a chance of getting done. And of course I might have had other completely different ideas -- as in fact I did.

But on the whole I was actually quite surprised at how many stories -- if not how many words! -- I had managed to write; I'd probably have predicted not doing anything at all after finishing Hertha, and neither of those things happened :-p

What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted last year?

I absolutely would not have predicted ever writing D.K.Broster fanfic!

What's your favorite story this year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you the happiest.

Ironically, probably the D.K.Broster fanfic -- despite the fact that it manages to come bottom in every one of the best/worst questions above. It was a big technical challenge, it was a moral challenge in the attempt to keep writing a new drabble every single day (I did cheat and write a couple of them a day 'in advance', where they were linked so closely that I needed to know what proportion of the scene was going into each), and de Brencourt himself is a character who has haunted me for years -- I didn't initially set out to write a drabble-sequence reframing the book as his personal epiphany, but the fact that the prompts pushed it in that direction I found highly satisfying.

Okay, NOW your most popular story.

Oh, "Appraisal", of course, purely and simply because it was posted in a big fandom instead of a dead or non-existent one!

Story most underappreciated by the universe?

I'm not sure any of them were 'underappreciated', given that my expectations for two of them were so very low -- I'm astonished that the Sydney Carton one got 5 kudos and 20 page hits, for example, since I can't imagine many people are browsing that fandom (certainly no-one has posted there since I did). And the "Yellow Poppy" fic got kudos from a user I've never even heard of.

Story that could have been better?

Probably "For Valentine" -- ironically -- *again*, simply because when looking at it now I can see the clumsinesses resulting from the drabble constraints. On the other hand, without those constraints it certainly wouldn't have been written.

Sexiest story?

Well, there is [canonical] extra-marital activity alluded to in "For Valentine", but it really isn't 'sexy' either in my story or the original novel!
Probably the closest out of a celibate-as-usual field is Hertha's story, where she is actually intermittently sleeping with her husband, even if she isn't getting (or expecting) any sort of excitement out of it. (It really isn't a significant part of their relationship, from her perspective; there are hints in the course of the story that she is gaining an increased physical awareness of him, but she has no association at all between that and their mutual marital obligations.)

Saddest story?

Probably "For Valentine", where Valentine loses her husband after a briefly joyous reunion, and de Brencourt goes through a largely self-inflicted hell...

Most fun?

None of them are really much 'fun'; "Appraisal" is probably the most upbeat, with a little genuine laughter at the end.

Story with single sweetest moment?

"For Valentine" -- even if it's really the only one with any 'sweet' moments in it ;-p

Hardest story to write?

Hertha, of course!
Otherwise, "For Valentine" again, given the triple challenge of writing to a set of non-negotiable daily prompts, fitting them to a pre-existing novel in chronological order, *and* ensuring that each chapter was precisely a hundred words in length.

Easiest/most fun story to write

Well, the *easiest* to write was probably "Appraisal" -- and I got to do some light humour in there as well.

Did any stories shift your perceptions of the characters?

Not unless you count Hertha, where the various OC family members evolved quite a lot from my original concepts/thumbnail sketches of them.

Most overdue story?

Hertha, of course...

Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?

Other than the obvious unnecessary extra challenge in choosing to fit the drabble prompts to an existing fixed plot (from which I'm not sure I learned much other than that it was a lot harder than I'd realised when I'd originally casually set out to do it)... I think the main risk was in writing what turned out to be a domestic drama of a young wife struggling with the first year of her marriage and a first pregnancy, which was just too far out of my experience/comfort zone.
Man about to be guillotined? Yes, I can do that.
Woman with a parasite growing inside her? More difficult, apparently! (Probably because a hefty proportion of the audience may very well be in a position to detect when it rings false, and I'm not...)
So what I'm conscious of having learnt is that it looks as if I probably couldn't write a formula romance if I tried, even minus the now-obligatory smut -- something I'd come to assume I now possibly could pull off convincingly after writing so much R/C stuff :-(

What are your fic writing goals for next year?

Identical to last year.
"At least to finish typing Arctic Raoul. To manage to finish Hertha's story" :-(