Fanfic Year in Review 2023
28 February 2024 10:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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List of Completed Fics
This year I finally completed *both* my long fics! (I think I can count Arctic Raoul, as it is at the stage where I would be uploading it if I were going to.)
And I even managed to get the new work uploaded to my fanfiction.net account and the stories from my old FFnet account uploaded to AO3, so things are reasonably back in sync, even though I still have a considerable backlog of material that was never transferred to AO3...
With the Best Intentions (3000 words)
Fandom: Sunset Boulevard (musical)
Characters: Max von Mayerling, Betty Schaefer, Joe Gillis, Norma Desmond
Summary: Max acts to forestall the final shot. AU.
Chick nor Child (7000 words)
Fandom: Phantom of the Opera (Leroux)
Characters: Raoul, Philippe (offstage), Perrette (OC)
Summary: Raoul has an encounter with Philippe's past, and Perrette faces the future: side-stories from The Sons of Éléonore.
What's in a Name? (7000 words)
Fandom: Phantom of the Opera (Leroux)
Characters: Erik
Summary: "He should not have been born, and having been born, should have had the good grace to die and spare the world from the spectacle of his existence. Nobody had ever made any secret of that."
White Knight (5500 words)
Fandom: Gigi (book)
Characters: Gaston Lachaille, Gigi, Madame Alvarez, Liane d'Exelmans
Summary: World-weary Gaston Lachaille sees himself as perfectly positioned to offer a solution to Gigi's situation. He misjudges things in more ways than one.
"My dear Vicky..." (3800 words)
Fandom: The Red Shoes (Powell & Pressburger)
Characters: Vicky, Julian, Lermontov
Summary: Lermontov takes up his pen to write a letter, and is not interrupted. AU.
High City on a Hill (67000 words)
Fandom: Phantom of the Opera (musical)
Characters: Raoul, Hertha (OC), Christine
Summary: Raoul was bound to recognise Christine when once he heard her sing. But things have changed... for both of them.
From the Phantom's Shadow (a.k.a. 'Arctic Raoul') (126000 words)
Fandom: Phantom of the Opera (book)
Characters: Raoul, Christine, Erik
Summary: For the purposes of this meme -- Raoul and Christine flee Paris before the fatal performance of 'Faust'. But Erik is not prepared to let matters rest there.
Total number
Seven
.Total word count
About 220,000 words (but probably nearer 28,000 actually written this year, as opposed to editing).
Ship/character breakdown
Raoul/Christine, three
Philippe/Perrette, sort of
Multiple people in "Sunset Boulevard", all of them basically unrequited
Gaston/Gigi, one
Vicky/Julian, one
Hertha/Raoul, one
Specifics
Best/worst title?
"With the Best Intentions" is probably the best. "From the Phantom's Shadow" is really not good, either as an indication of the type of story to expect or as an allusion to the plot themes; "Chick nor Child" is not nearly as good as I originally thought it was going to be either.
Best/worst summary?
"High City on a Hill" is the best out of a strong field, I think. The worst is probably "My dear Vicky...", which doesn't really explain the pivotal nature of the AU as well as I had hoped.
Best/worst first line
The best, again in a strong field (and how wonderful it is to have a choice of more than a couple of candidates), is probably Staring down at the two letters on the desk in front of him, Boris Lermontov knew that he had lost from "My dear Vicky...", which in conjunction with the previous answer suggests that I should probably have simply used that as my summary for the story! For me the worst is His own father referred to him, when he was forced to acknowledge the boy’s existence, as 'the creature' or 'that thing', which feels just a little clumsy.
Best/worst last line?
My favourite is the final line of Arctic Raoul (which is good, after I spent so much time fiddling with it!): The Comte's mouth was a little crooked beneath the points of his moustache, but his grip was a benediction and a promise. The worst, I think, is from "With the Best Intentions": There was nothing left to find but a mass of draperies face-down in the pool. The final line of "My dear Vicky..." is a bit clunky as well, but it works better in context; the whole last paragraph of the Sunset Boulevard fic has never really worked, alas. Most unusual for my stories, which tend to have stronger ends than beginnings :-p
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?
Far, far more!
(Although I've just noticed that I apparently didn't do this meme at all last year, and that "With the Best Intentions", technically speaking, was in fact the only story I wrote during 2022 instead of being part of the 2023 crop -- but I'm not going to go back and take it out now, having already named it in several of the preceding verdicts :-p)
Last year I would probably have echoed my verdict from the previous two entries: after finishing the ongoing novel-length projects I was "starting to wonder if I shall be writing any fan-fic or indeed anything at all". I certainly wouldn't have expected to produce two new POTO stories and write for several fresh fandoms (even if they are all, unfortunately, incredibly obscure...) and in fact I actually started a new "Yellow Poppy" story two days ago, even if it isn't eligible for this year's fic summary.
What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted last year?
The Sunset Boulevard story has actually been hanging around since 2019, although that didn't mean I was necessarily likely to write it -- after all, I still have that idea for a Stephen King "Christine" crossover pending, and the Roland story has been in the back of my mind since I was originally writing the drabbles of "For Valentine"!
But it would certainly never in a million years have occurred to me that I would write a 'redemption' fan-fic for "The Red Shoes", which I had not seen since the first time I watched it, had no expectation of watching again, and hadn't remembered feeling particularly sorry for Lermontov in....
What's your favorite story this year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you the happiest.
The greatest relief is undoubtedly caused by having finished Arctic Raoul, even if I have failed to do anything useful about it (and will probably still be failing to have done anything useful about it as of this time next year).
But I was pleased by the staggeringly difficult achievement of writing a third-person account (in "What's in a Name?") from the point of view of a protagonist who rejected the name he was christened with and didn't adopt another to mentally refer to himself, so basically had no name that I could use in the narrative ;-)
Okay, NOW your most popular story.
Technically "High City on a Hill", at least on AO3 (which are the only stats I currently have access to) -- it has had 867 hits since February 2022, of which 325 were since February 2023, but I'm not sure if that reflects multiple views or multiple viewers, and it certainly reflects multiple updates. After that, oddly, enough, "With the Best Intentions", which had 138 hits on a single chapter story despite being uploaded to a virtually non-existent fandom. ("My dear Vicky", in a similarly tiny and moribund fandom, got only 17 hits on AO3; even "White Knight", for which I had to *create* a fandom with only my own single story in it, got 41 hits in the same period.)
Story most underappreciated by the universe?
"My dear Vicky" got almost no page views -- a grand total of 17, despite being posted to a fandom that did at least already exist, unlike "White Knight" and, earlier, "For Valentine"). On the other hand it did get comments and kudos, even if half of that was due to my "Frozen" beta-reading!
Feedback on "High City on a Hill" pretty much died out before the climax, which was very disappointing (and suggests at the very least that said climax/conflict either didn't enthuse the reviewers who were commenting on it earlier, or that they had simply stopped bothering to follow the story due to slow updates) -- but to be fair, on AO3 it did eventually get at least some comments.
Story that could have been better?
The wording of the ending of "With the Best Intentions" simply does not satisfy me, but at this stage it is what it is, I'm afraid.
Sexiest story?
Technically speaking, Arctic Raoul, which does have a very vague 'wedding night' scene of sorts... except that the passage in question was written back in 2019 and already appeared as a response in that year's "Fanfic Year in Review"!
Otherwise, *possibly* "Chick nor Child", where Agathe does some mischievously significant licking of plum-juice off her fingers -- but in terms of sexiness, that is really pretty much off the bottom of the scale ;-p
Saddest story?
"With the Best Intentions" features everybody trying to fix the story only for one of the main characters to end up inevitably dead anyway -- but to be honest, I can't feel Norma's suicide to be 'sad'. It's more along the lines of a defiance thrown in the face of an ungrateful world.
"High City on a Hill" is, basically, an R/C tragedy, but since the viewpoint character 'wins' in that she gets to keep her husband and their son, even if he is only making the best of things for her sake, it is likewise difficult to rank the feeling of the final scene where she steels herself to face the future as 'sad'.
Most fun?
"Chick nor Child", where I teased poor Raoul mercilessly and then had Perrette interacting with her family (and the back history of various less-than-admirable Comtes de Chagny over the ages :-p)
Although I also had a lot of fun writing infant sociopath Erik in "What's in a Name"...
Story with single sweetest moment?
Julian and Vicky as a newly-married young couple, at least amongst the 'shorts'; there are sweet moments in Arctic Raoul, but surprisingly few, as C/R tend to be undercut by angst of one sort of another...
Hardest story to write?
"What's in a Name?", due to the aforementioned issue with a character who thought of himself merely as 'he' and my strenuous (and ultimately successful) attempts to avoid loading the story with epithets in unnatural contexts as a result!
Easiest/most fun story to write?
On the whole, "Chick nor Child", where I enjoyed having fun with the characters and rehashing my own past fic while inventing a whole load of fresh OCs to inhabit this completely new environment :-)
Did any stories shift your perceptions of the characters?
Well, Perrette became a lot more fleshed out (unsurprisingly) as the result of getting her own narrative point of view... but I'm not sure my original concept of her (as the self-possessed young farm wife who is curious what it would be like to bed a member of the aristocracy, and ages into a formidable matriarch) actually changed in the process.
Most overdue story?
Both "High City on a Hill" and Arctic Raoul were horribly overdue, obviously. Goodness knows what I shall answer for this one next year, given that I have been pretty much constantly engaged in dealing with first "Blue Remembered Hills" and then Arctic Raoul since the first time I ever filled out this meme in January 2015...! It will be odd *not* to have an overdue project; the most probable candidate seems likely to be "Imprisoned by Fear", which I still haven't done any more work on despite mentally setting it as my next task almost a year ago :-(
Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?
Again, the whole business of setting myself to write from the point of view of a character with no name, without the crutch of being able to do so in the first person. And the irony is that it hadn't occurred to me at the start that this was going to be a problem; I ended up undertaking the task almost by accident rather than as any kind of intended risk. (In the first chapter I could get away with using 'the boy' from time to time, but as the protagonist grows to adulthood I found I had no choice at all!)
What are your fic writing goals for next year?
Get Arctic Raoul published, I suppose, although I don't really have a lot of faith in my ability to get that done.
I'd like to finish that translation -- and obviously I want to finish the "Yellow Poppy" story I've just started, despite the fact that it obviously isn't going to find any kind of audience :-p
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Date: 2024-03-02 12:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-06 10:11 am (UTC)I got as far as discovering that the local library system stopped buying the Writers' and Artists' Yearbook in 2015 -- no doubt the contact listings are all online these days -- although I found this morning that it apparently still does exist, so I suppose I might have to go out and actually pay for it... https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/writers--artists-yearbook-2024-9781399408899/
The online listings ("new agents seeking clients") tend to be entirely US-centric.
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Date: 2024-03-06 02:18 pm (UTC)Try 'UK literary agents'
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Date: 2024-03-06 05:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-06 05:44 pm (UTC)I once published Chris Boucher's Star Cops novelisation - he couldn't get them commercially published. I don't think I even have the text files now - change of computers, etc.
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Date: 2024-03-06 06:04 pm (UTC)That's the scary thing about computers -- you can utterly lose so much work so casually unless you actively update and transfer it all the time. It doesn't just sit there in human-accessible form for our descendants to stumble over two hundred years later...