Fanfic Year in Review Meme

[igenlode]

Stats

List of Completed Fics

(in the last year, rather than since the last time I did this in January 2015!)
The Daaé Case (15,000 words)
Fandom: Love Never Dies
Characters: Christine, Raoul, Gustave, and my original character Jos Perlman as the narrator
Summary: Jos Perlman wants to keep his job with Hammerstein. Raoul just wants to keep his wife. Maybe they have more in common than they think.

Can I list this one yet again? It was in the 2015 summary :-)
Blue Remembered Hills (completed and typed but still not uploaded: length 75,000 words)
Fandom: Crossover between Phantom of the Opera (Leroux AU)/Blake's 7 (first series)
Characters: Raoul, Christine, Erik, Daroga, Blake, Gan, Avon, Jenna, Vila, Carlotta
Summary (POTO-centric): On Newparis, planet of masks, a mysterious underground genius strikes terror into the corrupt Terran Federation... but when a young Federation officer falls for a member of the resistance and outsiders get involved, old allegiances shift. Leroux characters in AU space opera.

The Man Who Knew Too Much (4,000 words)
Fandom: Phantom of the Opera (movie)
Characters: Buquet, Phantom, and the mystery narrator ;-)
Summary: Gone, but not forgotten; Joseph Buquet knew the difference between stagecraft and the supernatural, but when he went after the intruder he had no idea what he was up against.

Christmas as it ought not to be (8,000 words)
Fandom: Phantom of the Opera (Leroux)
Characters: Raoul, Christine, Philippe, Raoul's sister, and the usual assortment of other OCs
Summary: Raoul had never enjoyed Christmas very much.

A Ring Returned (100 words — drabble)
Fandom: Phantom of the Opera (Leroux)
Characters: Raoul, Christine, dead Erik (sort of :-p)
Summary: Together, they dig a grave.

This Mask of Death (3,000 words)
Fandom: Phantom of the Opera (Leroux)
Characters: Raoul, Christine, Erik (and a brief cameo from the shepherd who finds Raoul's body)
Summary: Moonlight over Perros-Guirec, and something is stirring in the graveyard...

If I Were Vicomte (5,500 words)
Fandom: Phantom of the Opera (Leroux AU)
Characters: Raoul, Christine, Christine's father, Raoul's AU parents, AU Philippe who is not Raoul's brother
Summary: Christine's childhood friend is convinced that all his problems would be solved by a little more social position.

There is no Phantom of the Opera (4,000 words)
Fandom: Phantom of the Opera (musical)
Characters: Raoul, Christine
Summary: Raoul's thoughts go round and round as he follows Christine up to the roof of the Opera... but he is sure of one thing at least.

Redemption
Fandom: Love Never Dies
Characters: Phantom, Christine, Gustave, Meg, Raoul, Madame Giry
Summary: Meg shoots someone else. And it's not a mistake.

A Family Man
Fandom: Phantom of the Opera (musical)
Characters: Raoul, Christine, OC children
Summary: Sometimes, Raoul's children remind him of himself and Christine. But mostly they are very much themselves. And a long walk on a hot day is not to everyone's taste...

Newly Wed
Fandom: Phantom of the Opera (musical)
Characters: Raoul, Christine
Summary: Every morning, the sun casts a rainbow across her pillow... and whatever her fears, they will face the future together.

...and four more that were written over the preceding sixteen months, including a "Les Mis" book-fic and one for "Carmen". I'm not counting Imprisoned by Fear under the past year, although I did do quite a lot of work on it over that period, because it's a translation rather than my own composition.

Total number

Eleven, although that's cheating as I'm counting "Blue Remembered Hills" as being completed in both years ;-p

Total word count

122,000 - most of which consists of "Blue Remembered Hills" again! I did a lot more one-shots this year, plus a drabble; and even my multi-chapter stories were mostly pretty short.

Ship/character breakdown:

Raoul/Christine, ten (and technically speaking they're a background pairing for number eleven, "The Man Who Knew Too Much", as well)
Hmm, let nobody say I'm not consistent :-p

Specifics

Best/worst title?

Possibly "The Man Who Knew Too Much", a neat quote from a non-canon source (for once) summing up why Buquet had to die.
"A Ring Returned" is possibly the worst on the grounds that it's a bit clumsy. Not really all that much to choose between any of them, actually.

Best/worst summary?

I rather like the poetic summary for "Newly Wed" (Every morning, the sun casts a rainbow across her pillow... and whatever her fears, they will face the future together.)
Worst... can I have "Blue Remembered Hills" again? ;-p

Best/worst first line?

Hmm, my first lines have had a tendency to be long and rambly this year. Most effective was probably Joseph Buquet was no saint, that's for sure from "The Man Who Knew Too Much". Worst, on the grounds of being almost Bulwer-Lyttonesque out of context, would be the discursive It was a cold, grey afternoon outside, and the neatly-clipped trees in their huge pots — each almost as tall as the boy who stood gazing out at them through the long windows — stretched away from the chateau towards an empty fountain that held only a thin layer of ice from "Christmas as it ought not to be".

Best/worst last line?

Not such a strong field this year.
I think my favourite would probably be My grief; my Phantom. My fault from "The Man Who Knew Too Much" — if I could classify those two sentence fragments together! If not, probably Dearest Raoul," she told him softly, "that was true long since" from "Newly Wed".

Worst would probably be, again, the wandering nature of the finale of "If I Were Vicomte": And with his mother's warm soup simmering over the fire, with Philippe mollified and those childhood dreams all come true, Yann Le Coennec began to have faith in his own good fortune at last.

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 didn't think I was writing that much; it felt as if I was doing far more reviewing than writing of my own. (According to my FFnet history, I wrote about 180,000 words of reviews over the past year!) So having written such a large number of stories, even if far more of them are one-shots than previously, is an unexpected achievement.

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

Well, I certainly wouldn't have predicted Buquet/building as a likely pairing, even if it is all tease! I wouldn't have expected to write a story based on the infamous 2004 movie version of "Phantom", either...

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

Maybe "Newly Wed", which is a sweet piece of fluff about Raoul and Christine on their honeymoon, seasoned with angst, hurt/comfort, some interesting family history and some very innocent naughtiness ;-p

Okay, NOW your most popular story.

In terms of reviews per chapter, the challenge entries "This Mask of Death" and "The Man Who Knew Too Much", since I got a lot of reviews from other contestants.
Page-views on all my stories look very low this year, possibly because of the high number of one-shots (but the one-shot "Redemption", in a low-traffic fandom, got 400 page views — that's more than the six-chapter "The Daaé Case" has had in total in the same fandom, though it's been up since last June as versus since January).
In terms of which the readers loved most... it's honestly hard to say. Maybe "This Mask of Death", simply because all the first-time reviewers who were reviewing fandom-blind and hadn't ever come across any of my work before seemed honestly astonished at the level of writing :-)

Story most underappreciated by the universe?

I would say "Blue Remembered Hills" again this year, except that I actually got a PM from somebody who had followed it when it first came out and wanted to know if I was still working on it... which after all this time, indicates a serious level of interest!
None of them were absolutely adored; none of them were ignored.

Story that could have been better?

"Redemption" and "A Ring Returned" were both technical experiments that to some extent sacrificed content for form.

Sexiest story?

"The Man Who Knew Too Much" has more (misleading) innuendo than anything else I've written this year, I think! "Newly Wed" contains actual sex and nudity, but not really 'in that way'.

Saddest story?

Oddly enough I seem to have done far fewer sad stories this year. Erik dies, twice, but I'm not sure that counts :-p
Perhaps "The Man Who Knew Too Much", in which the narrator has to witness horror and live with the memory of her inability to do anything about it.

Most fun?

Probably "The Man Who Knew Too Much" again. I had a lot of fun with those innuendos and the general attempts to mislead the reader... even if, according to the reviews, I utterly failed even to get people to realise that I was trying to fool them :-(

Story with single sweetest moment?

Possibly "There is no Phantom of the Opera": if some day he was bound to find himself with snuff-box and slippers laid ready by the fire, shaking his head over the extravagant follies of his youth... then he wanted it to be Christine with whom he shared that fond smile across the hearth; Christine grown as sweet and round and wrinkled as a winter apple, and her eyes warm with a lifetime of memories lived side by side.

Hardest story to write?

Again, getting "Blue Remembered Hills" typed and edited, which has taken literally years to push myself into getting round to :-(

Easiest/most fun story to write?

None of the one-shots were terribly difficult (even the drabble only took an evening or two).

Did any stories shift your perceptions of the characters?

"The Man Who Knew Too Much", with Buquet.

Most overdue story?

Any guesses? :-P

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

Quite a lot of experiment in the short pieces: I tried my first-ever drabble, my first-ever first-person present-tense story (plus the somewhat unorthodox present tense narration of "Redemption"), and a story that had all the principal characters speaking in various degrees of foreign accent, including all the main narrative PoV! I also set a story within the movie continuity, accepting all its slightly dodgy plot changes at face value, and wrote a very AU story which required Raoul to be recognisably the same person in the same setting while having a totally different name, social background and past history...

I'm not sure what I learnt, other than that taking risks makes it harder work to get a good result without any discernable improvement in quality; it's like trying to use your non-dominant hand for everyday tasks, possibly a useful exercise in diversifying one's abilities but not in itself talent-enhancing :-P

What are your fic writing goals for next year?

As always, to get "Blue Remembered Hills" published! Preferably with a cover image, since I've had one in mind for so long.
Looking at my goals from last time, I note that I did in fact finally get the 'Breton story' published (as "If I Were Vicomte") but have failed to do anything at all about the "Double Agents de Chagny", though I haven't totally forgotten it :-(