Revelation

The Lewis Secret Santa reveals are up, here. My lovely gift fic was written by garonne; there are a number of other lovely fics in the list; and to the surprise of no one here I wrote The End of All Our Exploring.

It was all great fun and an extremely well-run, drama-free exchange. Yay Lewis fandom!

In a few minutes I am going to post an absurdly long explication of my year in fic. Read at your leisure (by which I mean, make sure you are seated comfortably and have some sustaining food available oh my god).

Meanwhile I am still working on the "Sparrow" sequel and have just started on philomytha's prompt, which has turned into the long-threatened Gregor/Ekaterin fic (though, with a year's distance, far less melodramatically than it would have then).

2012 Fanfic Year In Review

(This is ridiculously, insanely long. Venture beyond the cut if you dare.)

(My AO3 page, for reference.)

2012 was a dismal and disappointing year for me in some ways, but even I can't say it was a bad year for producing fiction. I wrote and posted a total of 96771 words of new fanfic; this doesn't include "The Emperor's Garden," which was written at the end of 2011 and makes part of last year's count despite its publication date, or "In Time of Pestilence," which was written years ago and just posted this year. It does include my latest Lewis story, "The End of All Our Exploring," which had to wait for AO3 posting until my authorship was revealed. I'm not counting lots of snippets (some quite good but nevertheless incomplete or insufficient as stories) that went up on my journal as part of memes. (Despite some wavering, only two of those made the final cut as posted fics, and one of those is clearly labeled "crack.") But 100K is a fair estimate for total output.

The wordcount is especially shocking because that's for half the year; "No Time for Sergeants" went up in mid-July, and then the floodgates opened. I'm sure I've never written so much in so short a time. Not a word of that was part of my original fiction universe (I did do some editing of the novels in there, so technically some words got added and subtracted, but really nothing new occurred) and more importantly I did nothing toward publication except mull the possibilities over (I'll post about that soonish) but, well, it was a shitty year health-wise and, yeah. I do feel that, aside from being fun and good for me as a writer (because writing anything well is never bad), the fanfic work had some ulterior purpose; I joked "to George" here, somewhere in the middle of the floodtide, "Darling boy, I am building you an audience," and I hope there's some truth to that, though it's not the reason I wrote all the fic. I wrote the fic because I wanted to, because I love the source material, and because I love this method of conversing with my fellow fans, not because I want to sell you all books later on (although that would be nice, and George wants to meet you).

Anyway. I can label this year lots of ways, so here are a few of them:

1) It's all yunitsa's fault. Well, part of it; but who else could drag me into two new fandoms in a year and get me writing in them? I haven't done much in Person of Interest, aside from say "Oh, Mr. Finch" a lot, although I'm proud of the writing quality in the two short fics I've posted. (And the crossover, discussed below.) In Lewis, I think I could call myself an established, popular writer and a part of the community, though not an especially vocal or prolific one.

2) It's all philomytha's fault. And penwiper26's and raven's, too, but it was Philomytha who really yanked me forcefully into the universe where…

3) Simon Illyan Is The New Black. Oh, Simon. (Also a fair amount of "Oh, Aral" shadowing the black. Part of the package deal.) I actually only wrote four fics in which Simon figures prominently, but that was nearly all of my Vorkosigan output, and a lot of words, and a lot of Simon-POV, which I'd only done briefly before in "Imperial Bedrooms." So I feel rather Simon-dominated, to say the least. (Insert "L'oiseau qui vole" joke here…)

( crossovers, original characters, slash, etc. )

Favorite lines: I've been keeping track of these as I go along, here and here. To complete the record, favorite lines from "The Human Heart" (again, I like Harold noticing language):

There's just such perseverance to it. Such stubborn, gutsy… well, not gutsy, one really can't--"

"Harold. What are you talking about?"

"The human heart, John.

For "The End of All Our Exploring": I am inordinately fond of "Batter me up and fry me, you flipping God," but since that is a paraphrase amid all the allusions and quotes, I think I'll go for "You literary types, you readers of legends in hotel bedrooms with adequate lighting."

Word of the Year: apparently "gentle." This is not the result of statistical analysis, just my subjective observation, but I think it's a legitimate choice. And a curious one.

So: 2012, The Year of Fanfic, really. I'm sorry to say that I don't plan to have 2013 be the same (but there will at least be some. And who knows. Let's see what happens).