(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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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…)
4) Crossovers are back! I rediscovered the joy and the struggle of writing crossovers this year. There's really nothing like the comments on a crossover (all of those "I didn't think this could possibly work, and yet" exclamations) and I am invariably pleasantly surprised that people actually read them (in large numbers, in fact) though wrestling the things into shape can be a wearying, frustrating process (or a wild throw-caution-to-the-winds ride. Or both). "No Time for Sergeants" was just a crazy idea born out of three mystery series, one of which I'd fallen for the year before, one more recently, and one practically that week (hello, Hathaway!), and I didn't care much if what plot it had made sense or if it fit into anyone's canon, as long as Janice, Wieldy and James got to talk. (It really helped to use Janice's POV and the Bryant & May stylebook, here.) "Further Up and Further In" came out ofavanti_90's prompt, and I can't imagine I'd ever have thought to cross the Vorkosiverse and Narnia otherwise, but it works if you don't think about it too hard.
Both of those are "crash the universes together" crossovers, in very different modes (the second being literally an explosion while the first makes perfect real world sense no seriously). "Dear Stephen," which is labeled like a crossover, really isn't; it's about Laura Hobson having an imaginary friend who belongs to another fictional universe. "Rich and Strange" isn't labeled a crossover and it isn't; it's just a grand allusion. "Improbability" is a copout crossover with an unacknowledged Jonathan Creek cameo. "Sparrow" is the kind of crossover where one universe has to be submissive and crawl inside the other one, and from all my cries of "OTP, people!" while I was writing it, you can tell I think the pairing was fifty shades of wonderful. (I am still doing the "OMG Simon Illyan and Harold Finch" dance in my head as I write the sequel.)
("In Time of Pestilence" is also a crossover, with my original universe, but again, not written this year; basically a lingering leftover in my Snape-is-meant-for-crossovers mode of a decade ago.)
4) The Year of Original Characters. As I've said, tossing in non-canon characters is not something I'd done much before in fic, aside from the one prominent and eponymous "Lion's Cub Series" example last year. (I am hardly inexperienced at making up original characters, having written four heavily-populated novels.) I did have to create a few of them (a whole family of them, in fact) for "Rich and Strange," but they got very little onstage time (the villain basically appears once to be a villain, and many of them are only mentioned and never appear at all; that wasn't really the point of the story). Then came "Further Up and Further In," which while using a few canonical Narnians otherwise required original characters (none of the canonical Betans having conveniently disappeared into a wormhole in the course of the series, though I did manage to include an offstage-canonical character who didn't, at the end). It was the fic that took me longest to write this year, and the struggle with the characters was part of that (distraction, and illness I didn't realize I had at the time, were the rest), but in the end I think I turned out a nicely varied lot of them.
That experience released whatever inhibition I had, and the next thing I did was invent Jules Duval. And then, later on, Miranda Antonietti (as I also said before: The Year of Getting Simon Illyan Laid Using Original Characters).
(4a) For Lewis, I did a fair amount of bringing back minor (episodic) canon characters, which isn't something that happens a lot in that fandom, so it's worth mentioning. I just don't see why Liv Nash and Jonjo Read and Zoe Suskin shouldn't have another chance to do their thing, so I gave them one.)
5) Slash Ahoy! I've always been perfectly slash-friendly; I just hadn't written a lot of it. (For "not a lot" read "one tentative and unresolved Neville/Draco.") This year I have written: three stories about Lewis and Hathaway getting together in three different ways; one Sherlock/John (with a lead-in story that's retrospectively contiguous); a very short possibly UST-ish Peter/Neal (not something I ship, but whatever); two Finch/Reeses; and of course the grand madness of "L'oiseau qui vole" which is Simon/OMC with overtones of Simon/Aral. (And a bit of Piotr/Ezar hinting in "Thirty." I would say "and a partridge in a pear tree" but there are too many birds flapping around as it is. Oh, birds. Someday you all will read Time Goes By and understand why I got so excited about Finch's aliases and why Jules hums that song and so forth. I am not that into birds, seriously; they just happen to me.)
And no, I don't know why all the slash; I hate to think it was in part about being popular, but probably that figured into it. Mostly it was the particular fandoms I got into and what I saw in them (which happens to be the same as what a lot of other people saw). I am a little concerned about the whole misogynist thing, or at least about excluding the female point of view, but frankly not very much; this is only part of my overall writing output, after all. And I did have a few kickass women show up this year, if not a lot of Bechdel test passing.
6) Visual Media. The new fandoms are TV fandoms; I'd done practically nothing not book-based before. There may be some relation to 5) here, she said dryly. Otherwise, I'm still processing what this means for my writing.
Some Bests and Mosts. Yeah, I hate picking them out too.
The easy one is Most Popular. I am frankly amazed at the speed at which "Rich and Strange" picked up hits; in less than five months it's at over 2000, which may be peanuts to some popular writers but is astounding to me, especially since the Lewis fandom is not large, and which places it well above anything else in my stats, including fics posted a year earlier in a bigger but no less adulatory fandom. It is a decent, solid piece of writing with some bits I really like; it is nevertheless neither a fully-realized casefic nor an explicit slashfic, and the allusions got rather wild and woolly, but I guess it works for readers (and for me, frankly: dialogue, imagery, cinematic vision, characterization are what I'm proud of).
I've also had a goodly number of hits (and comments/kudos, which are what matter) on "Da Segno al Coda" and on my Vorkosigan fics en masse. My two Sherlock fics were my first experience writing in a truly enormous fandom: not just sheer numbers but the speed at which a newly-posted fic disappears off the front-page radar; wow. Vorkosiverse or Lewis: except in busy periods like Yuletide season, it takes days or sometimes weeks. Sherlock: hours. Despite this, the hit counts are impressively high (meaning, higher than the Vorkosiverse fics, without trying; not like real Sherlock writers), and people do keep finding them. I enjoyed writing "Improbability" and "The Cat Did Nothing in the Night-Time" but I'm not keen to go back; I like my small fandoms better, where I feel like I'm actually contributing and making an impact.
I'm not going to talk about disappointing low hit counts because there aren't any, but I am still amused that "And Love Itself Have Rest" lingers much lower than the other (non-crossover) Lewis fics. Lewis fans are a sensitive bunch and don't care for painful crawling out of suicidal depression, I guess. We are so much hardier in the Vorkosiverse. *g* (It could also be the lack of actual slash and Robbie Lewis that's keeping the numbers down.)
And, on the other hand, where are all these people coming from who read "Sparrow"? PoI/Vorkosiverse: much more of an OTP than I thought, clearly. :)
Most Fun to Write. In retrospect, I seem to have spent the last six months largely in a cloud of writing joy (in contrast to my physical state), though I know there were ups and downs. I did declare "Sparrow" to be the most fun thing I'd ever written, and I'll stick with that, though "Thirty" and "The Cat Did Nothing in the Night-Time" had some pretty gleeful moments too. Also "Dear Stephen," if mostly for the whole "OMG Laura Hobson and Stephen Maturin" personal wow factor. And writing drunk!Gregor in "Bubble." (I'd done that before, but then "Offerings" was my "most fun" last year, so there you go.)
Most Challenging. I took lots of chances and challenges this year, which is all to the good. I tried some style experiments (hey, really anything written in present tense is a style experiment, for me, but "Improbability" with all its imagery and its depressive-detached POV was the furthest out there, followed by the wilder bits of "the heart is hard to translate" and maybe "Da Segno al Coda"). "Thirty" is the only story I can call structurally challenging, though sometimes just getting through a linear narrative in one piece is harder than skipping around in time, and "Further Up and Further In" had some of both, plus all those new characters, so I think it wins. Or ties with "the heart is hard to translate," because that used so much sheer writing muscle. (Fitting in all the literary allusions in "The End of All Our Exploring" was more bravura and flimflam, but did have its own challenges for sure.)
Best Writing. I don't think I can pick a "best story," especially in short-term perspective, but I can pull out the bits that resonate and shine most to me. "Stephen"'s letter back in "Dear Stephen"; the opening and closing scenes in "Rich and Strange" (and other ones, too, but let's not be greedy); the opening in "Further Up and Further In"; the fact that I sustained "Improbability"'s modal tone (I don't know if it's actually good, but it sings in the same key throughout); bits of Hathaway's internal monologue in "And Love Itself Have Rest" and the scene on the Tor in "The End of All Our Exploring"; the Mark bits in "Thirty"; the Aral and Simon not-as-suggestive-as-it-sounds bedroom scene in "L'oiseau qui vole," though I have trouble judging that one, see below; and, I don't know, I'm very fond of the Person of Interest stories. I'm also rather proud of the tightrope dance that is "the heart is hard to translate," especially the section that starts with Simon seeing the snake and continues through the flood of French-derived words; after that I think it fails to cohere somewhat.
All of those judgments will change, looking back next year, and others would pick different bits, no doubt. But I do feel confident there's good stuff in there.
Favorite Story. You just knew it would be "L'oiseau qui vole," yes? I am in love with it in the same way that, five years later, I'm still in love with Time Goes By, so I have a lot of trouble standing back and judging it as a work and I probably always will. But who cares; it's nice to have something in your own oeuvre you can hug and pet and call it Simon-and-Jules.
And then nearly everything else comes in second. Good year.
The year-in-review meme I did last year wants you to talk about sex, because that is clearly what fanfic is all about. I did write a lot more sex this year, which I suppose was breaking new ground in public, though it wasn't anything more alluring or explicit than what I'd already written in the novels, and I'm not going to pick a "sexiest story" or anythingbecause it would be "L'oiseau qui vole" again because I think it's all a factor of investment in the pairing and therefore very personal to the reader.
Humor is tremendously important to me as a writer; it's how I stop myself from bogging down in the ponderous and precious and falling over the cliffs of feeeellling. It's not like I'm usually trying outright to write something amusing; it's more that I prefer POV characters who possess a dry humor and wield it to advantage, and that has more of an impact when the surrounding atmosphere is um, rather damp. I could try to pick out a funniest fic overall ("The Cat Did Nothing in the Night-Time," probably) but it would be more worthwhile searching out the laughs amid the pathos (though I'd have to skim everything again to find them and that's not on the schedule just now). I will point to "Thirty" in this context, though, especially the Piotr/Olivia segment that everyone (including me) enjoyed the humor in, and suggest that what makes us want to laugh at or with Olivia Vorkosigan, or make sure she has a good time in life, is having "sonic grenade to the stomach" in the back of our heads. And it's what makes me love writing Simon and his sly acerbity so much; he had such a shitty life in a lot of ways, and it's so… graceful, in all senses of the word, that he can laugh about it, or at least quirk his lip and lift an eyebrow at the right time. And Mark is the same way (oh, I need to write more Mark. Except I can't spare the time. Mark nods ironically here).
This is edging into favorite characters to write territory, and well, duh, Simon. And Mark. James Hathaway is a joy to write, although he's not so far along the path of being able to view his world with a detached humor (the best moments, for me, were when I could get him to laugh at himself). Robert Lewis is a bit harder, though people tell me I write him well; Piotr Vorkosigan was a real struggle, though I managed it; both very satisfying when the right notes are hit. John Watson suits me perfectly, and Sherlock Holmes I just can't quite get. I am surprised that I can write from the POV of either Harold Finch or John Reese, though I think I'm just scratching the surface of both of them. Laura Hobson! Oh, Laura; why were you not my muse more often? Too many men, this year. (I'm wondering: as-yet-untitled Book Five is shaping up to be all from male POVs, as Book Four (Not Time's Fool) was all from female ones. Perhaps I'm rehearsing?) (In which case, what I need to do is move on from the slash into the realm of loyalty and male friendship, because aside from already-established Rinaldo/Pasha there isn't any m/m romance to play with there, really. But I digress.)
I should give a mention to multi-faceted universes or whatever they're called. I'm not very good, as a general rule, with writing or even reading in different universes within one broad canon stream, which is likely part of what made me turn from fanfic to novel writing to begin with. Why this year I could suddenly do it, I don't know; even last year, I was subtly uneasy trying to fit the Sergverse into canon without breaking it, and once I'd invented that 'verse I didn't want to move away from it. And the whole idea of "let's just keep pumping out the Lewis/Hathaway stories so they discover each other's love at hundreds of different places and times within canon or out of it" was, well, something other people did. And now I have done it (I mean, not hundreds, but three) and it's not so hard. And even my Simons are not quite consistent with each other. (Though "Sparrow" is an AU of "L'oiseau qui vole" where Jules Duval became a music professor. I hope you noticed.)
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).
(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…)
4) Crossovers are back! I rediscovered the joy and the struggle of writing crossovers this year. There's really nothing like the comments on a crossover (all of those "I didn't think this could possibly work, and yet" exclamations) and I am invariably pleasantly surprised that people actually read them (in large numbers, in fact) though wrestling the things into shape can be a wearying, frustrating process (or a wild throw-caution-to-the-winds ride. Or both). "No Time for Sergeants" was just a crazy idea born out of three mystery series, one of which I'd fallen for the year before, one more recently, and one practically that week (hello, Hathaway!), and I didn't care much if what plot it had made sense or if it fit into anyone's canon, as long as Janice, Wieldy and James got to talk. (It really helped to use Janice's POV and the Bryant & May stylebook, here.) "Further Up and Further In" came out of
avanti_90's prompt, and I can't imagine I'd ever have thought to cross the Vorkosiverse and Narnia otherwise, but it works if you don't think about it too hard.Both of those are "crash the universes together" crossovers, in very different modes (the second being literally an explosion while the first makes perfect real world sense no seriously). "Dear Stephen," which is labeled like a crossover, really isn't; it's about Laura Hobson having an imaginary friend who belongs to another fictional universe. "Rich and Strange" isn't labeled a crossover and it isn't; it's just a grand allusion. "Improbability" is a copout crossover with an unacknowledged Jonathan Creek cameo. "Sparrow" is the kind of crossover where one universe has to be submissive and crawl inside the other one, and from all my cries of "OTP, people!" while I was writing it, you can tell I think the pairing was fifty shades of wonderful. (I am still doing the "OMG Simon Illyan and Harold Finch" dance in my head as I write the sequel.)
("In Time of Pestilence" is also a crossover, with my original universe, but again, not written this year; basically a lingering leftover in my Snape-is-meant-for-crossovers mode of a decade ago.)
4) The Year of Original Characters. As I've said, tossing in non-canon characters is not something I'd done much before in fic, aside from the one prominent and eponymous "Lion's Cub Series" example last year. (I am hardly inexperienced at making up original characters, having written four heavily-populated novels.) I did have to create a few of them (a whole family of them, in fact) for "Rich and Strange," but they got very little onstage time (the villain basically appears once to be a villain, and many of them are only mentioned and never appear at all; that wasn't really the point of the story). Then came "Further Up and Further In," which while using a few canonical Narnians otherwise required original characters (none of the canonical Betans having conveniently disappeared into a wormhole in the course of the series, though I did manage to include an offstage-canonical character who didn't, at the end). It was the fic that took me longest to write this year, and the struggle with the characters was part of that (distraction, and illness I didn't realize I had at the time, were the rest), but in the end I think I turned out a nicely varied lot of them.
That experience released whatever inhibition I had, and the next thing I did was invent Jules Duval. And then, later on, Miranda Antonietti (as I also said before: The Year of Getting Simon Illyan Laid Using Original Characters).
(4a) For Lewis, I did a fair amount of bringing back minor (episodic) canon characters, which isn't something that happens a lot in that fandom, so it's worth mentioning. I just don't see why Liv Nash and Jonjo Read and Zoe Suskin shouldn't have another chance to do their thing, so I gave them one.)
5) Slash Ahoy! I've always been perfectly slash-friendly; I just hadn't written a lot of it. (For "not a lot" read "one tentative and unresolved Neville/Draco.") This year I have written: three stories about Lewis and Hathaway getting together in three different ways; one Sherlock/John (with a lead-in story that's retrospectively contiguous); a very short possibly UST-ish Peter/Neal (not something I ship, but whatever); two Finch/Reeses; and of course the grand madness of "L'oiseau qui vole" which is Simon/OMC with overtones of Simon/Aral. (And a bit of Piotr/Ezar hinting in "Thirty." I would say "and a partridge in a pear tree" but there are too many birds flapping around as it is. Oh, birds. Someday you all will read Time Goes By and understand why I got so excited about Finch's aliases and why Jules hums that song and so forth. I am not that into birds, seriously; they just happen to me.)
And no, I don't know why all the slash; I hate to think it was in part about being popular, but probably that figured into it. Mostly it was the particular fandoms I got into and what I saw in them (which happens to be the same as what a lot of other people saw). I am a little concerned about the whole misogynist thing, or at least about excluding the female point of view, but frankly not very much; this is only part of my overall writing output, after all. And I did have a few kickass women show up this year, if not a lot of Bechdel test passing.
6) Visual Media. The new fandoms are TV fandoms; I'd done practically nothing not book-based before. There may be some relation to 5) here, she said dryly. Otherwise, I'm still processing what this means for my writing.
Some Bests and Mosts. Yeah, I hate picking them out too.
The easy one is Most Popular. I am frankly amazed at the speed at which "Rich and Strange" picked up hits; in less than five months it's at over 2000, which may be peanuts to some popular writers but is astounding to me, especially since the Lewis fandom is not large, and which places it well above anything else in my stats, including fics posted a year earlier in a bigger but no less adulatory fandom. It is a decent, solid piece of writing with some bits I really like; it is nevertheless neither a fully-realized casefic nor an explicit slashfic, and the allusions got rather wild and woolly, but I guess it works for readers (and for me, frankly: dialogue, imagery, cinematic vision, characterization are what I'm proud of).
I've also had a goodly number of hits (and comments/kudos, which are what matter) on "Da Segno al Coda" and on my Vorkosigan fics en masse. My two Sherlock fics were my first experience writing in a truly enormous fandom: not just sheer numbers but the speed at which a newly-posted fic disappears off the front-page radar; wow. Vorkosiverse or Lewis: except in busy periods like Yuletide season, it takes days or sometimes weeks. Sherlock: hours. Despite this, the hit counts are impressively high (meaning, higher than the Vorkosiverse fics, without trying; not like real Sherlock writers), and people do keep finding them. I enjoyed writing "Improbability" and "The Cat Did Nothing in the Night-Time" but I'm not keen to go back; I like my small fandoms better, where I feel like I'm actually contributing and making an impact.
I'm not going to talk about disappointing low hit counts because there aren't any, but I am still amused that "And Love Itself Have Rest" lingers much lower than the other (non-crossover) Lewis fics. Lewis fans are a sensitive bunch and don't care for painful crawling out of suicidal depression, I guess. We are so much hardier in the Vorkosiverse. *g* (It could also be the lack of actual slash and Robbie Lewis that's keeping the numbers down.)
And, on the other hand, where are all these people coming from who read "Sparrow"? PoI/Vorkosiverse: much more of an OTP than I thought, clearly. :)
Most Fun to Write. In retrospect, I seem to have spent the last six months largely in a cloud of writing joy (in contrast to my physical state), though I know there were ups and downs. I did declare "Sparrow" to be the most fun thing I'd ever written, and I'll stick with that, though "Thirty" and "The Cat Did Nothing in the Night-Time" had some pretty gleeful moments too. Also "Dear Stephen," if mostly for the whole "OMG Laura Hobson and Stephen Maturin" personal wow factor. And writing drunk!Gregor in "Bubble." (I'd done that before, but then "Offerings" was my "most fun" last year, so there you go.)
Most Challenging. I took lots of chances and challenges this year, which is all to the good. I tried some style experiments (hey, really anything written in present tense is a style experiment, for me, but "Improbability" with all its imagery and its depressive-detached POV was the furthest out there, followed by the wilder bits of "the heart is hard to translate" and maybe "Da Segno al Coda"). "Thirty" is the only story I can call structurally challenging, though sometimes just getting through a linear narrative in one piece is harder than skipping around in time, and "Further Up and Further In" had some of both, plus all those new characters, so I think it wins. Or ties with "the heart is hard to translate," because that used so much sheer writing muscle. (Fitting in all the literary allusions in "The End of All Our Exploring" was more bravura and flimflam, but did have its own challenges for sure.)
Best Writing. I don't think I can pick a "best story," especially in short-term perspective, but I can pull out the bits that resonate and shine most to me. "Stephen"'s letter back in "Dear Stephen"; the opening and closing scenes in "Rich and Strange" (and other ones, too, but let's not be greedy); the opening in "Further Up and Further In"; the fact that I sustained "Improbability"'s modal tone (I don't know if it's actually good, but it sings in the same key throughout); bits of Hathaway's internal monologue in "And Love Itself Have Rest" and the scene on the Tor in "The End of All Our Exploring"; the Mark bits in "Thirty"; the Aral and Simon not-as-suggestive-as-it-sounds bedroom scene in "L'oiseau qui vole," though I have trouble judging that one, see below; and, I don't know, I'm very fond of the Person of Interest stories. I'm also rather proud of the tightrope dance that is "the heart is hard to translate," especially the section that starts with Simon seeing the snake and continues through the flood of French-derived words; after that I think it fails to cohere somewhat.
All of those judgments will change, looking back next year, and others would pick different bits, no doubt. But I do feel confident there's good stuff in there.
Favorite Story. You just knew it would be "L'oiseau qui vole," yes? I am in love with it in the same way that, five years later, I'm still in love with Time Goes By, so I have a lot of trouble standing back and judging it as a work and I probably always will. But who cares; it's nice to have something in your own oeuvre you can hug and pet and call it Simon-and-Jules.
And then nearly everything else comes in second. Good year.
The year-in-review meme I did last year wants you to talk about sex, because that is clearly what fanfic is all about. I did write a lot more sex this year, which I suppose was breaking new ground in public, though it wasn't anything more alluring or explicit than what I'd already written in the novels, and I'm not going to pick a "sexiest story" or anything
Humor is tremendously important to me as a writer; it's how I stop myself from bogging down in the ponderous and precious and falling over the cliffs of feeeellling. It's not like I'm usually trying outright to write something amusing; it's more that I prefer POV characters who possess a dry humor and wield it to advantage, and that has more of an impact when the surrounding atmosphere is um, rather damp. I could try to pick out a funniest fic overall ("The Cat Did Nothing in the Night-Time," probably) but it would be more worthwhile searching out the laughs amid the pathos (though I'd have to skim everything again to find them and that's not on the schedule just now). I will point to "Thirty" in this context, though, especially the Piotr/Olivia segment that everyone (including me) enjoyed the humor in, and suggest that what makes us want to laugh at or with Olivia Vorkosigan, or make sure she has a good time in life, is having "sonic grenade to the stomach" in the back of our heads. And it's what makes me love writing Simon and his sly acerbity so much; he had such a shitty life in a lot of ways, and it's so… graceful, in all senses of the word, that he can laugh about it, or at least quirk his lip and lift an eyebrow at the right time. And Mark is the same way (oh, I need to write more Mark. Except I can't spare the time. Mark nods ironically here).
This is edging into favorite characters to write territory, and well, duh, Simon. And Mark. James Hathaway is a joy to write, although he's not so far along the path of being able to view his world with a detached humor (the best moments, for me, were when I could get him to laugh at himself). Robert Lewis is a bit harder, though people tell me I write him well; Piotr Vorkosigan was a real struggle, though I managed it; both very satisfying when the right notes are hit. John Watson suits me perfectly, and Sherlock Holmes I just can't quite get. I am surprised that I can write from the POV of either Harold Finch or John Reese, though I think I'm just scratching the surface of both of them. Laura Hobson! Oh, Laura; why were you not my muse more often? Too many men, this year. (I'm wondering: as-yet-untitled Book Five is shaping up to be all from male POVs, as Book Four (Not Time's Fool) was all from female ones. Perhaps I'm rehearsing?) (In which case, what I need to do is move on from the slash into the realm of loyalty and male friendship, because aside from already-established Rinaldo/Pasha there isn't any m/m romance to play with there, really. But I digress.)
I should give a mention to multi-faceted universes or whatever they're called. I'm not very good, as a general rule, with writing or even reading in different universes within one broad canon stream, which is likely part of what made me turn from fanfic to novel writing to begin with. Why this year I could suddenly do it, I don't know; even last year, I was subtly uneasy trying to fit the Sergverse into canon without breaking it, and once I'd invented that 'verse I didn't want to move away from it. And the whole idea of "let's just keep pumping out the Lewis/Hathaway stories so they discover each other's love at hundreds of different places and times within canon or out of it" was, well, something other people did. And now I have done it (I mean, not hundreds, but three) and it's not so hard. And even my Simons are not quite consistent with each other. (Though "Sparrow" is an AU of "L'oiseau qui vole" where Jules Duval became a music professor. I hope you noticed.)
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).
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Date: 2013-01-05 07:57 pm (UTC)From:And Sparrow is undoubtedly sizzling with fun, as I think I said when I first read it. I didn't spot Jules the music professor, though...
Structure, yeah, starting at the beginning and keeping going till you get to the end is awfully difficult, at least for me. I did vastly admire the way you wove Thirty together, though. Clever and organic and perfect.
Incidentally, I have now seen Life Born Of Fire and therefore will at some point be heading off to read your related fics. I don't actually feel I know Lewis and Hathaway all that well yet, but there's no denying that they're fascinating.
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Date: 2013-01-05 10:14 pm (UTC)From:Ioanna Stavros's violin teacher is a Professor Duval; this was mostly the result of my usual floundering around for names, but I figured it could be Jules if he'd had a few different chances (maybe an earlier meeting with Aral, say) and decided to stay put in Vorbarr Sultana.
Believe it or not, I did more or less write "Thirty" in order as it stands, except for moving some of the Miles bits from one part to another, but I had no idea what to do for a while when I finished the Piotr section. As often seems to be true in the Vorkosiverse, mirroring was the answer.
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Date: 2013-01-08 02:05 am (UTC)From:And I am, dagnabit, going to deal with some of the housework and get a bit more writing done tonight, and not go read all the things you mention here that I haven't read. (Or the rest of the Lewis Holiday fic, which ditto.) I do have "Rich and Strange" open in a tab, though.