End of year meme

[karanguni]

Every January it's "write a few entries for a few days before I disappear" season! Hope everyone is well &c.. Here's an end of year fandom/writing meme, stolen from snickfic and tweaked here and there:

Leitmotif(s) of the year:

Acknowledging that life is happening in ways that mean I can't reserve/commit creative energy during my favourite exchange season period (well, my only exchange season period...): I normally use Yuletide as a season to push out the boat, but this year I couldn't even get to the shore with life stuff going on. My lowest word count (24.499K) in years!

On an actual writing level? I don't think I had enough headroom to develop themes. Upon reflection, maybe a return to city and urban environment stuff, my old stomping grounds. I travelled a lot this year, to a lot of cities I've loved or am now coming to love.

On a fandom level, it was being more embedded in the behind-the-scenes exchange stuff, thanks to many friends old(er) and new(er) who are dragging me in. I really appreciate being dragged. fence in particular hauling me into FIAB has been enormous. I'm up to two Discord bots, a few scraping improvements, and a plan for a third bot for auctions next year in terms of tech. Then the usual improvements/tweaking for the app, which has had some good behind-the-scenes kicking that was long overdue. Still a bunch of tech debt that needs dusting up, and more that's accruing with every month I let that linger, but the app tends to suck up energy in ways that mean I have to limit how much I feed it, lest it consume me whole.

My best/favourite story of this year

Moving Cities, without a doubt. DCU/Batman, 4.3k, mostly about an architect/developer original character figuring out why he'd ever want to move to Gotham City.

I love urban planning, and fence laid out the perfect bait for FIAB, and this whole thing ought to have been 15-30k, but got wrangled down to a more scoped-in 4k. It's the sort of writing I always want to do - the words flow, the ideas coalesce, there's something a little bit More under the surface. Also, just coming back to Batman! I didn't have time to catch up much on the new, even whackier timeline - I'm about 15 years out of date, sadly, except for some Nightwing – but Gotham City is a concept, really...

Okay, NOW your most popular story

Still Moving Cities. Good will out.

Hardest story to write

Probably Ex-Company (The Bedlam Stacks). I always want Merrick to be bad-ass because he is, but this one came out flat. I tried, but I think I'll have to try again as an NYR.

Easiest story to write

Moving Cities.

Most fucked-up story?

Inversions (Hikaru no Go). Sai is not necessarily a friendly ghost. The whole piece is also textually inverted, which was a fun write.

Biggest disappointment

More or less all of my Yuletide fics could have Been Better. I didn't put in less effort – I put in whatever I had left in me, and tried hard, but some years there's just Too Much Going On to get the time alone to let the words do what they need to do. Alas, recips :(

Happiest surprise or biggest success:

That Moving Cities received the reception it did. It's a very nerdy story, inset with a lot of even nerdier off-shoots. But it seemed to hit a nerve!

Art?

I picked up an Apple Pencil and that was revolutionary. I managed some! art. I'm no artist - all of it was referential - but there was From The Desk of Reeve Tuesti and a little bit in the TMZ Wayne Christmas Party.

Favourite title

Ex-Company

Favourite opening lines

Does an entire opening paragraph count?

'You know, it's a terrible idea to go into business in Gotham,' they'd told Jim when he'd said he wanted to up sticks and trade in one east coast metropolis for another.

It was just that Jim was tired of New York City: tired of the cookie-cutter development of the outer boroughs, but honestly also tired of the cookie-cutter development of Manhattan, too. He'd had his time, was Jim's conclusion: he'd built up a large firm, a large backlog of industry awards, and – most importantly – a large reputation that preceded him.

'You could go anywhere in the country,' people had told him. 'Anywhere in the world, Jim, and you want to go to Gotham City?'

'Yeah,' Jim'd said, having chewed on the idea for some years now like a particularly ruminant sheep. 'I do.'

So Jim prepared to go.

Favourite closing lines

... [Hikaru] refuses Sai games, abandons Sai when he is bored: he resists. And that is true strength out of the mouth of babes: to resist what a ghost, a spectre, a poltergeist, an onryo can do: what sai can, and did, do to its host.

Pairing/Fandom/Genre/Fic that I wrote that I never would have predicted in January?

FIAB was a delightful multi-media romp. I wouldn't have expected to code up a building code reference website skin, or done some colouring in of things, or made a workskin. Also doing as much reading into urbanism and CPTED as I did for the Wired interview on urban planning in Gotham.

Writing risks this year and lessons learned

• Taking time always pays off. Writing needs to ferment.
• Splitting up a FIAB assignment into many parts that all had to happen to cohere. It turned out to be a lot of fun! But it was a lot of manic flailing about.
• hAPPY into FIAB into Yuletide = needing to prioritise ahead of time. Game more! Write more treats over the course of the year instead!
• Writing for a Place instead of a Character is a hell of a lot of fun

Goals for next year

1. Write one thing for myself
2. Write a Disco Elysium fic
3. More DCU! Reading group for Tim and Jason maybe!
4. Write one weird thing I'm proud of
5. Write a fic in a Miura Shion fandom