I'd be the last shred of truth in the lost myth of true love.
It's that time again! The one time I show up on LiveJournal every year to reflect on how much I did or didn't write in the previous year. Enjoy?
January
Revisionist History [Supernatural; Sam/Dean] salt_burn_porn - 4,964
February
A Dime If You Tell Me That You Love Me [CW RPF; Jared/Jensen] - 60,122 (31,612 in 2019/still unfinished)
March
Laissez Les Bon Temps Rouler + ART [CW RPF; Jared/Jensen] - 7,480
May
Entrenched [Supernatural; Sam/Dean] - 1,029 (153 in 2019)
June
Curiosity Killed the Catfish + ART [CW RPF; Jared/Jensen] - 9,992
July
Through the Looking Glass [CW RPF; Jared/Jensen] Timestamp to Rattling Your Locks - 2,452 (1,744 in 2019)
October
ART FOR Playtime [Supernatural; Sam/Dean] wincestbigbang
December
Wasteland, Baby! [Supernatural; Sam/Dean] spn_j2_xmas - 9,864
Unpublished But Written in 2019:
Common Tongue [Supernatural; Sam/Dean] unfinished wincestbigbang - 6,467
Lazarus Rising [CW RPF; Jared/Jensen] unfinished spn_j2_bigbang - 35,102 (33,073 in 2019)
Ramble On [CW RPF; Jared/Jensen] unfinished spn_reversebang - 3,467
Total Word Count: 110,845
Fandoms that I dabbled in this year, old and new: Supernatural and CW RPF. The ol’ reliables.
My favorite story this year: I have worked so hard on A Dime If You Tell Me That You Love Me and put so much of my heart into it. Maybe got a little too close to it, because I’ve frozen on the last chapter for months, but I just want to be sure I land it. It’s the longest thing I’ve ever written and probably in my top 5 favorite things I’ve ever made, depending on how I stick the landing. I love this one very much.
My least favorite story this year: Through the Looking Glass was just a short timestamp to a story I now mostly only have negative associations with that I started many years ago and rushed to finish this year so I could have something done in July. I don’t think it’s bad exactly, it’s just not a verse I especially wanted to return to or draw attention to.
Most successful story: A Dime If You Tell Me That You Love Me, and that’s WITHOUT the readers who don’t read WIPs. Imagine how successful it could be if I just finished the dang thing!
Story most underappreciated by the universe, in my opinion: I just posted Wasteland, Baby! and am pretty happy with it, and it hasn’t gotten a lot of readers, but I know this time between holidays is kind of a fanwork consumption dead period, so it is what it is. My recipient seems to have really liked it and this is a case where I can genuinely say I just wanted to make them very happy with their gift.
Most fun story: It’s probably just narrator bleed, but writing Revisionist History, especially the first scene, felt a lot like the smug, self-satisfied tone of the story. I was just amusing myself so much. That was a really fun experience.
Story with single sexiest moment: A Dime If You Tell Me That You Love Me has the most porn in it that I’ve ever written in one story and it’s a lot of very different approaches, so I feel like there’s gotta be something in there for everyone. Probably the threesome was the hottest of the scenes I wrote this year, IMO.
Biggest story fail: The amount of anxiety I am having over not finishing A Dime If You Tell Me That You Love Me is ridiculous. I posted chapter 7/8 in April and am still sitting on the last chapter. There are so many readers who cared as much about this story as I could hope for and most of them probably don’t even remember it exists at this point. I’m really down on myself about it.
Hardest story to make: Obviously it’s A Dime If You Tell Me That You Love Me. I ran myself ragged on it at the start of the year and then as 2019 devolved into the mess it ended up being, a lot of the stuff in this story that was innocuous when I wrote it got weighted down with emotional baggage that is contributing to how hard it is for me to finish. I know intellectually that these things are not connected, but I gave Jensen’s mother cancer in the story and my mom got diagnosed shortly after I posted that, so now it’s making me feel weird guilt knowing what I had planned for the end of that story. Like, I know my fanfiction didn’t give my mom cancer. But, you know. Brains are fucking dumb.
Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you'd predicted? In 2018, I broke 100,000 for the first time since 2015 and in 2019, I wrote about 600 words more than I wrote in 2018. So I’m really proud that I didn’t backslide, especially considering how the second half of my year played out.
What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January? I guess I wouldn’t have expected to be inspired by current canon-I hadn’t written anything based in current Supernatural canon since Season 11, but this year I wrote Revisionist History during Season 14 and Wasteland, Baby! is set after Season 15 based on everything we know as of the most recent episode. I just hope the second half of the season inspires me to keep returning to that world!
Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them? Well…I wish I had a cheerier answer to this. A Dime If You Tell Me That You Love Me was my first try at posting chaptered fic. I started posting it in February with 4/8 chapters finished and posted Chapter 7 in April and have left readers dangling since then. So I think we can all agree that was a failed experiment and I should stick to the all-at-once posting that I’ve used throughout my time in fandom even though it’s fallen out of favor with readers and will keep me relegated to getting fewer readers.
Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters: I write almost exclusively from Jared, Jensen, Sam, or Dean’s POVs, so Revisionist History gave me a really cool challenge to put myself in the head of a character I hadn’t given much thought in canon, AU!Michael. What I came away with was a much more layered reading of that character and although this has nothing to do with the show writers doing especially good work, it helped make Season 14 more compelling than I think it otherwise would have been for me. And I am loving what we got of Michael so far this season, which I think is mostly due to the fact that the acting and writing was actually pretty strong, but I think the glimpse this story gave me into Michael’s head also contributed.
Biggest Surprise: Maybe that I dug up Entrenched from the old Tumblr post where it originally was posted and let it see the light of day, lol.
Story with the sweetest moment: A lot of the interactions between Jared and Jensen in A Dime If You Tell Me That You Love Me make my heart hurt because I think there’s so much affection there that’s unexpected and, not to toot my own horn, but painstakingly earned. I think the sweetest is probably the tipping point before everything blows up, Jared and Jensen dancing in the garden on New Year’s Eve.
Story that made you cry: That challenging trip to the zoo in A Dime If You Tell Me That You Love Me made me cry so so much.
Most eye roll-worthy title: I’ll leave the same answer here that I gave last year: I love the quote it’s referencing so much, especially for a story that is hooker fic, but A Dime If You Tell Me That You Love Me sure is a goddamn mouthful and no one is going to remember it, so I am second guessing myself a lot on that.
Most intentionally telling: There’s a certain amount of “Fuck you, current Supernatural writers” embedded in Wasteland, Baby! and what it gives Sam and Dean as an ending as a response to the endings I am expecting/dreading from the actual show.
Unintentionally?: A few things in A Dime If You Tell Me That You Love Me ended up not aging so well in the context of this year. I have a little bit of discomfort with Jared bribing a cop in the aftermath of the Very Bad Thing that happened in October and, even though I don’t actually think trying to bribe cops was part of the reality of that situation, the accusation was made by a certain news outlet before enough facts of the case were known and became part of the conversation, and now I’m really worried that stink is going to be on that for new readers who try to take the whole story in once it’s finished even though I wrote it long before any of that mess went down.
Most overdue: Like I’ve lamented several times already, I’ve let my A Dime If You Tell Me That You Love Me readers down in a horrible way. Everything up to the penultimate chapter dropping in such a short period of time and now 8 months waiting to know how it ends is not something I’m proud of.
This year's theme and the story that demonstrates it most: Finish what you start. I had so many stories I started and didn’t have the emotional energy to get through this year. A Dime If You Tell Me That You Love Me is the best example because there are a lot of people waiting on it, but I failed three artists this year mid-bangs and while a lot of that is because of how challenging the second half of the year ended up being for my personal life, it still means I let people down.
Favorite Opening Line(s):
“Do you ever think maybe this is Heaven?”
Sam asks it out of the blue as they’re walking down a cracked road somewhere between what used to be Philadelphia and what still passes for New York City.
Dean glances at his brother, then throws a look down the side of the overpass. There’s a Wendy’s directly below them with its own sign crashed through the roof. Half of Wendy’s head is cracked, so all you can see is the bottom of her little smile beaming up at the highway she was designed to lure travelers away from. It should probably creep Dean right out, but frankly, all he can think right now is that he could really go for a burger.
“Wouldn’t you say it’s kind of the opposite?” Dean asks, watching as a group of former-people meander aimlessly through the abandon fast food chain’s parking lot. “It’s an apocalyptic zombie wasteland.”
(Wasteland, Baby!)
Favorite Closing Line(s):
“The last song you did during the encore. The new one that you’ve never played for a crowd before…” Jared ducks his head, smiling bashfully as he raises his hand to the back of his neck. “About the man who brought you back from the dead.”
“Lazarus Rising,” Jensen answers. “I started writing that on your couch at three in the morning. Six months ago.”
“I thought it sounded familiar.” He watches Jared get pinker and pinker as he blushes. “Was it-? I mean. I don’t know how to ask this without sounding like a total asshole.”
To put Jared out of his misery, Jensen says, “You’re not being vain. The song is about you.”
(Lazarus Rising)
Top 5 Scenes from Anywhere You Would Choose to Have Illustrated:
1. The last scene of A Dime If You Tell Me That You Love Me, which might actually get drawn if I hurry up and get it to my little artist before her semester starts.
2. The whole Bacchus!Jensen thing had such great visuals and the story I wrote because of that, Laissez Les Bon Temps Rouler I think had a lot of color and vibrance that would make for good art. I did actually make a little art for it because of that.
3. Maybe WWII soldier!Dean returning to his brother in Entrenched?
4. Well, a lot of the fics that didn’t get finished this year were collaborations with artists and I didn’t get far enough in the drafts to inspire art for the scenes that most warranted art in my mind. There’s a scene in Lazarus Rising where rockstar!Jensen teaches Jared how to play the guitar that I really hope to see someday.
5. Dean!Michael holding Sam as they walk through the stars in Revisionist History.
The things I've learned this year: Life happens so much and there’s really only so much you can do about it.
Fic-writing goals for 2021: I want to limit myself to signing up for very few challenges so I can meet all my deadlines. I need to finish a few stories that have been in limbo for a long time since this is probably the last year anyone will care about them. And, as usual, I’m going to aim for posting at least one fic every month and see if I can make it farther than the halfway point this year.
January
Revisionist History [Supernatural; Sam/Dean] salt_burn_porn - 4,964
February
A Dime If You Tell Me That You Love Me [CW RPF; Jared/Jensen] - 60,122 (31,612 in 2019/still unfinished)
March
Laissez Les Bon Temps Rouler + ART [CW RPF; Jared/Jensen] - 7,480
May
Entrenched [Supernatural; Sam/Dean] - 1,029 (153 in 2019)
June
Curiosity Killed the Catfish + ART [CW RPF; Jared/Jensen] - 9,992
July
Through the Looking Glass [CW RPF; Jared/Jensen] Timestamp to Rattling Your Locks - 2,452 (1,744 in 2019)
October
ART FOR Playtime [Supernatural; Sam/Dean] wincestbigbang
December
Wasteland, Baby! [Supernatural; Sam/Dean] spn_j2_xmas - 9,864
Unpublished But Written in 2019:
Common Tongue [Supernatural; Sam/Dean] unfinished wincestbigbang - 6,467
Lazarus Rising [CW RPF; Jared/Jensen] unfinished spn_j2_bigbang - 35,102 (33,073 in 2019)
Ramble On [CW RPF; Jared/Jensen] unfinished spn_reversebang - 3,467
Total Word Count: 110,845
Fandoms that I dabbled in this year, old and new: Supernatural and CW RPF. The ol’ reliables.
My favorite story this year: I have worked so hard on A Dime If You Tell Me That You Love Me and put so much of my heart into it. Maybe got a little too close to it, because I’ve frozen on the last chapter for months, but I just want to be sure I land it. It’s the longest thing I’ve ever written and probably in my top 5 favorite things I’ve ever made, depending on how I stick the landing. I love this one very much.
My least favorite story this year: Through the Looking Glass was just a short timestamp to a story I now mostly only have negative associations with that I started many years ago and rushed to finish this year so I could have something done in July. I don’t think it’s bad exactly, it’s just not a verse I especially wanted to return to or draw attention to.
Most successful story: A Dime If You Tell Me That You Love Me, and that’s WITHOUT the readers who don’t read WIPs. Imagine how successful it could be if I just finished the dang thing!
Story most underappreciated by the universe, in my opinion: I just posted Wasteland, Baby! and am pretty happy with it, and it hasn’t gotten a lot of readers, but I know this time between holidays is kind of a fanwork consumption dead period, so it is what it is. My recipient seems to have really liked it and this is a case where I can genuinely say I just wanted to make them very happy with their gift.
Most fun story: It’s probably just narrator bleed, but writing Revisionist History, especially the first scene, felt a lot like the smug, self-satisfied tone of the story. I was just amusing myself so much. That was a really fun experience.
Story with single sexiest moment: A Dime If You Tell Me That You Love Me has the most porn in it that I’ve ever written in one story and it’s a lot of very different approaches, so I feel like there’s gotta be something in there for everyone. Probably the threesome was the hottest of the scenes I wrote this year, IMO.
Biggest story fail: The amount of anxiety I am having over not finishing A Dime If You Tell Me That You Love Me is ridiculous. I posted chapter 7/8 in April and am still sitting on the last chapter. There are so many readers who cared as much about this story as I could hope for and most of them probably don’t even remember it exists at this point. I’m really down on myself about it.
Hardest story to make: Obviously it’s A Dime If You Tell Me That You Love Me. I ran myself ragged on it at the start of the year and then as 2019 devolved into the mess it ended up being, a lot of the stuff in this story that was innocuous when I wrote it got weighted down with emotional baggage that is contributing to how hard it is for me to finish. I know intellectually that these things are not connected, but I gave Jensen’s mother cancer in the story and my mom got diagnosed shortly after I posted that, so now it’s making me feel weird guilt knowing what I had planned for the end of that story. Like, I know my fanfiction didn’t give my mom cancer. But, you know. Brains are fucking dumb.
Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you'd predicted? In 2018, I broke 100,000 for the first time since 2015 and in 2019, I wrote about 600 words more than I wrote in 2018. So I’m really proud that I didn’t backslide, especially considering how the second half of my year played out.
What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January? I guess I wouldn’t have expected to be inspired by current canon-I hadn’t written anything based in current Supernatural canon since Season 11, but this year I wrote Revisionist History during Season 14 and Wasteland, Baby! is set after Season 15 based on everything we know as of the most recent episode. I just hope the second half of the season inspires me to keep returning to that world!
Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them? Well…I wish I had a cheerier answer to this. A Dime If You Tell Me That You Love Me was my first try at posting chaptered fic. I started posting it in February with 4/8 chapters finished and posted Chapter 7 in April and have left readers dangling since then. So I think we can all agree that was a failed experiment and I should stick to the all-at-once posting that I’ve used throughout my time in fandom even though it’s fallen out of favor with readers and will keep me relegated to getting fewer readers.
Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters: I write almost exclusively from Jared, Jensen, Sam, or Dean’s POVs, so Revisionist History gave me a really cool challenge to put myself in the head of a character I hadn’t given much thought in canon, AU!Michael. What I came away with was a much more layered reading of that character and although this has nothing to do with the show writers doing especially good work, it helped make Season 14 more compelling than I think it otherwise would have been for me. And I am loving what we got of Michael so far this season, which I think is mostly due to the fact that the acting and writing was actually pretty strong, but I think the glimpse this story gave me into Michael’s head also contributed.
Biggest Surprise: Maybe that I dug up Entrenched from the old Tumblr post where it originally was posted and let it see the light of day, lol.
Story with the sweetest moment: A lot of the interactions between Jared and Jensen in A Dime If You Tell Me That You Love Me make my heart hurt because I think there’s so much affection there that’s unexpected and, not to toot my own horn, but painstakingly earned. I think the sweetest is probably the tipping point before everything blows up, Jared and Jensen dancing in the garden on New Year’s Eve.
Story that made you cry: That challenging trip to the zoo in A Dime If You Tell Me That You Love Me made me cry so so much.
Most eye roll-worthy title: I’ll leave the same answer here that I gave last year: I love the quote it’s referencing so much, especially for a story that is hooker fic, but A Dime If You Tell Me That You Love Me sure is a goddamn mouthful and no one is going to remember it, so I am second guessing myself a lot on that.
Most intentionally telling: There’s a certain amount of “Fuck you, current Supernatural writers” embedded in Wasteland, Baby! and what it gives Sam and Dean as an ending as a response to the endings I am expecting/dreading from the actual show.
Unintentionally?: A few things in A Dime If You Tell Me That You Love Me ended up not aging so well in the context of this year. I have a little bit of discomfort with Jared bribing a cop in the aftermath of the Very Bad Thing that happened in October and, even though I don’t actually think trying to bribe cops was part of the reality of that situation, the accusation was made by a certain news outlet before enough facts of the case were known and became part of the conversation, and now I’m really worried that stink is going to be on that for new readers who try to take the whole story in once it’s finished even though I wrote it long before any of that mess went down.
Most overdue: Like I’ve lamented several times already, I’ve let my A Dime If You Tell Me That You Love Me readers down in a horrible way. Everything up to the penultimate chapter dropping in such a short period of time and now 8 months waiting to know how it ends is not something I’m proud of.
This year's theme and the story that demonstrates it most: Finish what you start. I had so many stories I started and didn’t have the emotional energy to get through this year. A Dime If You Tell Me That You Love Me is the best example because there are a lot of people waiting on it, but I failed three artists this year mid-bangs and while a lot of that is because of how challenging the second half of the year ended up being for my personal life, it still means I let people down.
Favorite Opening Line(s):
“Do you ever think maybe this is Heaven?”
Sam asks it out of the blue as they’re walking down a cracked road somewhere between what used to be Philadelphia and what still passes for New York City.
Dean glances at his brother, then throws a look down the side of the overpass. There’s a Wendy’s directly below them with its own sign crashed through the roof. Half of Wendy’s head is cracked, so all you can see is the bottom of her little smile beaming up at the highway she was designed to lure travelers away from. It should probably creep Dean right out, but frankly, all he can think right now is that he could really go for a burger.
“Wouldn’t you say it’s kind of the opposite?” Dean asks, watching as a group of former-people meander aimlessly through the abandon fast food chain’s parking lot. “It’s an apocalyptic zombie wasteland.”
(Wasteland, Baby!)
Favorite Closing Line(s):
“The last song you did during the encore. The new one that you’ve never played for a crowd before…” Jared ducks his head, smiling bashfully as he raises his hand to the back of his neck. “About the man who brought you back from the dead.”
“Lazarus Rising,” Jensen answers. “I started writing that on your couch at three in the morning. Six months ago.”
“I thought it sounded familiar.” He watches Jared get pinker and pinker as he blushes. “Was it-? I mean. I don’t know how to ask this without sounding like a total asshole.”
To put Jared out of his misery, Jensen says, “You’re not being vain. The song is about you.”
(Lazarus Rising)
Top 5 Scenes from Anywhere You Would Choose to Have Illustrated:
1. The last scene of A Dime If You Tell Me That You Love Me, which might actually get drawn if I hurry up and get it to my little artist before her semester starts.
2. The whole Bacchus!Jensen thing had such great visuals and the story I wrote because of that, Laissez Les Bon Temps Rouler I think had a lot of color and vibrance that would make for good art. I did actually make a little art for it because of that.
3. Maybe WWII soldier!Dean returning to his brother in Entrenched?
4. Well, a lot of the fics that didn’t get finished this year were collaborations with artists and I didn’t get far enough in the drafts to inspire art for the scenes that most warranted art in my mind. There’s a scene in Lazarus Rising where rockstar!Jensen teaches Jared how to play the guitar that I really hope to see someday.
5. Dean!Michael holding Sam as they walk through the stars in Revisionist History.
The things I've learned this year: Life happens so much and there’s really only so much you can do about it.
Fic-writing goals for 2021: I want to limit myself to signing up for very few challenges so I can meet all my deadlines. I need to finish a few stories that have been in limbo for a long time since this is probably the last year anyone will care about them. And, as usual, I’m going to aim for posting at least one fic every month and see if I can make it farther than the halfway point this year.