2007 in fic
2007 was my twelfth year as a fanfic writer, and I wrote twelve stories. SPOOKY, yeah? Oh...no? Okay.
There have been years I wrote less...but not last year, or the year before that. In terms of current events, this has been a thin, thin year for me, although IN MY DEFENSE, the statistics do not show all the work I did on the novel (one and a half years, twelve chapters -- THERE'S THAT NUMBER AGAIN, IS THAT CRAZY OR WHAT?!? Oh...no? It's pure coincidence? Never mind.) or on Bride of Ronon, which consumed a good chunk of my summer and stands now at roughly 30,000 words and maybe the halfway mark in terms of really being done. So this was actually a big writing year for me. Just not...a big getting-things-done year.
The biggest overall trend I notice is that 2007 was my Big Giant Year of Het -- seriously, where did all this het *come* from all of a sudden?? And if you factor in the novel and Bride of Ronon, it's EVEN HETTIER. Out of twelve finished stories, three revolved around het romances and/or contained only het love scenes (I Love My Love, Steadfast Loyal & True, Penitent), and three more were threesome-or-moresome stories that incorporated het. I don't even know, guys.
Also, I don't think the angst was as balanced out by schmoop as it normally is, when you take a whole year's worth of my writing as a whole. Even the stories that seem happy to me kind of...weren't, this year (Quarterife, Penitent). Or were kind of happy and awful at the same time (De Profundis, Steadfast Loyal & True), or ended on a suggestion that there might be happiness in the offing, if I hadn't stopped writing before I got to that part (Pass/Fail, Satisfaction). Given that I don't think I was any straighter or any more depressed this year than I normally am, I don't really know what's going on.
One nice thing I need to mention was that this year the first DiversiFICation Awards were given out in SGA fandom, and I won in three categories -- Sheppard/Ronon for "Fourteen Years," McKay/Ronon for "In the Hands of Yes" and OT(4-1) (for some reason, I love that category formulation!) for AlphaCen. This makes me happy! So if you happened to vote for me, thank you!
The twelve stories were:
Steadfast, Loyal and True (SGA, Ronon-centric, 172k)
De Profundis (SGA, OT4, 68k)
Penitent (SGA, Teyla-centric, 69k)
I Love My Love (Thoughtcrimes, Freya/Brendan, 78k)
Midway (SGA in the Alpha Centauri universe, 90k)
Pass/Fail (SGA in the Mensaverse AU, Rod/Ronon, 52k)
Quarterlife (Veronica Mars, Eli/Logan, 34k)
Reaction (SGA in the Mensaverse AU, Rod/Sheppard, 45k)
Satisfaction (SGA, Ronon/Rodney, 164k)
Vanilla (SGA in the Alpha Centauri universe, 34k)
Works and Plays Well With Others (SGA, OT4, 32k)
[REDACTED], my Three Ships holiday giftfic; you'll just have to take my word on this one for now
aaaand the Big Questions....
1. My favorite story of this year (my own)
"Steadfast, Loyal & True." It's been a little over a year and a half since I wrote "Fourteen Years," which was my first attempt to write a broad-ranging story about what Ronon's life looks like from his own perspective -- and while "Fourteen Years" is still, I think, one of my best stories, since then SGA aired both "Sateda" and "Reunion," which -- if they didn't exactly Joss "Fourteen Years," certainly made that story read a little weirdly, in the way that it deals with being a Runner as the *only* really formative experience in Ronon's life. It was pretty obvious to me that -- the perils of a live canon! -- I'd have to go back at some point and write another great, whacking backstory fic that would incorporate everything we now know about what Ronon's life was like prior to the fall of Sateda. I wrote this story in two days (I wrote "Fourteen Years" in a day and a half), and I really got immersed in it -- in the class issues of portraying Ronon as an upwardly-mobile working-class kid with a foot in two different worlds, in the way Ronon is manipulated by so many people that he looked up to and trusted (Kell, Tyre, and Solen were all really interesting characters in my head in this story, and I ended up feeling like there wasn't a good place to include everything I wanted to about them and their motivations), in the ways that we signal and sometimes lie about our identities through how we choose to appear on the outside, in the idea of Melena as the through-line of his whole life, so that his inability to stop seeing himself as her faithful husband, even eight years after her death, is tied up with his whole sense of self, to such an extent that he can only move on at the end of the story after he just lets go entirely of the illusion that he even *has* a single self, that the music teacher's son and the soldier and the Wraith-killer and the Lantean in him can ever do much more than learn to co-exist. I don't know, I just love this story -- I think I managed to pull in a lot of separate things I find fascinating about Ronon and make them cohere in some way, like they would all naturally follow from one specific personality and one specific life. Reading over it, there are points I find really frustrating, because it's such a visual story in so many ways -- it hinges on the way Ronon *looks* different at each stage of his life, so it was easy to imagine how I would shoot it on-screen but hard to draw the reader's metaphorical eye to that stuff in prose without belaboring the point terribly -- and, man, I think that missing-scene from "Miller's Crossing" would have played *beautifully* if I could have filmed it, but I couldn't *quite* make it get there just using my words. That's essentially the reason this story is my favorite and not, I think, my best. And speaking of...
2. My best story this year
"Penitent." I don't think I felt as strongly about this story when I wrote it as I do now; it was really just one of those high-concept things I like to do sometimes, where it just occurred to me to wonder what would have happened if the eleventh-hour tv rescue hadn't happened in "Long Goodbye," and Teyla really had been on the hook for that decision. Maybe Sheppard didn't think she'd do it, but I totally did, and then the question of how everyone would have handled it was for some reason hard to resist. It's one of those stories, though, that every time I go back and read it, I like it more and more. The only thing that irks me is that it really *should* have been titled "The Long Goodbye," except the damn episode snaked the title first; it was really much better-suited to my story than it was to that episode, but finders keepers, I guess. Incidentally, some of the inspiration for this story came from an Irish legend about a princess named Mis who went mad after her father's death, growing fur and fangs and drinking blood and leaving civilization to live in the woods. Music and sex both play a prominent (and rather charming) role in the story of Mis's redemption, and one of those little things I did that amused only me was have both music and sex become significant during Teyla's years in the wilderness, though not in the same way they were for Mis. That's your wildly obscure factoid for the day.
3. Story most tragically underappreciated by the universe, in my opinion
"Penitent." I don't know, I guess deathfic is never going to be the next big thing, and Teyla stories don't generally set the world on fire anyway.
4. Most fun story
"Satisfaction." Dude, it's a romantic comedy about impotence. What's not fun about that? Rodney POV is always comedy gold; if you're not having fun with it, then you're really just not trying. And at the end it turns into a bunch of angst over Ronon's backstory, and if you don't think that's my idea of fun, then you don't know me very well.
5. Most sexy story
The democratic process seems to favor "Works and Plays Well With Others" -- as NC-17 fic goes, I thought that one was fairly tame, but people seem to find it really hot, so all right, then! I myself am partial to "Quarterlife," which is the kind of psychological kinkfic that I really dig.
6. Story with single sexiest moment
"Satisfaction" -- that bit the morning after their first night together where Rodney goes down on Ronon's fingers just kills me dead every time. That bit was Caroline's. If by "moment" we can mean "scene," though, I'd pick that whole drunken first-time scene, which I think is one of the better sex scenes I've ever written. Now that I say that, though, I have to admit that I also think the love scene in "I Love My Love" is wicked hot. Maybe I'm getting better at the whole porn thing.
7. Most unintentionally "telling" story
I guess "Midway," although it's not unintentional per se. I mean, yes, my whole original motive for writing the story was basically that I'd been threatening to write the AlphaCen ferris wheel story for ages, and then I went to the State Fair and, I mean, how was I going to ignore that valuable research opportunity? But as I started plotting it out, it became obvious that I was going to need something to make it a *story* and not just "OMG, I love them, they are so awesome!!!" So I kind of tried to kick in a plot about how Sheppard likes most everybody and Rodney is kind of an elitist dick who would never be able to engage with something as Red State and ordinary as a state fair, and give Rodney a little bit of fear that he and Sheppard were uncomfortably, even threateningly different in that way. But the unintended result of setting that up was that "Midway" turned into kind of a prolegomena to some future story that I might someday write that would address my conflicted feelings about living in the South. I didn't really get into it deeply enough to make it *deeply* revealing, but there's some Stuff there that's undeniably my Stuff.
8. "Holy crap, that's *wrong,* even for you" story
"Penitent," I guess -- although sadly, I think I'm to the point in my fanfic career where even shooting John in the head doesn't really rate an "even for you." It's pretty much just my regular level of wrong.
9. Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters
I don't know if the story shifted my perceptions or my shift in perception created the story, but "Steadfast, Loyal and True" represents an interesting reversal of some tropes of Ronon's characterization that I have tended to rely on in the past, particularly in Alpha Centauri. I think Ronon has a fascinating duality in his character, one side of him laid-back and warm-hearted and a good observer and a team player, the other side impatient and short-tempered and hot-headed. In AlphaCen explicitly, and in other stories implicitly, I explained that by suggesting that Sateda was a rather formal, uber-civilized, strict society and that Ronon himself was essentially a firebrand who'd been acculturated successfully and only unraveled around the edges thanks to his Running years. As the show goes on, it seems like the truth is actually the exact opposite of that, and that Ronon is inherently kind of a gentle, introverted person who grew up in a rough, hard world, so that he's learned to defend himself and close off all his vulnerabilities. This story was my first attempt to really use that sequence of events rather than the one that had been my first extrapolation.
10. Hardest story to write
"I Love My Love" was a terrible, awful bitch to write because it had a plot -- and kind of an action-adventure plot to boot, which is not my natural habitat. I think it sucked a little bit, but I'm trying not to be really hard on myself, because A) I tried a new thing, and you have to start practicing somewhere, and 2) nobody reads Thoughtcrimes fic anyway, so I'm safe there. *g*
11. Worst story
"Reaction," I think, if only because it wasn't really a *story.* I think I had some interesting characterization of Rod and Mensaverse!Sheppard, and I still think the central conceit of Sheppard trying to take Rod out for this fancy, formal date and making a gigantic hash out of it is pretty likeable. But then I didn't really have anywhere to go with it, and it kind of just slid into nothingness at the end. I feel like this was less a story than scenes from a story that I should've been able to come up with but couldn't -- clever scenes, but they do not a narrative make.
12. Easiest story to write
"Satisfaction." I couldn't believe how fast and painless this was to write. I've never written in collaboration with anyone before (or rather, not in this specific way; although I've leaned very heavily on other people to help me make sense of a story in my head, I've never had anyone else be part of the process of actually putting words on the page), and I've got to tell you, it goes A MILLION TIMES FASTER when you can pull up the chat logs and just fill in the connective tissue between all the smart, creative things someone else already wrote for you. To sum up: linabean is ten kinds of brilliant, and it doesn't take a hell of a lot of work to turn her upside down, shake her, and build a story out of whatever falls out.
13. Story I'd like to rewrite
Definitely my 3 Ships story, which I simply ran out of time on. In a couple of places that turned into my advantage, since I'd been intending to go on longer in a few places that, looking at them now, didn't need more wordage to say what needed to be said. Enforced brevity can be a good thing. On the downside, however, the two halves of the story never really got sewn up together as thoroughly as I would've liked, and it really just stops more than comes to a satisfying ending. Also, if I'd had more time, it would've been sexier.
14. Story I didn't write but will at some point, I swear
Every year I name-check the same long string of WIPs, and every year I get like one of them done. So this time I'm keeping it simple: the next thing I finish will be the Ford story I agreed to write for the choc_fic challenge last August (I know, right?!!?) -- I think it'll be good, but it's been a tough one to write and it's not really rushable. And if it takes the rest of the year to do it, I'm going to fucking finish Bride of Ronon, which I started in May of 2006 for the sga_flashfic Virgin challenge -- so maybe, like "Steadfast, Loyal and True" this year, I'll have that one done for Amnesty 2008. Other than those two, I'm swearing to *nothing* this year.
There have been years I wrote less...but not last year, or the year before that. In terms of current events, this has been a thin, thin year for me, although IN MY DEFENSE, the statistics do not show all the work I did on the novel (one and a half years, twelve chapters -- THERE'S THAT NUMBER AGAIN, IS THAT CRAZY OR WHAT?!? Oh...no? It's pure coincidence? Never mind.) or on Bride of Ronon, which consumed a good chunk of my summer and stands now at roughly 30,000 words and maybe the halfway mark in terms of really being done. So this was actually a big writing year for me. Just not...a big getting-things-done year.
The biggest overall trend I notice is that 2007 was my Big Giant Year of Het -- seriously, where did all this het *come* from all of a sudden?? And if you factor in the novel and Bride of Ronon, it's EVEN HETTIER. Out of twelve finished stories, three revolved around het romances and/or contained only het love scenes (I Love My Love, Steadfast Loyal & True, Penitent), and three more were threesome-or-moresome stories that incorporated het. I don't even know, guys.
Also, I don't think the angst was as balanced out by schmoop as it normally is, when you take a whole year's worth of my writing as a whole. Even the stories that seem happy to me kind of...weren't, this year (Quarterife, Penitent). Or were kind of happy and awful at the same time (De Profundis, Steadfast Loyal & True), or ended on a suggestion that there might be happiness in the offing, if I hadn't stopped writing before I got to that part (Pass/Fail, Satisfaction). Given that I don't think I was any straighter or any more depressed this year than I normally am, I don't really know what's going on.
One nice thing I need to mention was that this year the first DiversiFICation Awards were given out in SGA fandom, and I won in three categories -- Sheppard/Ronon for "Fourteen Years," McKay/Ronon for "In the Hands of Yes" and OT(4-1) (for some reason, I love that category formulation!) for AlphaCen. This makes me happy! So if you happened to vote for me, thank you!
The twelve stories were:
Steadfast, Loyal and True (SGA, Ronon-centric, 172k)
De Profundis (SGA, OT4, 68k)
Penitent (SGA, Teyla-centric, 69k)
I Love My Love (Thoughtcrimes, Freya/Brendan, 78k)
Midway (SGA in the Alpha Centauri universe, 90k)
Pass/Fail (SGA in the Mensaverse AU, Rod/Ronon, 52k)
Quarterlife (Veronica Mars, Eli/Logan, 34k)
Reaction (SGA in the Mensaverse AU, Rod/Sheppard, 45k)
Satisfaction (SGA, Ronon/Rodney, 164k)
Vanilla (SGA in the Alpha Centauri universe, 34k)
Works and Plays Well With Others (SGA, OT4, 32k)
[REDACTED], my Three Ships holiday giftfic; you'll just have to take my word on this one for now
aaaand the Big Questions....
1. My favorite story of this year (my own)
"Steadfast, Loyal & True." It's been a little over a year and a half since I wrote "Fourteen Years," which was my first attempt to write a broad-ranging story about what Ronon's life looks like from his own perspective -- and while "Fourteen Years" is still, I think, one of my best stories, since then SGA aired both "Sateda" and "Reunion," which -- if they didn't exactly Joss "Fourteen Years," certainly made that story read a little weirdly, in the way that it deals with being a Runner as the *only* really formative experience in Ronon's life. It was pretty obvious to me that -- the perils of a live canon! -- I'd have to go back at some point and write another great, whacking backstory fic that would incorporate everything we now know about what Ronon's life was like prior to the fall of Sateda. I wrote this story in two days (I wrote "Fourteen Years" in a day and a half), and I really got immersed in it -- in the class issues of portraying Ronon as an upwardly-mobile working-class kid with a foot in two different worlds, in the way Ronon is manipulated by so many people that he looked up to and trusted (Kell, Tyre, and Solen were all really interesting characters in my head in this story, and I ended up feeling like there wasn't a good place to include everything I wanted to about them and their motivations), in the ways that we signal and sometimes lie about our identities through how we choose to appear on the outside, in the idea of Melena as the through-line of his whole life, so that his inability to stop seeing himself as her faithful husband, even eight years after her death, is tied up with his whole sense of self, to such an extent that he can only move on at the end of the story after he just lets go entirely of the illusion that he even *has* a single self, that the music teacher's son and the soldier and the Wraith-killer and the Lantean in him can ever do much more than learn to co-exist. I don't know, I just love this story -- I think I managed to pull in a lot of separate things I find fascinating about Ronon and make them cohere in some way, like they would all naturally follow from one specific personality and one specific life. Reading over it, there are points I find really frustrating, because it's such a visual story in so many ways -- it hinges on the way Ronon *looks* different at each stage of his life, so it was easy to imagine how I would shoot it on-screen but hard to draw the reader's metaphorical eye to that stuff in prose without belaboring the point terribly -- and, man, I think that missing-scene from "Miller's Crossing" would have played *beautifully* if I could have filmed it, but I couldn't *quite* make it get there just using my words. That's essentially the reason this story is my favorite and not, I think, my best. And speaking of...
2. My best story this year
"Penitent." I don't think I felt as strongly about this story when I wrote it as I do now; it was really just one of those high-concept things I like to do sometimes, where it just occurred to me to wonder what would have happened if the eleventh-hour tv rescue hadn't happened in "Long Goodbye," and Teyla really had been on the hook for that decision. Maybe Sheppard didn't think she'd do it, but I totally did, and then the question of how everyone would have handled it was for some reason hard to resist. It's one of those stories, though, that every time I go back and read it, I like it more and more. The only thing that irks me is that it really *should* have been titled "The Long Goodbye," except the damn episode snaked the title first; it was really much better-suited to my story than it was to that episode, but finders keepers, I guess. Incidentally, some of the inspiration for this story came from an Irish legend about a princess named Mis who went mad after her father's death, growing fur and fangs and drinking blood and leaving civilization to live in the woods. Music and sex both play a prominent (and rather charming) role in the story of Mis's redemption, and one of those little things I did that amused only me was have both music and sex become significant during Teyla's years in the wilderness, though not in the same way they were for Mis. That's your wildly obscure factoid for the day.
3. Story most tragically underappreciated by the universe, in my opinion
"Penitent." I don't know, I guess deathfic is never going to be the next big thing, and Teyla stories don't generally set the world on fire anyway.
4. Most fun story
"Satisfaction." Dude, it's a romantic comedy about impotence. What's not fun about that? Rodney POV is always comedy gold; if you're not having fun with it, then you're really just not trying. And at the end it turns into a bunch of angst over Ronon's backstory, and if you don't think that's my idea of fun, then you don't know me very well.
5. Most sexy story
The democratic process seems to favor "Works and Plays Well With Others" -- as NC-17 fic goes, I thought that one was fairly tame, but people seem to find it really hot, so all right, then! I myself am partial to "Quarterlife," which is the kind of psychological kinkfic that I really dig.
6. Story with single sexiest moment
"Satisfaction" -- that bit the morning after their first night together where Rodney goes down on Ronon's fingers just kills me dead every time. That bit was Caroline's. If by "moment" we can mean "scene," though, I'd pick that whole drunken first-time scene, which I think is one of the better sex scenes I've ever written. Now that I say that, though, I have to admit that I also think the love scene in "I Love My Love" is wicked hot. Maybe I'm getting better at the whole porn thing.
7. Most unintentionally "telling" story
I guess "Midway," although it's not unintentional per se. I mean, yes, my whole original motive for writing the story was basically that I'd been threatening to write the AlphaCen ferris wheel story for ages, and then I went to the State Fair and, I mean, how was I going to ignore that valuable research opportunity? But as I started plotting it out, it became obvious that I was going to need something to make it a *story* and not just "OMG, I love them, they are so awesome!!!" So I kind of tried to kick in a plot about how Sheppard likes most everybody and Rodney is kind of an elitist dick who would never be able to engage with something as Red State and ordinary as a state fair, and give Rodney a little bit of fear that he and Sheppard were uncomfortably, even threateningly different in that way. But the unintended result of setting that up was that "Midway" turned into kind of a prolegomena to some future story that I might someday write that would address my conflicted feelings about living in the South. I didn't really get into it deeply enough to make it *deeply* revealing, but there's some Stuff there that's undeniably my Stuff.
8. "Holy crap, that's *wrong,* even for you" story
"Penitent," I guess -- although sadly, I think I'm to the point in my fanfic career where even shooting John in the head doesn't really rate an "even for you." It's pretty much just my regular level of wrong.
9. Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters
I don't know if the story shifted my perceptions or my shift in perception created the story, but "Steadfast, Loyal and True" represents an interesting reversal of some tropes of Ronon's characterization that I have tended to rely on in the past, particularly in Alpha Centauri. I think Ronon has a fascinating duality in his character, one side of him laid-back and warm-hearted and a good observer and a team player, the other side impatient and short-tempered and hot-headed. In AlphaCen explicitly, and in other stories implicitly, I explained that by suggesting that Sateda was a rather formal, uber-civilized, strict society and that Ronon himself was essentially a firebrand who'd been acculturated successfully and only unraveled around the edges thanks to his Running years. As the show goes on, it seems like the truth is actually the exact opposite of that, and that Ronon is inherently kind of a gentle, introverted person who grew up in a rough, hard world, so that he's learned to defend himself and close off all his vulnerabilities. This story was my first attempt to really use that sequence of events rather than the one that had been my first extrapolation.
10. Hardest story to write
"I Love My Love" was a terrible, awful bitch to write because it had a plot -- and kind of an action-adventure plot to boot, which is not my natural habitat. I think it sucked a little bit, but I'm trying not to be really hard on myself, because A) I tried a new thing, and you have to start practicing somewhere, and 2) nobody reads Thoughtcrimes fic anyway, so I'm safe there. *g*
11. Worst story
"Reaction," I think, if only because it wasn't really a *story.* I think I had some interesting characterization of Rod and Mensaverse!Sheppard, and I still think the central conceit of Sheppard trying to take Rod out for this fancy, formal date and making a gigantic hash out of it is pretty likeable. But then I didn't really have anywhere to go with it, and it kind of just slid into nothingness at the end. I feel like this was less a story than scenes from a story that I should've been able to come up with but couldn't -- clever scenes, but they do not a narrative make.
12. Easiest story to write
"Satisfaction." I couldn't believe how fast and painless this was to write. I've never written in collaboration with anyone before (or rather, not in this specific way; although I've leaned very heavily on other people to help me make sense of a story in my head, I've never had anyone else be part of the process of actually putting words on the page), and I've got to tell you, it goes A MILLION TIMES FASTER when you can pull up the chat logs and just fill in the connective tissue between all the smart, creative things someone else already wrote for you. To sum up: linabean is ten kinds of brilliant, and it doesn't take a hell of a lot of work to turn her upside down, shake her, and build a story out of whatever falls out.
13. Story I'd like to rewrite
Definitely my 3 Ships story, which I simply ran out of time on. In a couple of places that turned into my advantage, since I'd been intending to go on longer in a few places that, looking at them now, didn't need more wordage to say what needed to be said. Enforced brevity can be a good thing. On the downside, however, the two halves of the story never really got sewn up together as thoroughly as I would've liked, and it really just stops more than comes to a satisfying ending. Also, if I'd had more time, it would've been sexier.
14. Story I didn't write but will at some point, I swear
Every year I name-check the same long string of WIPs, and every year I get like one of them done. So this time I'm keeping it simple: the next thing I finish will be the Ford story I agreed to write for the choc_fic challenge last August (I know, right?!!?) -- I think it'll be good, but it's been a tough one to write and it's not really rushable. And if it takes the rest of the year to do it, I'm going to fucking finish Bride of Ronon, which I started in May of 2006 for the sga_flashfic Virgin challenge -- so maybe, like "Steadfast, Loyal and True" this year, I'll have that one done for Amnesty 2008. Other than those two, I'm swearing to *nothing* this year.