Year in Fic 2007

What I Wrote in 2007

What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January 2007?

Well, DC Comics, in which I wrote my Supergirl fic, is a new fandom for me, and Heroes RPF wouldn't have struck me as very likely given how very little of the show I've seen. But nothing I wrote this year seems particularly out of place. I didn't write as much m/m as I had hoped, just Watcher, Ret. and The Army Chaplain (the latter of which at least managed to be somewhat explicit) but that's hardly shocking. And I wrote Simon/River for the first time in 2007, but that was just a matter of time.

My favorite story this year (of my own): My Girlfriend is a Telepath, in which Kitty begins to date Mindee Cuckoo and rather than just becoming omnisexual, actually struggles with her sexuality. I tried to provide a variety of perspectives on the insertion of Mindee into the Bobby/Rogue/Kitty triangle, from Bobby and Rogue to Celeste and an OMC, not to mention Kitty herself as she is afraid to tell her parents. Instead of going the will-to-powery route, I went for something more emotionally real, which is a real departure for me.

My best story this year: Looking over my fics, there's a lot of ficlets and scenes and not very much which is plotty. Not that plotty is necessary to be good, but if I'm trying to come up with a quasi-objective "best," it helps to have stories which are evaluable under traditional standards of quality. It's hard to tell how well a short scene that isn't quite PWP and is intertextual with a million other things is working. My Simon/River fic written for my 'Cest-a-Thon, Tomorrow Will Be Dying, might work best in having a linear narrative supported by strong prose. But I'm fond of the way that, say, Just Skin gives a glimpse of what must have been happening behind the scenes in canon in order for my Watcher!verse stories (in particular those drawing on the existence of a Faith/Dawn relationship) to work.

Most fun story:  I'm Awfully Fond of You. Anything that takes its title and cut-text from a Sesame Street song, and opens with a scene of Our Heroes fighting a giant fire-breathing rubber duck, has to count as fun.

Sexiest story: Unfathomable Youth. There is something about college!student!Eve which is just too hot for words.

Story with single sexiest moment:  The shower scene at the end of my Dawn/River piece Where the River Meets the Dawn. Not terribly explicit, because it doesn't need to be.

Kinkiest story: Science Lessons. The prompt ask for some type of BDSM, and I wanted to invert my own het male gaze (which was altogether too excited by the prospect of writing sub!Fred for me to be comfortable with) by having a dominant Fred. So here we have power games and spanking and threesomes with Faith, all with Fred in charge.

Sweetest story: The Flower Garden (of a Vicious Ice-Cold Bitch). What was going through Kitty's and Emma's minds at the end of Torn. With Kitty in overalls and Emma playing the part of the Summer woman in The Ice Queen.

Story with the best premise: Not with a Bang, but a Whimper, the Buffy/Darla AU where Spike is with the Master in season 1 and Darla shows up with Dru in season 2. I'd been wanting to write that idea for ages. I still want to write the Darla/Riley missing scene. 

Best use of language: Two Lost Little Girls. Two words: Drusilla POV.

Most unintentionally telling story: I usually answer this by looking for the most multivalent story, the one from which one can draw the most possible interpretations. This year that award might just go to my remix, Incurable (The "All You Zombies" Remix). A remix of "Incurable" by Ari (go to my story for a link to hers), it draws on a lot of different things, and is in many ways a very personal story. It's not as if there was ever any doubt who wrote it, anon or not!

"Holy crap, that's wrong, even for you" story: Give me a break. Everything I wrote this year was tame. ("Wrong" isn't quite as gloriously resistant when it's a het male on this side of the pen, so I try to restrain myself sometimes. See above wrt: "Science Lessons.") No noncon, and very little dubcon (unless we count everything with River in it as dubcon).

Story that shifted my perception of the characters: The Flower Garden (of a Vicious Ice-Cold Bitch). I wouldn't say it changed how I read Emma and Kitty, but it did provide a chance to work out how I thought they felt about each other.

Hardest/Easiest story to write: Looking over the list, they all seemed to come fairly easily. I supposed I've been blessed that way. ETA: Running was probably the hardest. It was for axial_tilt, which I meant I couldn't write "Africana Seductrix" (it has too much sex in it), and I wasn't sure where to go with Dawn and Xander otherwise.

Story I didn't write but will at some point, I swear:  Everything I answered for this question last year, verbatim.

Most underappreciated/overappreciated by the universe, in my opinion: There are a few stories that weren't as popular as I expected, (The Flower Garden (of a Vicious Ice-Cold Bitch), My Girlfriend is a Telepath) but when I go back and check they all got 3-4 comments, which is about what I've been averaging this year. I can't say that there's anything that got too much appreciation, which might be a factor of the fact that I'm really satisfied with everything I've written in 2007. ETA: I still think the way I set up Running was rather cheap for the praise it seemed to earn. But that's a lesson that this proto-academic sometimes forgets: that there is a power in stating in the obvious, in being really simple.

Biggest Disappointment: This is the first year I haven't written something with which I am truly unhappy. 2005 was "Lethe's Blessing"; 2006 was "Indian Summer." (Why link them if I hate them?) Not all the 2007 fics are artistic masterpieces, but they usually manage whatever it was I set out to accomplish, be it ever so humble.

Biggest surprise: I'm Awfully Fond of You, for providing the inspiration for My Girlfriend is a Telepath. I don't think I'm done with that 'verse, either. (Kitty and Mindee are so cute together!)

A story I want remembered: My Girlfriend is a Telepath.

Fic Index Update and Female Characters Meme

I've updated my fic indices with information reflecting things I've written in the last semester, and fixed the links pointing to each other. I still need to update my picture index, the index in my profile, and the freewebs site, but they simply point to the indices with the real content..

I've added:
--- 5 new universes: Arcadia, Bourne Identity, Buffy comicsverse, DC Comics, and The 4400, with each being given its own 150x90 logo.
--- 9 new stories: My Girlfriend Is a Telepath, The Road to Shur, Science Lessons, In Times of War, Up, Up, and Away, The Hurricane, The State of Nature, Proof, and In Soviet Russia, Femslash writes You.
--- links to the Audiofic Archive for my audiofic: Dear My Ideal Audience, The Fairest of Them All, Ghost of a Touch, I'm Awfully Fond of You, Je me souviens, and Two :Lost Little Girls.
--- links to each of the character entries on the X-Men Character Index from each of the other indices.

. . .

With all my indices open in front of me, it's a good time to do this meme, gakked from lyssie via wisdomeagle.

Italics for the characters you've written 1-3 times.
Bold the ones you've written 4-9 times.
Italics and bold for the ones you've written 10+ times.
Underline the ones you're intending to write, or have in unfinished story form.
Leave alone the ones you don't write/haven't written.
Add up to five that you have written (if they're not on here).

( women I've written )

Yep. Thirty-seven.