Fic in Review 2006
Jan. 2nd, 2007 08:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alixtiiLooking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this past year, less, or about what you'd predicted?
Less. Between my thesis in the spring, and my soul-sucking crap job in the summer and autumn, I got a lot less fic written than I had expected. I really thought I'd have To Live in Hearts by now, when I really haven't even touched it all that much since last year.
What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January 2006?
By this time last year I think I had already sorted out that I was the type of writer who should never say never. As such, I don't think any of my fic would surprise me all that much. All of my RPF (with the exception of "The Box of Yfrak," which hardly counts) was written this year, though, and really no one could have predicted Dear My Ideal Audience. Other fandoms for which I first wrote fic in 2006 included VMars, Torchwood, X-Men movieverse and comicsverse, Harry Potter (despite not having read the books), and Ender's Game.
My favorite story this year (of my own): This one is a no-brainer. Richard the Third, Act Two, Scene Three, Line Sixteen, my Ender's Game fic, hits all my own kinks so hard that I can't express how much I love this story. Valentine and Peter and all their subtexty wonderfulness.
My best story this year: I've just finished responding to the comments on Requiem at Reichenbach, and after reading twenty-something people tell me how wonderful this story is I've started to believe it, despite recognizing oh so many flaws. (As far as I can tell, "R3 2.3.16" is flawless--I'm in love with every moment in it--but I'll admit I'm biased on that one.)
Otherwise, I'd probably say The Fairest of Them All, my Lilah/River ficlet. Short, but I think the River voice in that one is fairly dense. Both stories, of course, are ones where the most striking feature is the language, where one can let oneself get lost in the beauty of the narrative voices. Moriarty and River make that possible in a way that Faith and Dawn, no matter how much I love them, do not.
Most fun story: Dayswimming and Daywalking. In which there is a whole lot of gratuitous nudity, because there is nothing bad in imagining the Potentials all walking around naked, no however flimsy the reasoning may be. Indeed, there's a way in which the flimsiness just makes all that much better.
Sexiest story: With Love and a Hippo (Faith/Dawn) is the most explicit thing I've written, and I have to say I'm happy with it. The Fairest of Them All is couched in River's metaphorical voice, OTOH, but the voyeurism and exhibitionism and general mind games between Lilah and River make it a different sort of sexy.
Story with single sexiest moment: Five Summers That Never Were. The last scene, the Buffy/Faith carsex, with Buffy completely naked in a convertible on hot leather seats. Guh.
Sweetest story: I turn to Mal & Kaylee for sweetness, so I'd go for the drabble Sky and the fic Je me souviens.
Most unintentionally telling story: I think I have a decent grasp of my kinks, so a story like R3 2.3.16 which caters to my kinks is totally intentional. (Brother/sister shower scene!) So I'm going to answer with The Fairest of Them All because I think River's metaphorical voice provides the most room for something unintentional to be going on.
"Holy crap, that's wrong, even for you" story: I don't think I've really managed to exceed the wrongness of of Hue of Dungeons, School of Night (Dark!Willow/Kennedy) and School of Lost Souls (Fred/River), both written in 2005, nor do I think I would want to. Of the 2006 fics, there is On Her Knees (Wes/Lilah) which continues in the dystopian vein of "Hue of Dungeons."
Story that shifted my own perception of the characters: Twice Bless'd. I've never been a huge Inara, but writing Faith/Inara allowed me to explore what I liked about her character. As it turns out, most of what I hate about Inara is Mal/Inara. Here, I got to write the graceful, wise courtesan we are supposedly supposed to believe Inara is when she isn't busy being screwed up over Mal.
Hardest story to write: Well, Twenty Facts about St. Clare's Academy Not Found in the Brochure was at once the easiest and the hardest: the hardest in that flailed so much over it that it was several weeks late, the easiest in that once I decided to use the 20 facts format there wasn't any difficult at all.
Easiest story to write: See above. Most of my fics come fairly easily, actually; it's the getting the butt in the chair to write part that is hard.
Story I didn't write but will at some point, I swear: Well, To Live at Hearts, of course. The Captain Kaylee fic. The Amy/Rack/Drusilla. The NArnia RPF/BtVS crossover with Anna as a Slayer and Will as a Watcher. And I'm going to finish "Not Quite Queen of the Damned."
Most underappreciated by the universe, in my opinion: Best Friends Forever (Devon Days Remix). Willow/Xander. The universe seemed to mostly pass this one by.
Most overappreciated story, still in my opinion: Sinister Simulacra (Wes/Fred, Dawn). Which isn't to say I'm not fond of this fic; anything which extends the time between "Smile Time" and "A Hole in the World" makes me happy, and there's the implication of Wes/Fred tent!sex. But this is rather by-the-book plotty adventure story and somehow the theme never really seemed to show up. Also, this was written for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
winter_of_wes, which meant it got a broader audience than my fics usually do, and thus more feedback.
Biggest Disappointment: Part of me wants to answer Indian Summer, but I'm not so much dissapointed in it as I want it to just disappear. It was forfandom_mashup, and the fics of my recipient ended up being mostly m/m PWP's, many of them RPF, that in their style and execution just didn't lend themselves very well to my brand of writing.
Cynthia and Permutations, OTOH, are stories which are uneven in ways which I wish I had more time to fix. They never really got the chance to live up to their full potential.
Biggest surprise: Well, Dear My Ideal Audience, of course. And I never expected to love R3 2.3.16 so much.
A story I want remembered: R3 2.3.16, I suppose. I just love it so, so much. Although I wouldn't mind being remembered for The Fairest of Them All either.
Less. Between my thesis in the spring, and my soul-sucking crap job in the summer and autumn, I got a lot less fic written than I had expected. I really thought I'd have To Live in Hearts by now, when I really haven't even touched it all that much since last year.
What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January 2006?
By this time last year I think I had already sorted out that I was the type of writer who should never say never. As such, I don't think any of my fic would surprise me all that much. All of my RPF (with the exception of "The Box of Yfrak," which hardly counts) was written this year, though, and really no one could have predicted Dear My Ideal Audience. Other fandoms for which I first wrote fic in 2006 included VMars, Torchwood, X-Men movieverse and comicsverse, Harry Potter (despite not having read the books), and Ender's Game.
My favorite story this year (of my own): This one is a no-brainer. Richard the Third, Act Two, Scene Three, Line Sixteen, my Ender's Game fic, hits all my own kinks so hard that I can't express how much I love this story. Valentine and Peter and all their subtexty wonderfulness.
My best story this year: I've just finished responding to the comments on Requiem at Reichenbach, and after reading twenty-something people tell me how wonderful this story is I've started to believe it, despite recognizing oh so many flaws. (As far as I can tell, "R3 2.3.16" is flawless--I'm in love with every moment in it--but I'll admit I'm biased on that one.)
Otherwise, I'd probably say The Fairest of Them All, my Lilah/River ficlet. Short, but I think the River voice in that one is fairly dense. Both stories, of course, are ones where the most striking feature is the language, where one can let oneself get lost in the beauty of the narrative voices. Moriarty and River make that possible in a way that Faith and Dawn, no matter how much I love them, do not.
Most fun story: Dayswimming and Daywalking. In which there is a whole lot of gratuitous nudity, because there is nothing bad in imagining the Potentials all walking around naked, no however flimsy the reasoning may be. Indeed, there's a way in which the flimsiness just makes all that much better.
Sexiest story: With Love and a Hippo (Faith/Dawn) is the most explicit thing I've written, and I have to say I'm happy with it. The Fairest of Them All is couched in River's metaphorical voice, OTOH, but the voyeurism and exhibitionism and general mind games between Lilah and River make it a different sort of sexy.
Story with single sexiest moment: Five Summers That Never Were. The last scene, the Buffy/Faith carsex, with Buffy completely naked in a convertible on hot leather seats. Guh.
Sweetest story: I turn to Mal & Kaylee for sweetness, so I'd go for the drabble Sky and the fic Je me souviens.
Most unintentionally telling story: I think I have a decent grasp of my kinks, so a story like R3 2.3.16 which caters to my kinks is totally intentional. (Brother/sister shower scene!) So I'm going to answer with The Fairest of Them All because I think River's metaphorical voice provides the most room for something unintentional to be going on.
"Holy crap, that's wrong, even for you" story: I don't think I've really managed to exceed the wrongness of of Hue of Dungeons, School of Night (Dark!Willow/Kennedy) and School of Lost Souls (Fred/River), both written in 2005, nor do I think I would want to. Of the 2006 fics, there is On Her Knees (Wes/Lilah) which continues in the dystopian vein of "Hue of Dungeons."
Story that shifted my own perception of the characters: Twice Bless'd. I've never been a huge Inara, but writing Faith/Inara allowed me to explore what I liked about her character. As it turns out, most of what I hate about Inara is Mal/Inara. Here, I got to write the graceful, wise courtesan we are supposedly supposed to believe Inara is when she isn't busy being screwed up over Mal.
Hardest story to write: Well, Twenty Facts about St. Clare's Academy Not Found in the Brochure was at once the easiest and the hardest: the hardest in that flailed so much over it that it was several weeks late, the easiest in that once I decided to use the 20 facts format there wasn't any difficult at all.
Easiest story to write: See above. Most of my fics come fairly easily, actually; it's the getting the butt in the chair to write part that is hard.
Story I didn't write but will at some point, I swear: Well, To Live at Hearts, of course. The Captain Kaylee fic. The Amy/Rack/Drusilla. The NArnia RPF/BtVS crossover with Anna as a Slayer and Will as a Watcher. And I'm going to finish "Not Quite Queen of the Damned."
Most underappreciated by the universe, in my opinion: Best Friends Forever (Devon Days Remix). Willow/Xander. The universe seemed to mostly pass this one by.
Most overappreciated story, still in my opinion: Sinister Simulacra (Wes/Fred, Dawn). Which isn't to say I'm not fond of this fic; anything which extends the time between "Smile Time" and "A Hole in the World" makes me happy, and there's the implication of Wes/Fred tent!sex. But this is rather by-the-book plotty adventure story and somehow the theme never really seemed to show up. Also, this was written for
winter_of_wes, which meant it got a broader audience than my fics usually do, and thus more feedback.Biggest Disappointment: Part of me wants to answer Indian Summer, but I'm not so much dissapointed in it as I want it to just disappear. It was for
fandom_mashup, and the fics of my recipient ended up being mostly m/m PWP's, many of them RPF, that in their style and execution just didn't lend themselves very well to my brand of writing.Cynthia and Permutations, OTOH, are stories which are uneven in ways which I wish I had more time to fix. They never really got the chance to live up to their full potential.
Biggest surprise: Well, Dear My Ideal Audience, of course. And I never expected to love R3 2.3.16 so much.
A story I want remembered: R3 2.3.16, I suppose. I just love it so, so much. Although I wouldn't mind being remembered for The Fairest of Them All either.
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Date: 2007-01-03 03:27 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-03 03:31 am (UTC)