2018 Fanfiction Roundup
Jan. 1st, 2019 11:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
isozymeI'm taking the fanfiction year-end meme from Sineala because I actually posted fiction this year!
Fiction posted this year:
Original fiction:
Sequestration; Vitrification
Strange Horizons, 12/17/18, 4413 words. Bioremediation, the eve of nuclear war, activism, art, how to live when nothing you do feels like enough. Reviewed here, here, and here.
Fanfiction:
Everything stays (but it still changes)
Voltron: Legendary Defender, Keith/Shiro, 11794 words. Keith and Shiro try to have a relationship around Keith’s leftover PTSD from Shiro trying to kill him.
the girl with the modern face
Marvel Universe Fusion, Steve/Tony, 26881 words. Tony’s secret superhero identity is Rescue, and Rescue is a woman. Steve falls for Rescue and things go south from there.
(i need a) touch up
Marvel Universe Fusion, Steve/Tony, 9918 words. Sequel to the girl with the modern face, turns out gender play is one of Steve’s sex things. Tony is, understandably, a little nervous about it.
not gruesome, just human
Marvel 616, Steve/Tony, 6505 words. Tony is super, super depressed post-Avengers Disassembled, and then he shows up at Steve’s doorstep.
Didn’t Catch You Saying Grace
Marvel Ultimates, Steve/Tony, 3701 words. Internalized homophobia for everyone! Steve propositions a closeted Tony instead of the other way around.
Fire Drills
Iron Man (Movies), Eve Rogers/Tonia Stark, 19506 words. Genderswap retelling of Iron Man 2, plus Captain America is there.
This year I wrote and posted:
Seven stories! I also finished edits on The Novel and started sending it around to agents. I have two pieces of original short fiction out on submission to the pro markets, plus two pieces of flash. Oh, and I published a first author methods paper on the science side.
Total word count: 82,717 words.
Overall Thoughts:
Before September of 2018 the last fic I’d posted was from 2015. I went from zero to eighty thousand very quickly, and I hope I can keep some of this around. I spent a lot of time thinking about fiction, too.
Also, this is the year I taught myself how to write sex scenes.
What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January?
I wrote an (unpublished) dark comedy set on a terraforming space ship about the military industrial complex and exploitative capitalism. Cramming as much humor as I could into 5,000 words was really challenging and I hadn’t done it before.
This year's theme and the story that demonstrates it most:
I like my queers VERY QUEER. Fire Drills is, uh, really lesbian.
What's your own favorite story of the year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you happiest?
Didn’t Catch You Saying Grace is my favorite of the year. I wrote it outline-to-posting in one day and it scratched exactly the itch I was feeling. This is the year I got tired of self-actualized, unproblematic, out-of-the-closet pairings.
Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?
I was very nervous to post Fire Drills, mostly because of the sex in it. But I learned that I know how to write filthy, visceral lesbian fucking. I also learned that I want to write a lot more of it. Stay tuned in 2019.
My best story of this year:
Sequestration; Vitrification is, quality-wise, the best. It’s fucking deft, if I say so myself. Tangent Online said I have a “clear, elegant, and unpretentious style.” Hell yeah.
My most popular story of this year:
everything stays (but it still changes) wins on every metric. Unfortunately for the Voltron fandom I wrote basically everything I needed to say about the show in a fic and a half, and then fell out of the fandom.
Not written this year, but First a Darling, Then a Marvel did spectacularly well in 2018. Thank you, Pacific Rim 2, for bringing people back to one of my old faves.
Story of mine most under-appreciated by the universe, in my opinion:
Fire Drills is never going to get a ton of love; it’s a sad truth of writing femslash.
My least favorite story this year:
(i need a) touch up feels very thin to me. There’s just not a lot of there there. It’s porn from front to back without a lot of fucking, which puts it in a weird place.
Most fun story to write:
the girl with the modern face was an absolute BLAST to write. It’s got everything: identity porn, hurt/comfort, mean gay shit, repressed Steve, and Tony Stark’s X-ray spectrometer. I love my OC the Tony Stark Portable X-ray Spectrometer. It makes a lot of fic cameos.
Story with the sweetest moment:
Probably Steve agreeing to take Tony out for pancakes immediately after eating his own (large) breakfast at the end of not gruesome just human.
Story with the single sexiest moment:
Dirty talk in Fire Drills.
Most “Holy crap, that’s wrong, even for you” story:
The unfinished Voltron fic that is 100% about why age gaps are unhealthy and includes Krolia threatening to kill Shiro for sleeping with her son. It’s a dark indictment of the Keith/Shiro fandom’s efforts to make the ship toothless and wholesome to keep people from shitting on it instead of owning the fucked up parts and writing it anyway.
Most overdue:
Fuck writing on deadlines! I’m going to try some exchanges and fandom events in 2019 but 2018 wasn’t the year for it.
Most eye roll-worthy title:
(i need a) touch up is not classy at all.
Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters:
Didn’t Catch You Saying Grace was a hell of a ride for my Steve characterization. I didn’t realize how easy it would be to write Ults!Steve’s vision of his own future: marrying a woman, having kids, being a good husband and father, and secretly blowing guys in gay bars the whole time. It’s a real gut-punch of internalized homophobia and resignation about being gay and I didn’t expect it to square so well with canon.
Hardest story to write:
Fire Drills. A lot happens in it. I had to fit in the whole plot of a movie, and a romance, and two betrayals, and gender issues, and a bunch of sex, and some primo hurt/comfort. Genderswaps also come with the challenge of coming up with a goddamn gender-neutral name for Iron Man. I’m really proud of The Iron Mantle, actually. It’s Iron Man with two letters added, and it makes the suit into a vaguely-female-coded article of clothing, plus a mantle is a responsibility.
Biggest Disappointment:
I’m really happy with all my fic this year! On the original fiction front, I’m disappointed that I can’t find a home for my horror/dark fantasy story about hunting dogs and flash floods in the American midwest. It’s not horror enough for the horror mags and not fantasy enough for the fantasy mags, so for now it’s trunked.
Most Unintentionally Telling Story:
(i need a) touch up is embarrassingly about my own kinks. Fire Drills is way too much about being a lesbian. Sequestration; Vitrification is just my feelings about graduate school and activism barfed onto the page in literary format. I write by pulling stuff out of myself and slapping it on the page for people to look at.
Favorite opening line:
Fire Drills: Tonia Stark comes out of the desert with a thrumming hunk of glowing metal in her chest, two angry red scars where her tits should be, and the giddy memory of flying.
Favorite closing line:
not gruesome, just human: “Just,” Tony says, then pauses, because this still feels hard, piercing the bubble back into a world where he’s expected to be Iron Man and Tony Stark, genius businessman and invincible superhero. “Give me a second to get my phone out of the kitchen.”
I am garbage at closing lines in fic; this one is passable.
Sequestration; Vitrification has a decent one. Lynn held the phone in one hand, and her Geiger counter loosely in the other. The counter chirped at her side, detecting natural background radiation and, from the window, sunlight.
In conclusion:
I really like Steve/Tony and I need to read more comics. I think I’ve written enough fic now that I can justify writing a Civil War fix-it.
Fic-writing goals for the coming year:
Do more events and exchanges! I want to write a time-loops fic and an extremis fic and do more with the full Avengers ensemble. Also Carol/Jess is on the horizon, I can feel it.
Fiction posted this year:
Original fiction:
Sequestration; Vitrification
Strange Horizons, 12/17/18, 4413 words. Bioremediation, the eve of nuclear war, activism, art, how to live when nothing you do feels like enough. Reviewed here, here, and here.
Fanfiction:
Everything stays (but it still changes)
Voltron: Legendary Defender, Keith/Shiro, 11794 words. Keith and Shiro try to have a relationship around Keith’s leftover PTSD from Shiro trying to kill him.
the girl with the modern face
Marvel Universe Fusion, Steve/Tony, 26881 words. Tony’s secret superhero identity is Rescue, and Rescue is a woman. Steve falls for Rescue and things go south from there.
(i need a) touch up
Marvel Universe Fusion, Steve/Tony, 9918 words. Sequel to the girl with the modern face, turns out gender play is one of Steve’s sex things. Tony is, understandably, a little nervous about it.
not gruesome, just human
Marvel 616, Steve/Tony, 6505 words. Tony is super, super depressed post-Avengers Disassembled, and then he shows up at Steve’s doorstep.
Didn’t Catch You Saying Grace
Marvel Ultimates, Steve/Tony, 3701 words. Internalized homophobia for everyone! Steve propositions a closeted Tony instead of the other way around.
Fire Drills
Iron Man (Movies), Eve Rogers/Tonia Stark, 19506 words. Genderswap retelling of Iron Man 2, plus Captain America is there.
This year I wrote and posted:
Seven stories! I also finished edits on The Novel and started sending it around to agents. I have two pieces of original short fiction out on submission to the pro markets, plus two pieces of flash. Oh, and I published a first author methods paper on the science side.
Total word count: 82,717 words.
Overall Thoughts:
Before September of 2018 the last fic I’d posted was from 2015. I went from zero to eighty thousand very quickly, and I hope I can keep some of this around. I spent a lot of time thinking about fiction, too.
Also, this is the year I taught myself how to write sex scenes.
What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January?
I wrote an (unpublished) dark comedy set on a terraforming space ship about the military industrial complex and exploitative capitalism. Cramming as much humor as I could into 5,000 words was really challenging and I hadn’t done it before.
This year's theme and the story that demonstrates it most:
I like my queers VERY QUEER. Fire Drills is, uh, really lesbian.
What's your own favorite story of the year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you happiest?
Didn’t Catch You Saying Grace is my favorite of the year. I wrote it outline-to-posting in one day and it scratched exactly the itch I was feeling. This is the year I got tired of self-actualized, unproblematic, out-of-the-closet pairings.
Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?
I was very nervous to post Fire Drills, mostly because of the sex in it. But I learned that I know how to write filthy, visceral lesbian fucking. I also learned that I want to write a lot more of it. Stay tuned in 2019.
My best story of this year:
Sequestration; Vitrification is, quality-wise, the best. It’s fucking deft, if I say so myself. Tangent Online said I have a “clear, elegant, and unpretentious style.” Hell yeah.
My most popular story of this year:
everything stays (but it still changes) wins on every metric. Unfortunately for the Voltron fandom I wrote basically everything I needed to say about the show in a fic and a half, and then fell out of the fandom.
Not written this year, but First a Darling, Then a Marvel did spectacularly well in 2018. Thank you, Pacific Rim 2, for bringing people back to one of my old faves.
Story of mine most under-appreciated by the universe, in my opinion:
Fire Drills is never going to get a ton of love; it’s a sad truth of writing femslash.
My least favorite story this year:
(i need a) touch up feels very thin to me. There’s just not a lot of there there. It’s porn from front to back without a lot of fucking, which puts it in a weird place.
Most fun story to write:
the girl with the modern face was an absolute BLAST to write. It’s got everything: identity porn, hurt/comfort, mean gay shit, repressed Steve, and Tony Stark’s X-ray spectrometer. I love my OC the Tony Stark Portable X-ray Spectrometer. It makes a lot of fic cameos.
Story with the sweetest moment:
Probably Steve agreeing to take Tony out for pancakes immediately after eating his own (large) breakfast at the end of not gruesome just human.
Story with the single sexiest moment:
Dirty talk in Fire Drills.
Most “Holy crap, that’s wrong, even for you” story:
The unfinished Voltron fic that is 100% about why age gaps are unhealthy and includes Krolia threatening to kill Shiro for sleeping with her son. It’s a dark indictment of the Keith/Shiro fandom’s efforts to make the ship toothless and wholesome to keep people from shitting on it instead of owning the fucked up parts and writing it anyway.
Most overdue:
Fuck writing on deadlines! I’m going to try some exchanges and fandom events in 2019 but 2018 wasn’t the year for it.
Most eye roll-worthy title:
(i need a) touch up is not classy at all.
Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters:
Didn’t Catch You Saying Grace was a hell of a ride for my Steve characterization. I didn’t realize how easy it would be to write Ults!Steve’s vision of his own future: marrying a woman, having kids, being a good husband and father, and secretly blowing guys in gay bars the whole time. It’s a real gut-punch of internalized homophobia and resignation about being gay and I didn’t expect it to square so well with canon.
Hardest story to write:
Fire Drills. A lot happens in it. I had to fit in the whole plot of a movie, and a romance, and two betrayals, and gender issues, and a bunch of sex, and some primo hurt/comfort. Genderswaps also come with the challenge of coming up with a goddamn gender-neutral name for Iron Man. I’m really proud of The Iron Mantle, actually. It’s Iron Man with two letters added, and it makes the suit into a vaguely-female-coded article of clothing, plus a mantle is a responsibility.
Biggest Disappointment:
I’m really happy with all my fic this year! On the original fiction front, I’m disappointed that I can’t find a home for my horror/dark fantasy story about hunting dogs and flash floods in the American midwest. It’s not horror enough for the horror mags and not fantasy enough for the fantasy mags, so for now it’s trunked.
Most Unintentionally Telling Story:
(i need a) touch up is embarrassingly about my own kinks. Fire Drills is way too much about being a lesbian. Sequestration; Vitrification is just my feelings about graduate school and activism barfed onto the page in literary format. I write by pulling stuff out of myself and slapping it on the page for people to look at.
Favorite opening line:
Fire Drills: Tonia Stark comes out of the desert with a thrumming hunk of glowing metal in her chest, two angry red scars where her tits should be, and the giddy memory of flying.
Favorite closing line:
not gruesome, just human: “Just,” Tony says, then pauses, because this still feels hard, piercing the bubble back into a world where he’s expected to be Iron Man and Tony Stark, genius businessman and invincible superhero. “Give me a second to get my phone out of the kitchen.”
I am garbage at closing lines in fic; this one is passable.
Sequestration; Vitrification has a decent one. Lynn held the phone in one hand, and her Geiger counter loosely in the other. The counter chirped at her side, detecting natural background radiation and, from the window, sunlight.
In conclusion:
I really like Steve/Tony and I need to read more comics. I think I’ve written enough fic now that I can justify writing a Civil War fix-it.
Fic-writing goals for the coming year:
Do more events and exchanges! I want to write a time-loops fic and an extremis fic and do more with the full Avengers ensemble. Also Carol/Jess is on the horizon, I can feel it.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-02 03:05 pm (UTC)