Fic (+ Stuff) Rundown for 2010!

[quinara]

Happy New Year!! Hope everyone had a nice time last night and that we all have a lovely year, or at least a better one! I went with a schoolfriend to one of our other friends' friend's house with her and her fiancé(!!) and had a great time playing Settlers of Catan and (briefly) poker. Also standing in a circle holding hands with our arms crossed and singing 'ner ner nerr ner ner' to the tune of Auld Lang Syne when it was on the telly. Of course.

As is traditional, I've done the 2010 rundown of my fic - but it's been added to this year by 'stuff'! I started it yesterday, but since it's turned out that I was quite prolific this year, I've only just finished it today. I've also possibly been chattier than usual, so it's turned into a rather epic collection of mini commentaries on my creative endeavours. So, if you like this sort of thing, enjoy!

2010 Mini Commentaries.

All of the journal links go to my DW, by the way, but they should all have a link to LJ at the bottom, should you want to leave a comment there(!).

The Last Fingers of Leaf
I don't think I ever did inspire a great slew of Buffy+Illyria(+dragon fics), but I've certainly been prompting a few from people, so the hope lives on! This fic was fun to write, essentially because of containing those elements, but also because it (a) mostly came out in one go and (b) was one of those kind of 'method' stories where I was writing Buffy's POV and knew there was a dragon there, but didn't discover who it was specifically or what it meant for the story until Buffy and Illyria had discovered it. That was satisfying. The title, nicked out of The Wasteland, seems to have become something of a model for my titles this year, which really need to be reigned back in their pretentiousness.

FFIX Ficlets: Stroper Stew; Fish for the Blues
I like Final Fantasy, even if no one else I know does! FFIX, specifically, is a fun, rompy sort of world full of great species of people, which I'm quite attached to. These two stories are essentially children's stories, I think, in genre - but I appreciate that sort of thing once in a while, especially with Bobby Corwen, the cutest chocobo ever. Not to mention Quina, who is such an easy-going character (for a change!). These ficlets were also one of those great fandom moments: angelikitten happened to answer one of my queerlygen prompts, which led to a couple of days pinging fic back and forth, though barely anyone else was interested. Realtime fun!

If God is Love, Then You are False
Weslah poem! I love Weslah, but don't really have much to say about them - I don't have much to say about Wesley or Lilah individually either, though I do like them popping up when they can. (I think the main thing is that, in the end, they are just human... Where's the existential crisis there? ;) ) But when the idea popped into my head that Wesley might like to try a sestina - because he has far too much time on his hands - I was incredibly surprised to find out that it came reasonably easily (I've tried several Spuffy sestinas and they have all been terrible). I'll confess that I'm quite fond of this poem (and the line If all my body's blood had bled away) and all the graven imagery, possibly because it ties into this other drabble I wrote about Wesley once, where he was in a church back when he was younger. I seem to think the poor bloke has issues with religion.

All-Penguin AU Spuffy: P-P-P-Pick Up a Plot for Vengeance; Gone Fishin'; Fun with the Fluffballs
Not much to say here. There are penguins; it was a bizarre, bizarre Friday(?) night. Although, I suppose, it is interesting thinking back to what I was actually trying for... Because it started off as a mild parody of Spuffy tropes, which was possibly too subtle to notice, including a strong pinch of melodrama and the idea that Angel becomes some sort of evil mastermind in order to screw with their relationship, not that I'm entirely sure where that came from. I was a bit worried people couldn't tell I was taking a minor inch of piss with the angst of it all, but, you know, it was about penguins, so I assumed that was implied. Interesting development after that, though, was when penguin!fic, to me at least, felt like an act of rebellion against the crackiness of S8, which was where Gone Fishin' came in - which was again supposed to be slightly OTT, but ended up as possibly having one of my better fightscenes, more's the pity (I'm really not good at keeping crack cracky). I really started getting into the idea that all metaphors/similes Buffy thought with had to make sense in relation to her penguin life... See - far too involved!

Three-Sentence Ficathon Pseudo-Drabbles
Writing these was fun! And a proper exercise in punctuation, which I've carried with me forever more (much to my Spikeid betas' chagrin...). I think the Dollhouse ones came out the best, actually, especially Mellie's second sentence: She has a job (she knows she has a job), but it always seems to happen on the days she's not living, the yesterdays and tomorrows and last week and next year; the rest of the time, the today and right now, it feels like her life is best spent waiting for Paul, or cooking for Paul, or watching for Paul, or dressing for Paul, or cleaning for Paul, or getting her treatment (to be healthy for Paul). I think the rhythm works nicely, especially the sneaky way that the treatment doesn't fit. For some reason my personal canon is now that Mellie was 'trained' as a copywriter; who knows where that came from.

Dawn/Satsu in Cambridge (with bonus Andrew!): Dawn Drabbles (at the bottom); Go, Remembering Me (to Return on a Favourable Wind)
Datsu: proving even the most conventional shipper can be taken by a UC ship. This was all a result of a fic which will never be posted in its half-constructed form (because I think it's going to be bastardised, if anything, into the only real idea I've had for a Buffyverse novel, which is the next project to start after the Spikeid), where Buffy, Dawn and Satsu ended up the run from the castle, while Faith headed to LA to get Angel (and would have ended up bringing Spike back instead, much to everyone's surprise). D and S had this unintentional chemistry, mostly brought about through Satsu's arc of realising that the devil-may-care, bank-robbing Buffy she fell in love with was kind of a smokescreen over the angsty and stiff-backed Buffy we all know and love and aided, apparently, by the fact I was writing this before Satsu developed Whedon-style lack of confidence and mostly rocked around pretty sure of herself in kooky clothes. (I've kept that reading of her, by the way, because I like it much more than the wet sort of 'oh noez' she gets branded with every now and then - my Satsu definitely stomps. :D ) Anyway - Andrew!! Andrew is also vitally necessary here, because my fanon never escapes Dawn and Andrew remaining friends, and he is totally one of my pet ace characters. Doing stuff from his POV is, therefore, a most excellent break from writing sexual people all the time.

Writing on the Wall (Or is That Just Graffiti?)
Oh, how do I love Wishverse Buffy! brutti_ma_buoni put out a plea for Wishverse fic on fantas_magoria and how could I refuse? This was one of those things I just sat down and wrote, the first character appearing on the page turning out to be Dru - because I apparently have a deep desire for Dru and Wishverse Buffy to meet. It was only going to be them, with Dru being very amused by the changes to Buffy, but then, naturally, Spike appeared on the scene - reprising his role from an old fic of mine, Waiting in the Fog, where he's rather beholden to Dru's whims and has been one step behind in following her across the country. Thus he is drunk off his head and uninhibited in letting his immediate attraction to Buffy come out. One day I'd like to write a longer Wishverse Spuffy fic, but it's been years and I still can't think beyond 'they rescue Angel; they rock around with Giles; something something something'. (Wishverse Giles? Also very cool.)

Season 8 Fic (mocking, mocking, serious): Lager: The Only Thing That Can Kill a Twilight (at the bottom); If I'm an Actor then I Want to Know My Lines; The Frayed and Weathered Mantle
Again proving that I can only do crack so long before I take it too seriously to amuse people, I nevertheless don't think I started my crack!commentary that badly. Red Dwarf was possibly an obscure choice for a crossover, but since I'm not into too much scifi, the spacefucking didn't leave me with so many options. And who can resist superpowered mini!Lister? I was actually feeling rather gleeful when I wrote If I'm an Actor, because Spike's spaceship (not the bugs) is one of the very few things I like about S8, especially when overwritten by my backstory for how he got it, which keeps me entertained. I love the idea of Spike being a roving investment broker for the Scoobies (at the same time as being on a Mission to save Angel, with Illyria and Connor), not to mention bringing Bilali back from Devouring Time (my Darla fic) and giving him a massive vamp-tourism empire (35 years is a long time in business, as Lord Sugar would say). It was, however, such tangential fanwanking that brought me to The Frayed and Weathered Mantle (pretentious title supposed to be about Angel's mantle, ie. billowy coat, of heroism, which metaphorically got all battered in, leaving him wanting just a little slice of happiness, ie. Twilight - I should stop overthinking these things). I enjoyed writing it! Not sure it really made the map, though.

To Apprehend Air
Ah, more pretentious titling - including the chapter titles/summaries, which possibly don't mean anything to anyone, but did to me (got to let my pretentiousness out somewhere). 'Air', in case anyone didn't get it, was supposed to be a slightly less on-the-nose reference to the soul - in a kind of life/breath/spiritus/pneuma/ka/chi/prana kind of way. (It was my posting day and I couldn't think of a title for ages and ages - when I get in a panic I just become as wanky as possible; it's an exam technique...) Anyway, pretentious trappings aside, this was a fic where I just let all my kinks hang out and pulled together a bizarrely long story for seasonal_spuffy, which I am actually remarkably proud of. (Possibly would have been prouder if I'd got a beta for it in time. There are still sentences I need to comb through to naturalise; will get on that at some point.) It took inspiration from oldskool S6 fics where Spike and Buffy ended up really buckling down to chat about the soul - Kalima's Daemons Luminati has got to be cited there somewhere - as well as a love for random fantasy worlds and a little touch of travel(ish) writing. I was trying to reconcile the pro-S7 side of me with some old redemptionista roots, though I don't know if the fic would have made any hardcore redemptionistas happy. In the end, basically, I don't think the soul is the be-all-and-end-all of Spike's journey - I think Spike going after the soul was the main fulcrum of change in him and that, even without the soul, post S6-Spike would never have got back to where he was in S5. It seems to be generally accepted in Spuffy these days that the soul was necessary for the relationship to work, but I don't think that's true, though (as becomes pretty clear in the story) I think Buffy would have been even less likely to make the leap of trust for soulless Spike after he'd proved he could have a soul. I really wanted the story to be about Spike's choices, though perhaps not enough of that came out. It was originally going to end quite sadly, with Buffy lost in aporia about why the soul's returning wasn't a happy moment at all - but it wouldn't stay that way (I'll confess I'm more and more drawn to happy endings these days and can't be doing with things not getting worked out as far as Spuffy is concerned... I think it's stress). Had a great time writing this one, though - and especially writing Anya for once!

Taken Over (Stunned Silent Remix)
Faith! Another character I've never really written (bits and bobs; can't remember if they're in stuff I've posted) and my first crack at Remix. This was definitely a lot of fun, but one of those fics that felt more like a performance than anything else. I tend to feel like writing poetry is a performance - you have to feel it and let the words come (though thank god for editing) - but usually writing can be a bit less linear and a bit more intellectualised. With this fic, however, I really wasn't sure I was going to get it unless I committed to it completely, though there was the intellectual bit of working out how I was changing up the pormpt. I decided it was all just about Who are You, so the content was there already: the interest was going to come from characterisation and language. So, basically, I clicked my mind over to 'everything is sexualised' + 'everything is shit and about to self-destruct' and wrote how Who are You happened to Faith - three sex(ualised) scenes came to the fore and the POV was a definite 3rd/2nd/1st person blur. I have no idea if I could do something like this again, but that's part of the fun.

Tuesday May 20, 2003
To be honest, I'm not entirely happy with this. Part of a plan for seasonal_spuffy was to do a 'five poems Buffy wrote about Spike', but they were all quite terrible. The first of these really should have been a lot better and the second, though it was supposed to show she and Spike were rushing the poem out as a conversation, could possibly also have been cleverer. I still quite like the concept, but, let's be honest, the main reason I posted this was because my exam results were coming out the next day and I'd no way to occupy my evening apart from convincing myself I was preparing this for posting. Meh! Fandom - it's a social experience too...

Ficlets about Asexual Characters
This was a lot of random fandoms - St. Trinians! Torchwood (this fic is remarkably popular hitwise on AO3 for some reason)! Harry Potter! I think my heart is still with the Buffyverse ones, though, especially Ethan Rayne. Not that it was the most striking fic in the whole world, maybe, but because the thoughts that went into constructing it have really filled out my Ethan fanon (another character I love but don't write very much). My Ethan is totally ace, by the way... Also - I wrote something positive about Xander! Good old Andrew. Hmm - if last year was the year of 2000-word fics I wrote in an evening, this was the year of ficlets. I don't really find them that satisfying, to be honest, though they are fun. Maybe next year I can do longer things as my filler again?

A Regular Van Helsing
Ooh, the Racebending Revenge Ficathon - I think this fic of mine is probably the most appreciated by people beyond my flist and I'm quite happy with it myself. I think I mentioned when I posted it that working out what and how to write the thing, once I'd worked out my Buffy was Latina, proved pretty tricky. I'm not American, for a start, so my understanding of the Latina-in-the-US experience comes mainly from film/TV and a bit of further reading. Starting from there, I should make quite clear, was not enough. Buffy is (what British me would call) an upper middle class girl, slightly down on her luck in terms of income after the divorce - yet in everything I started she was dropping social class left right and centre, and I didn't even notice until I looked over what I was writing with a critical hat on. Definite bad times. So, after that, I stopped writing and started looking on YouTube for as many videos by Latinos as possible, because clearly reading blog posts etc. wasn't enough to counteract the visual material I'd consumed. There was some good stuff pointing out what the stereotypes were and how they refracted in various ways, as well as interviews with people who aren't activists (which were voices I also wanted to hear). After that I thought I was in a slightly better position - and worked out that a lot of where I was going wrong was that I was trying to make Buffy's life change in too significant a way (the ficathon was supposed to be about showing how the character's race made their story change, but I was taking that as far too bald an objective). So, instead of thinking how the plot of the show would have changed in some specific way, I decided to get right back to the basic narrative of the show - monster and the blonde girl in an alley, and work out where Buffy would be fitting into that now. It became less about how her life had changed (because there was no reason why it should have) and more about how the people around that life had made it signify differently. Black leather became a starting point because clearly now Buffy was supposed to be playing the hot badass chick with a gun - only she isn't that, it hopefully appears...

The Beauty of the Stars
This was again a very last minute endeavour - I had a whole other fic I was working on for Emmie's Bodyswap Ficathon, but it really wasn't happening. Luckily, there was a tiny scrap of my fic on my hard drive about Buffy and Illyria getting swapped, so I thought maybe I could work from that. I was in a poetry mood, though, so the sensible thing (obviously!) seemed to be to start writing it in pentameter. It was going to be straight pentameter, but then the first bit settled so nicely into a stanza that I decided to keep it going like that and make it something of a ballad. It actually worked out quite well - I could easily read back, judge the pacing and insert another stanza where necessary. I'd recommend it for fics that are essentially mental journeys, rather than plotty.

[[Schmoopy Sonnet by Spike for BMB]]
brutti_ma_buoni was working on her Schmoop Bingo ficlets when she put out a call for help over Spike writing Buffy a poem for Valentine's Day. I volunteered to help out (always keen on the poetry) and ended up with a nice and schmoopy sonnet (I like sonnets, sue me). I'm glad it's embedded in schmoop, though, because I don't think I would ever post it on my own!!! I was definitely trying for a sort of Shakespearean extended metaphor (I was vaguely thinking about II IIRC?), but it was mostly trying to be schmoopy with my dignity still intact. Not very Spike-like really, but I don't think it came out too badly. Maybe I should have committed more.

Blood of My Blood
Medea!! Not much to say on this, but Seneca's Medea rode again for this ficlet, where I was trying to get as much physicality in as possible and ended up with childbirth. I kind of liked the gory image of blood becoming the lubrication that let the baby be born... Or, at least, I think Seneca would have appreciated it!

sb_fag_ends Ficlets: Burnt to the Filter; Past Progressive; In Strength We are Stronger; A Wild Night Out; Half-Loop Topstitch; As We Are; Spuffy vs Mecha Godzilla
I quite like all of these (apart from Past Progressive, which feels trite when I reread it), but don't have much to say, because they don't really feel like stories to me. I'm fond of all the images/scenes, but would like to suck them into individual plots or something. In Strength We are Stronger is possibly my favourite - because who doesn't love meditating Buffy? Her mental discipline is awesome. I also quite like A Wild Night Out, just because I have quite a few S7 fics which have some sort of date-promise in them (and have read lots as well), but this is the first time I actually let the pair of them get somewhere in terms of having one. So that was satisfying.

The Seduction of Claire Saunders
I've been wanting to write a long and serious Dollhouse fic since last year (for some reason whenever I write for Dollhouse, it comes out quite short) and this, it turned out, was it. After the crashing disappointment of the end of S2 I'm not entirely sure I have much else to say about the verse, but I'm glad I got this written. It's not a story in which much happens and I think the emotional arc is possibly a bit subsumed, but Claire is one of my all-time favourite characters, I think. That she's so self-confident yet thrown this curveball that all that confidence is being fed to her by programming - it's really tragic stuff.

Bechdel Test Ficathon Fics: Stories the Mortals Never Hear; Hoar Leaves in the Glassy Stream; Ανους μεν ερχηι, τοις φιλοις δ'ορθως φιλη and Ονειρων προσφερεις μορφωμασιν
(Yes, I am too lazy to find out the codes for the breathings and accents on my Greek. Let's face it, next to no one reads the accents anyway - and though I do believe in breathings, it's fairly obvious, isn't it?) Anyway - oh, look! I got my Classics out again... Heh, I think I was feeling a bit of Buffyverse-burnout at the particular time this ficathon was running, because I remember shying away from the Buffyverse prompts and being glad that there were other things I could get into. Hoar Leaves is probably my favourite, though the problem with that is that I just know there are people reading it and cringing at my thous and whatever. I wrote it with a brief glance around Google, but with mostly a sense of foggy ignorance, ploughing through anyway. I also love Cassandra being the medium between Clytaemnestra and Helen, probably because I have a massive story kinks for clairvoyance and seeing through other peoples' eyes, but also because it seems fitting that Cassandra gets to see Clytaemnestra just a little bit more truly before she's killed off. No righteous hate for anybody!

Spikeid IV-VI
Oh dear, what a lot year went by before I got to this!! Still, I was glad to have posted it and can happily say that VII-IX are in the works, with first drafts of VII and VIII actually complete. Not many people appear to be reading, but for me (at least) the posting three books at once worked out quite well. I'm much more comfortable posting completed stories than things in parts, because I don't tend to be very linear, so having three books in hand instead of one is reassuring and easier to think about thematically, because there's a bigger chunk of story to think about, which necessitates thinking about the next chunk, which makes you think what you need to change in this chunk etc. etc. Book VI is my favourite so far, I think (though VIII might give it a run for its money when it's shaped up), for the Spuffy but also for the Lilah, whom I never intended to have anywhere, but who suddenly seemed very necessary when I was writing. Poor Angel was actually supposed to be around, but he didn't really work, in terms of being representable in the actual state he was in as well as thematically, which was the main reason he had to go - his absence was necessary to reinforce his absence from the main world... All my post-NFA fics, thinking about it, tend to make Angel absent in some way; I must see NFA as some sort of deletion of himself. I've never really thought about it in actual thinking terms - should probably get on that before I trope myself to death.

Came Dancing to My Door
Since this fic has been wanting to be written for ages, I'm really glad I managed to get this out, even though it didn't turn out to be as long as I thought it would be. (But then that sort of made sense, because the whole point was that the decision had kind of already been made before the fic started; everything in between is about realising that.) Of course, the challenge was to work out why Buffy choosing abortion was a positive, rather than the absence of a negative, because I couldn't be bothered with the halfway-house of 'well, abortion is a necessary evil for when women really can't cope with carrying a baby to term'. Buffy could cope with anything; she would just prefer not to, not in this world. It worked for this verse, I think, because it could be paired with my logic-reasons were for Buffy proposing in You've Got the Power to Know (which really should have made it into the fic somewhere), which were essentially that Spike proposing would have been rude. He's immortal; she's not - his asking her for a lifetime commitment naturally comes with the added clause 'but only until you die - then I'll bugger off again, eternally young, and do whatever I fancy'. Similarly, making a child - which essentially represents a complete fluke and Spike's nature being turned upside down - become such a massive, central part of their lives didn't seem exactly fair. The verse is about (it turns out) the balance Spuffy and the gang has going in terms of human vs. demon nature - a baby is the exact sort of thing that would skew it too far in the human direction.

Shine On You
Giles/Faith! Not entirely sure I'm converted, but I had a lot of fun in this fic giving Faith power and authority. And an iPod. For some reason that seemed like the best and least offensive gift she could receive; I'm possibly revealing my own thoughts here, but isn't the gift of music what everyone wants? Mmm, music...

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I also made the following things!

Spike's Mixtape for Buffy's 21st
It is a tradition gathering more and more weight that I always post two things to seasonal_spuffy, usually something long-ish and something short-ish, so when Buffy's poems weren't working as an accompaniment to To Apprehend Air, I decided to go with an idea I've been vaguely having for years - this. In fact, you can tell how old the idea is by the way everyone had absolutely no idea what I was talking about when I talked about fics where Spike makes a mixtape for Buffy... I swear there was a (very minor) trend at some point, but it might well have been in 2003; I'm definitely thinking individual websites with limited HTML. Maybe it was in the days when people used to just list their fanmixes, because no one had the time to upload and download them...? Who knows. Anyway, this revealed punk's lack of a tendency to be in any way complimentary and thus quite unsuitable for courtly mixtapes. Still, I persevered and ended up with a sort of thematic one instead. I still quite like it! (Maybe not my silly little explanations for the songs.)

Spikeid I-VI Soundtrack
It may not be occupying other people's brains, but it's occupying mine! And thus a soundtrack is born, with the rather simple process of two songs per book. It all ends up rather dubsteppy (as in the second half), but I seem to be into that at the moment. I'm never sure I'm as good at expressing myself through mixes as some people are; I choose songs based on their mood most of the time, before realising that the lyrics don't (usually) match what I want to say, so it's hard to quickly describe what's going on. My Enemy was like that in particular. I still feel like it's the best song I have for that part of the story (the beginning of III, when Buffy faces off with Osiris/Sadie and is made to see LA, before gathering the troops and coming). The lyrics are kind of triumphant and about recovery and beating back personal demons - to me it hears as the elegiac aftermath to badness, a little bit hopeful but not entirely. Meh! I'm very happy about God is in the Radio and Orpheus, though - didn't even think about the second one being called Orpheus when I first picked it out; clearly Pariah and I are on the same wavelength in terms of what calling someone back from hell should sound like. God is in the Radio seemed to fit with Lilah's preliminary deconstruction of Osiris. Also, though it's a guitary song, it blends very well with the dance music (good old that-era QOTSA). Because soundtracks should flow as well as the story! I think anyway.

And some vids -

Triceratops
I'm not entirely sure where the urge to vid came from, but this is what started it off - this song and this DVD. stultiloquentia bore witness to my first hideous attempt, which was good in my head, but boring, slow, and not at all communicating what I was seeing when I had one long clip after another sort-of in time to the music. Re-energised I tried again, still mostly feeling my way around. I do like what I ended up with, though, heh, I made the whole thing without realising you could look at the audio wave representation in WMM and line your clips up so you knew they'd probably be on the beat before you watched the preview. That was bizarre.

The Fortress at Sea Level
See, I'm really proud of this vid - and yet I face the 'I don't know any Final Fantasy people' conundrum again! FFVIII is visually spectacular and I know they've started putting voices in the cutscenes now, but before they had any voice acting at all (with the game's dialogue done in text boxes) all the communication in the cutscenes had to be done visually - which leaves you with the best material for vidding ever! I love the FFVIII music as well, but it is all edged with with a slightly cartoony melodrama, so it was fun to put the images to a more glitchy, edgy piece. The Fortress at Sea Level, as the title of the song, felt to me like a great (coincidental) nod to Ultimecia's castle, and the idea of trying to approach and understand what being a sorceress means - the argument being that you can't really do that with Rinoa (every gesture signifies as something more than you - implied Squall, because pretty much everything is shot from his POV anyway - can understand). Technically, though, it was a bit of a mission working with two different aspect ratios (dear Square, why did you put the closing sequence in boxed widescreen?? That was mean), but I think I managed to fudge the transitions enough that you don't notice when it changes back and forth.

Stress
At last, a Buffy vid! This mostly came out of me going 'OK, what are the best visuals in Buffy? Desert in Restless, no contest', then concluding that that meant I was vidding about Buffy and the First Slayer - and I have lots to say about them, so I was quite happy with that thought. It seems to me that between Restless and Get It Done Buffy comes to a much better understanding about who the Slayer is and have much more sympathy for her, rather trying to distance herself from who she is. I wanted to tell the story of the similarities between them, and Buffy's growing acceptance of that, but also presenting the First Slayer's view of the spell in Primeval, in relation to what the Scoobies' using the Slayer's essence means when you know the GID story. I knew the song choice was a little off the wall, but I'll be honest and say that, by the time I posted the vid, I'd been working with it so long I'd forgotten how abrasive it is on first hearing, so people's 'bzuh?' reactions were not what I was expecting at all! And I am still waiting for the time I'm watching these episodes again and realise what the perfect shot would have been to end the vid with, because I do feel like there's just a couple of frames missing. I did very much enjoy reordering the shadow puppets into a new story, though - and matching up both Buffy's mouth saying 'our power' over some fluffy fuzz (to me it makes it sound like she's saying it) and the car speeding up to the music going 'vroom!'. Good times.

Too Hot for Drumstep
The next vid idea I had was a Darla vid, but I thought I was going to have to put it on the backburner, because I couldn't find a song that struck me as Darla anywhere... And then I heard this! The only problem is that it's fast, possibly too fast for me (you can see the vid and WMM creaking around the tempo - and there was much more creaking that had to be changed so the vid would compile without juddering), though I did enjoy cutting to it. In hindsight, I really should have left it for a couple of weeks and done a final edit before I posted, because I think it could be sharpened up (I think it's a weaker vid than Stress because of that), but sometimes you just want to post! The idea was to extend Darla's great exit 'don't look for me again' and point out how damn White Knight-ish Angel becomes around Darla and the way for him and Lindsey she stops being important as a person so much as a thing. What I didn't anticipate was how, to me anyway, Dru becomes this weird shadow part of Darla - standing for the demon part that Darla invites back to herself and which then shadows her through her smackdown of the men. Still, I quite like it.

/

Memey Meme.

Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you'd predicted?

The first six-eight months were incredibly productive for me - must be what finals does to you? I've definitely slowed down since the summer, though, and I feel like I'm going at a fairly expectable rate at the moment. I did add up my 2010 published words the other day, having said that, and it was something like 86,000, which I definitely didn't expect in January!!

What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January 2010?

I don't think I would have predicted I'd actually produce some vids, nor that Datsu would take hold of me. So I suppose it's been quite a surprising year!

What's your favourite story of the year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you happiest?

I'm really very happy with To Apprehend Air. It was a bit of a pig/last minute scramble to write, but I've read it back a few times and it does have a lot of what I enjoy in it. And it's satisfyingly long! The Frayed and Weathered Mantle also makes me very happy, though.

Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?

Writing for an anti-racism challenge as a merry little white person felt like quite a big risk, but I felt like giving it a go was the right thing to do - because if I can't fic it, I'm not thinking it properly (or something). I learnt a lot from that about the necessity of research and self-criticism, so it was really rewarding. My Faith Remix fic also felt like a bit of a risk, because it wasn't really 'me' at all (I think it was you, BMB, who said you wouldn't have guessed that fic was mine in a million years), and I was worried I'd embarrass myself. But what are (preliminarily) anonymous ficathons about if not risks? I think that one paid off as well, and from that I think I learned the corresponding lesson to my other one, that sometimes you've just got to go for it and the the squidgy goo of your brain will sort you out some good stuff.

Do you have any fanfic or profic goals for the New Year?

I would love to properly finish the Spikeid this year. I think getting the next three books posted by my birthday at the end of March is entirely doable, and then that leaves a lot of time for the last three. I know what I'm about now, even though I continually fear my pentameters are normalising into rhythmic prose, so, yeah, that. Otherwise, keep up the momentum and keep writing, especially longer fics because they're really satisfying when you've finished them.

From my past year of writing, what was...

My Best Story: Hmm, not sure. Taken Over (Stunned Silent Remix), actually, turned out rather well.

Story Most Underappreciated by the Universe: Spikeid. I say it every year, but I'm still holding out that when it's finished, it will be liked.

Most fun: Probably If I'm an Actor then I Want to Know My Lines, because it was silly and gleeful, followed by the penguins, because that was literally brain fuelling fingers and mad.

Most disappointing: Tuesday May 20, 2003. You can't win 'em all, especially with poetry, which is often more miss than hit, but there's something there I can't quite get at. Buffy can do poetry; I just need to work out how she expresses herself.

Most sexy: Probably Taken Over, but to me that pushes too far into disturbing territory. Came Dancing to My Door, then. Go, Remembering Me is the most asexy!

Hardest to Write: I always say Spikeid; I think I'll say A Regular Van Helsing instead, because my brain was against me.

Most Unintentionally Telling: Not a fic, but Stress probably reveals my music taste as being weirder than I thought. Also, I have a big drum to bang about the First Slayer and I'm going to keep on banging it.

Right, then; onwards! Let's be having you, 2011.

Comments

[evilawyer]

When you list it all out like that, it's amazing!

Happy New Year.

[quinara]

It definitely makes a change from a couple of years ago! Even though most of the things I've listed are pretty short.

You too!!

[stultiloquentia]

Goodness me, you wrote a lot of good words this year. Thanks for lining them all up with links, because I know I missed a few.

[quinara]

I'm quite pleased with them all told, though I feel I've rather laid down the gauntlet for myself in terms of the amount of stuff I can produce in a year. And you're entirely welcome - I just hope you enjoy anything you check out! ;)