AO3 Output: June-December 02019

Here we are again, the AO3 output from July-December 02019. Um... obviously, there's going to be a lot of Miraculous Ladybug in it, because apparently that's the current show that can accommodate just about any idea without bending itself too much, but there's plenty of other things, too. Also, Miraculous Ladybug is a huge fandom, and so I can apparently get a couple hundred kudos for things that pretty clearly aren't going to become super-mainstream popular. (Because that bar is apparently measured in the thousands.)

Anyway, onward to the list of things-writ!

( There's a lot here. )

Okay, well, the statistics page for AO3 says that this year, I put out...a lot of words. About 150k of them, in fact. Add on the at least 50k that is the Giving of Grief, and I'm comfortably up above 200k in words for this year. I usually also add an estimate of about 50k on top of that for words written across journal entries for the year. That's reasonable to say, right? (Perhaps it is actually conservative, given that between December Days and Fandom Snowflake-type activities, I might have the 50k in hand, and there's still a few more tens of thousands of words on top of that to cover.) So 250k of words, and probably more than that. That's a prolific year for me. Big fandom will do that to you. (It's also no coincidence that the works that crested 100 kudos this year were nearly all in Miraculous Ladybug. Megafandom is megafandom, and even if you only appeal to a small segment, that's still a lot by raw number count.) That's the sort of thing that, if I were to bend it toward trying to do things like write novels, I'd have a few, but I have yet to create something that's NaNo length, even across multiple works, as Heart of the Miraculous is only around 40k.

So, yeah. That's a lot of words for this year. A really large lot of words. Thank you, for those of you that read them, for spending time with my words, and even occasionally replying to them and eliciting more words. It's nice to know you're out there. Let's have a fantastic year together.

Fandom Snowflake 2020 #1: Back To The Fairy Tale, Back To The Show

Welcome back to the new year, and as is traditional, it's time for snowflake_challenge to get underway. This year, rather than concentrating everything into the first fifteen days, the challenge is going to run the entire length of January, with each new challenge appearing on the odd days of the month. That should make it less stressful than years past in trying to do something daily.

The master post for all challenges is live, so if you want to dedicate one tab to that for the entire challenge, then that's the one to use.

Challenge #1 asks us to introduce ourselves. For some people, that's a fairly easy thing, as their daemons have settled and their fandoms are small and finite. For me, it's never that easy. Here's the text from the challenge with suggestions about what might be good for introductions:

If you already have a sticky post or full bio, make sure they’re up to date so that people visiting your journal can learn something about you. Update your interests; make sure your fic posts are current; check that all your links work, etc. If you don’t already have a post introducing yourself, create one!

The profile I built for Dreamwidth still stands up over time, although the interest list has fallen by the wayside. The sticky comment culture post says a lot about how I would like to interact with other people and have them interact with me in the space.

I archive my fic efforts at silveradept, but if you look at the list of works, you'll find that I've written a little of everything. I'm primarily an exchange fic writer, and I tend to be multifannish about things that I like. One of my greatest skills is that I can usually find something interesting in any given canon, so I can enjoy discussing it with other people. This often extends to being more interested in side or secondary characters than the main ones, jsut because they leave a lot more room for people to speculate on or write interesting works about. And often, what canons I do pay attention to are because other people are interested in them as well. Despite a prodigious fic output for last year, I tend to the meta-and-discussion side of things, and I suspect it shows in my fic.

I've also been engaged in a years-long meta project regarding the Dragonriders of Pern, looking at how the Suck Fairy has been active in those book series, chapter by chapter. At this point, I'm into the second author of Pern, and when all is done, assuming there is no more output from the third author of Pern, I'm probably going to import the entire series to AO3 to give it a more permanent home.

One of these years, when I feel like I can, and I'm ready to face that story, I'll tell you the story of how RWBY and math saved my life, but this year is not that year.

Most of the time, what you'll see from my journal is long lists of interesting things around the World Wide Web, usually as found by the interesting people on my reading list. I've come to acceptance of the idea that curation, collation, and presenting these disparate threads in a single space, often thematically arranged, is something worthwhile, even if it isn't novel. Excepting for things like December Days or Snowflake, I don't talk a whole lot about myself and what I do or what I'm fannish about in my own space. (Most of what I've done on that front can probably be found on the various snowflake and December Days tags. The series just finished is a retrospective on some aspects of video gamess.) A lot of people have gotten to know me because I started appearing in their comments and we struck up conversations. Or because we know each other from other places. I'm trying to be better about talking about things as they interest me, but there's often something in the way about trying to sound useful or informative. Or maybe because there's a perfectly good conversation about that thing going on somewhere else and that's where I want to be or put people to. They're not all fundamentally related to questions of self-worth as measured by originality, but there's probably more of that than I would really like to admit to myself.

As with many introductions, I'm looking forward to seeing all of you and reading your posts, and having a good conversation with all of you. Even if we don't have a fandom in common, it'll be nice to hear about what you like about yours. And if we do have one in common, it'll be nice to have conversations about that. Or anything else that you are posting about, probably.