AO3 Output - July-December 02020

Here it is, the last six months of fic work that I've posted to the Archive, with any commentary attached.

( Here we go! )

And that's everything for these six months. See you again in six more to see what other things I've ended up writing in the interim.

(Holy shorts, AO3 stats says I did about 90k in fiction this year. It never feels like that much, since it's bits and exchanges and such. And what does that mean my total wordcount is, if you add in Grief and all the other writing that I purposefully do? Clearly I'm up over 100k, possibly even over 150k? 200k, maybe maybe? That's a lot of words. No wonder AO3 thinks, of everything I've posted to there so far, that I'm near 1M words over time.)

Fandom Snowflake 2021 #1: Eram quod es, eris quod sum

It is the first day of the first month of the calendar year, if you keep the Gregorian calendar, and thus, we have the snowflake_challenge, a series of fifteen posts over Janus's month allowing us to look both backward and forward and get to know or to reacquaint ourselves with other fannish persons.

The first command is simple:

In your own space, introduce yourself!

Which seems simple enough to most people. There's some additional text and examples of arrangement that someone could use if their inspiration well does not produce something useful.

• 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!


• Imagine you're at a fandom party, what would you want strangers you hope to be friends knowing about you? If someone happens upon your journal randomly, what impression do you hope they leave with? Or just simply an update on your life and what got you through this year.

The first part is done, as I have updated the profile biography and the sticky post for this year and this part of the year. The second seems like a reasonably good exercise to engage with, and so I shall, for the bulk of this post.

If you haven't met me yet, welcome. What you are likely to find as you go through this space is a lot of links pointing elsewhere, many of which you would also find elsewhere if you had the same subscriptions and access that I do. I like to believe that I provide some value to it by putting them in contexts with each other and providing some amount of commentary where warranted, but while I read nearly all of the links that I post (and the ones I don't read fully, I try to at least read partially), I rely on the people that I subscribe to talking about their interests for a large amount of that material.

When I'm not produce dense balls of links, I do occasionally post about other things. I use the month of December and try to write one post a day all on the same theme. Most recently, it was answering a question a day. And I like using challenge ideas like this one to talk more about my fandom experiences apart from the six-monthly recaps of what I've posted to AO3.

The trickiest part about holding a fandom conversation in my own space is that I'm profoundly multi-fannish, and I don't usually have moments in the consumption of canon or fanworks where I have to stop the presses and write something about it. And when I do, it tends to be more heavily on the meta side if it's here. Fic sorts of things go to silveradept and it tends to stay compartmentalized there, since hey have a serviceable comment function attached to the works. So it's not like I give a lot of people opportunities to talk to me about things in my own space. (I'm usually in the comments of other people's places instead, so at the party, I tend to be someone who overhears someone talking about another thing and asks if I can join in, rather than being the person starting the conversation. Give me a good set of icebreakers, though, and I can do a lot.)

Complicating that is that oft times, I feel adjacent to Fandom, like I don't quite belong here. Not because anyone is actively hostile, but because I wasn't raised with the kind of gendered expectations or peer group that would lead to the discovery of transformative fandom and finding a fandom, a home, a something. I'm very late to transformative fandom on the Internet, unlike some of the people around who feel like they've been here since fandom was more a pocket of people, that required introductions, and that might be at any time served with cease-and-desist or otherwise brought to the attention of an author that would try to stomp out their own fans. I don't have stories of binders full of printed-off fic nor diskettes and hard drives full of painstakingly curated material. And I haven't had the experience of finding the fandom online and recognizing that I'm home and that these people are going to be the best people in my life from this point forward. I like things, and their tropes, and their stories, and I like being able to make more stories or explore different things with those characters. Which makes me part of fandom all the same, but it can feel sometimes like I'm missing out on something that's instinctual and tacitly understood by everyone else around.

So, hi. If you want to get a feel of who I am and who I've been, I've got tags with previous challenges in the tags section and you can peruse both the December Days posts and the /run/media/silveradept tagged posts as well. (Now that I look at it more, actually, if I've tagged something, there's a good chance that it contains something other than link-type posts.)