The Fic Year in Review

 
Stories I wrote this year:

In chronological order (completed, or standalone series fragments):

1. Alias: “Savant”
   Why Marshall loves his life, and never conquered the world.
2. Buffy the Vampire Slayer: “First Do No Harm”
   There’s a new Slayer in town … but there’s something a little off about her.
3. Buffy the Vampire Slayer: “Yet to Be Seen”
   Marcie (“Invisible Girl”) Ross, before she went after Cordelia.
4. Buffy the Vampire Slayer: “Parting Shot” [drabble]
   Short, pungent snark from Ethan Rayne.
5. Buffy the Vampire Slayer: “Learning Curve”
   The new Slayer/Watcher organization (post-“Chosen”) has a problem child on their hands. So, naturally, they send her to Xander.
6. Buffy the Vampire Slayer: “Quatrain” [drabble]
   The four times Buffy Summers died.
7. Buffy the Vampire Slayer: “Fish and Visitors” [drabble] (with vastid87)
   Idle fantasy — or wishful thinking — in the Xander-Spike roommate dynamic.
8. Superman: “Icarus”
   A really bad moment in the life of the world’s mightiest hero.
9. Modesty Blaise/MacGyver crossover ficlet: “Spur of the Moment” (with sroni)
   A ‘first kiss’ fic between two very unlikely people.
10. Buffy the Vampire Slayer: “God Save the Queen” (with sroni)
    Collaborative piece, showing the life of the Slayer from an entirely different perspective.

My new WIPs were:

None. Everything I started in 2006, I finished.


My favorite story of the year. Not the most popular, but the one that makes me happiest:

“First Do No Harm”.
It was just delightful to write, then to read, then to re-read. Of course, it was the most popular, but that’s not why it’s my favorite.

From my past year of writing, what was …

• My best story:

Again, “First Do No Harm”.


• Story most under-appreciated by the universe:

“Spur of the Moment”, with sroni.
Zero response. I mean, nothing at all.


• Most fun:

“First Do No Harm”. Beginning to see a theme here?


• Most disappointing:

None, really. Just about everything wound up as well as I wanted it to do.


• Story with single sweetest moment:

“First Do No Harm”.
I’m sorry, it really IS. When Doc runs to save his daughter instead of the woman he loves, and then the woman tells him that’s exactly what she would expect a good man to do … sweet.


• Story with most interesting idea:

“Learning Curve”.
Xander as corrective medicine for rebellious Slayers? And whispered about by them in rumors that cast him both as a mysterious nemesis and as a legendary seducer? It was interesting to me, anyhow.


• Hardest story to write:

“God Save the Queen”. Because I was revising someone else’s work, and needing to preserve as much of her story as possible, instead of simply writing my own.


• Easiest story to write:

“Icarus”. Got the story in a dream, and turned it out in one day of white-hot composition.


• Most unintentionally telling story:

“First Do No Harm”. Sort of. I swear Doc wasn’t modeled on me, but my daughter claimed to recognize me in him.


• Most “OHMIGOD HEY *I* WROTE THAT” fanon-turned-canon moment:

None. Just didn’t happen.

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

Both more and less, in a way. I wrote more pieces overall after I got back from Afghanistan than I thought I’d do, but most of them were short fics.

What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January 2005?

“Icarus”, Superman. I never expected to do a DC-universe fic, and if I had, I would have expected it to be about Batman.

What's your favorite story of the year?

Big surprise here: “First Do No Harm”.

Did you take any writing risks this year?

Not this past year, not really. I broke a lot of (for me) new ground in 2005, but 2006 was mostly the wrap-up.

What fanfic or profic goals did you make last year, and how did you do in meeting them?

In 2006, I finished a goal I’d set for myself the year before: to write more completed Buffy stories (9) during my Afghanistan deployment than I’d done (8) during my time in Iraq. I also did the revision of “God Save the Queen”, a necessary step toward more comprehensive input/rewrite on sroni’s sequel, “Queen’s Gambit”.

Do you have any fanfic or profic goals for the new year?

Fanfic: Do “Queen’s Gambit”. Do a story that I’ve been planning for over five years now, which will involve doing a precursor story to put a necessary character in place. Do a story explaining why Spike spoke so familiarly to Cordelia in the Angel episode, “In the Dark”, even though I can’t find any canon evidence that the two of them had ever seen each other. Tackle NaNoWriMo with a better-sketched plot in mind (I have two to choose from, and eight months to make plans), so that I don’t again flub it without having written one single NaNo word.

Profic: More modest in number of titles, potentially more ambitious in scope. I might do a new book idea that’s been floating in the back of my mind (what I intended to do for this past NaNoWriMo, only then I got interested in the idea and couldn’t approach it with the necessary who-gives-a-damn-as-long-as-I-make-word-count?). And a number of years ago I turned out the first draft of an SF-adventure novel that I now feel competent to rewrite from the beginning … but I may or may not try to do that this year.

*****

PS: Responding to a query from izhilzha, I’ve added links to the stories listed.