Fic Year in Review

My Fanfic for 2020

Prompted by the posts made by other LJ friends, I took a look back on 2020, and … Well. Only three stories, plus one set of five linked drabbles. So my first thought was that it had been a pretty lean year (I hadn’t thought it was a great year, but I had believed I’d done better than that).

Then I checked the most recent previous years, so I could make my report within context. Honestly, my output has never been really good. Most of my best years were the ones I spent on deployment (though this could be skewed by the fact that a deployment ‘year’ would usually span two different years): nine fics for 2003-04 (Iraq, and only eight for 2003 itself); ten for 2005-06 (Afghanistan, with six for 2005 separately and seven for 2006 separately), and six for 2009-10 (Iraq again, but split evenly between 2009 and 2010). The next few years were also pretty good: five fics each for 2011 and 2013, seven each for 2012 and 2014. For the last several years, though, I’ve averaged three fics per year. Which would be anemic in itself, but as a long-term trend … well, I honestly didn’t know I’d drifted that low.

(For perspective, I don’t count drabbles or linked drabble-sets among my ‘stories’, though I did for the purpose of establishing that I’d turned out 100 stories over a 20-year period. Generally speaking, drabbles come so easily to me that I almost always put them into a separate category.)

For years and years — five years ago I made a formal commitment to it, during that year’s Snowflake Challenge — I had the goal of twelve stories during a one-year period. Not only did I never achieve that, I didn’t even finish the twelve stories I posited for that specific promise (though one wasn’t my fault, it was going to be ‘whatever I do for RemixRedux this year’ only RemixRedux skipped that year).

All the same, 2020 wasn’t completely without anything to recommend it in fanfiction terms, because each of the three stories I did post was a small milestone. “Beneath the Bitter Snows” was one of the stories I had originally promised (and that I’d had in the gonna-do-it-one-of-these-years stack for a long time); “By the Rose-Wreath’d Gate” was my seventh submission to summer_of_giles; and “Reality Check” was done for the tenth anniversary of my own Circle of Friends Remix (circle_of_friends). (And the drabble set, “Fortunate Son”, was kind of fun in itself.)

Still, even if I need to be less ambitious than in the past, I believe I can manage better performance than in the past. Say, a minimum of six stories per year (one every two months), rather than the one-a-month I’ve never actually managed to produce?

We’ll see. Better to deliver than to promise, I’ve learned that much. All the same, it’s a goal to shoot for.