Year-end fanfic retrospective

[aadler]

This past year hasn’t gone too badly as far as fic production. Technically I turned out eight stories, which would equal my record from 2003 … but four of those were drabble collections, which I don’t quite count the same. Even without those, I did as well as — or better than — most years. (Of course, I’ve been at this since 1999, so there’s a lot of leeway for the accounting.)

So, in review:

• “Snapshots 01”, “Snapshots 02”, “Snapshots 03”, “Snapshots 04”: all drabbles I wrote as supplements to my own Backstage stories. With ten drabbles per entry, I have to finish two more Backstage fics before I can turn out Snapshots 5.
• “Zulu Time”: a Buffyfic set in Afghanistan, semi-planned since my own time in Afghanistan in 2005-2006.
• “the Price of Lace”: another Buffyfic without Buffy, but showing two people Buffy saved so long ago.
• “Listen to the Mockingbird”: done for 2023’s Summer of Giles, our favorite Watcher dealing calculatedly with Drusilla, while she happily plays with him in turn.
• “the Lesson of the Butterfly”: a Mission: Impossible fic, done entirely because my wife recently binged the original M:I TV series and I got intrigued by the background of a particular episode.

I’m about a thousand words into another story (DD), and I think I know which one I’ll do after that. And then it’s time to get serious about SaM, which — like “Zulu Time” — I’ve been planning since 2005.

Yes, that’s been a while. There’s a tradition, though. I hold a story in the back of my head, mulling on it and turning it over in my mind till I’m ready to write it, and then I do. It was the same for “In Ev’ry Angle Greet” (2001), “Whisper of a Moment” (2003), “Glass Ceiling” (2005), “Unbidden the Day” (2010), “Oaxaca Nights” (2012), “Into the Abyss” (2014), “the Other Night I Dreamt of Knives” (2016), and “Jack Be Nimble” (2019), plus — as I said — “Zulu Time” itself.

I’ve pretty much given up on the idea of turning out twelve stories in a single calendar year. (Physically possible, I just always wind up doing something else.) I’m close, though, to finishing out the specific stories I promised years ago (here). Only three remain, SaM is one of them, and the other two aren’t major undertakings.

2024 will be my 25th year of Buffyfic writing. That’s a decent time to be winding up a long-held goal.