elrhiarhodan

2013 – The Year in Fanworks:

By the Numbers

Stories: 101
Words: 409,400
Monthly Average: 34,117
Daily Average: 1,122
Longest: 70,000 (Red Velvet)
Shortest: 100 (Bruised Roses)

To compare, my 2012 Review | 2011 Review | 2010 Review

Total number of words since 2010: 1,424,235

The rest of this exercise in navel-gazing is under the cuts. There's a bonus Bomer awaiting anyone who finishes.

The List of 2013 Stories

January (6)
Any Two Can Turn to One
Package-Defining Briefs
The Road Leads Home
The Inexorable Pull
Here Be Dragons
The Truth Out of a Lie

February (8)
Listen to Your Heart Bleed
Things You Can't Unsee
Breaking the Horrid Silence
After Hours
Summer Colds Are the Worst
Out to Pasture
Absolute Trust
Do Not Go Gently

March (6)
Living Well
Parentheticals
It’s Just Life that Sharpens the Blade
Bruised Roses
This Is Not My Name
The Moon in its Flight

April (7)
The Cold Empty Pulse of Night
Keep The Creatures Safe From Harm
There’s a Reason Why The Classics Never Go Out of Style
Secrets Best Left Unshared
The Complicated Heart
Heaven for the Hunger, Poison for the Pain
You Make it Hard On Me

May (18)
Recidivism
No Release
Gods and Demons
A Composition in White and Black
Catch Me As I Fall
Life Doesn't Get Much Better Than This
Springtime in New York
Playing Games
Gonna Make You Sweat
Never Gonna Give You Up
An Object of Desire
They're Just Harmless Fantasies, Right?
Skyrockets in Flight
It Doesn't Always End the Way it Begins
Just a Lesbian From Oregon
Caught in the Tide
At Night, It's a Different World
The Interview

June (7)
Strange Addiction
Never Ask a Question
The Taste of Freedom
Too Late
The Waking Nightmare
Refugee from a Clown College
First Impressions

July (10)
Fortune's Just a One Night Stand
y0u11b3s044y p3t3r (You’ll Be Sorry, Peter)
You Can’t Tame the Wind
Prelude
Things Taken, Things Left Behind
Despite the Heat, It Will Be All Right
Three Pitched Balls
Quarter Day
All You Need to Do is Walk Away
All the Little Things That You Do

August (8)
One of the Many Reasons Why Elizabeth Burke is Awesome
The Strength to Dream is All That Remains
The Best of All Possible Futures
It Was Fascination
Schezarazad
The Game of Life - Anarchy Edition
Kinship Analysis
Lovers in a Dangerous Time

September (3)
Longing For Denial
Dirty Filthy Wrong
Red Velvet

October (5)
When Neal Was Four
Old Haunts
Travel Well and Come Home Safe
At Thirty Thousand Feet
Magic at Moonrise

November (10)
Reason Enough
One More Job
Full Disclosure
A Life More Ordinary
Origin Story, or How Much is That Doggy in the Window?
Nothing Stays the Same
Fortune Favors the Bold
The Candlemark Past Midnight
The Weight of Sleep
Nothing Will Remain

December (13)
Hope For the Future
Some Things Are Better Left Unsaid
The Raven’s Children
Come To the Journey’s End
The Circumstance of You and Me
Four Tiny Ficlets
The Truth Will Out
Cool Down With the Rain
The Quality of Light
Fruit of the Poisonous Tree
The Details of Unremarkable Days
The Illusion of Control
Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot?


Overview …

For 2013, I have included stories published on my journal from January 1, 2013 until December 31, 2013. It includes stories that were works in progress/unpublished in 2012 and published in 2013, and doesn’t include any comment fic or other works that were not published as standalones on my journal, or any unpublished works in progress, or any completed but unpublished works.

Looking back at 2013, it seems to have been a banner year. Not only did I blow past my 2012 word count, I beat my previous all-time high from 2011. When that happened, I’d set myself a seemingly impossible goal of 400k, and beat that one too – by a comfortable margin.



However, for most of the year, I felt like I was falling behind, from a word count perspective. And in fact, I was. Much of January and February were spent recovering from unexpected surgery and getting my life back in order after more than a week in the hospital. Many of the stories published during these months were older works that had been gathering dust in various comment fic threads. I did get back up to steam with the good old “A/Us I’ll Never Write Meme” which always seems to work the opposite for me – at least one prompt become a full-fledged story (Listen to Your Heart Bleed).

But that doesn’t fully account for the slow start. As with 2012, I focused most of my energy on longer stories. I don’t multitask when I write, so if I’m working on a longer story, I’m not writing or publishing very many drabbles and ficlets. I also had a few false starts in the spring, putting in several weeks of effort on stories that ended up getting mothballed. It wasn’t until I published my White Collar Pairings fic, Fortune's Just a One Night Stand that I made any serious headway.

I did finally catch up to my 2012 progress by mid-September, with the publication of my White Collar Big Bang story, Red Velvet, which is – to date – the longest single continuous narrative I’ve ever written (70k).

My writing picked up steam in the second half of the year – about 80% of all my words were published after July 1 (over 310k) – and just kept on going. No serious writer’s block issues and maybe my biggest issue has been keeping the bunnehs quiet. With the polybigbang (A Life More Ordinary), Fic-Can-Ukah, and the whitecollarhc Advent (The Circumstance of You and Me), November and December represent the most prolific months of the year – word count and story count wise (23 out of 101 stories and 124,750 out of 409,400 words, almost all of that written in those 60 days).

Some general observations about 2013…

2013 was the year I went really long

Every year I’ve done this, I’ve kind of marveled at the long stories I’ve written. Since 2011 (my first full year of writing), I’ve averaged nine fics north of the magical 10K threshold (10 in 2011, 8 in 2012, 9 in 2013), but the average length of these long fics has increased substantially. 2011, those long fics were running about 20k, in 2012, they were about 25k, and guess what – in 2013, they were averaging about 30k. But hitting the 70k mark on Red Velvet really meant something to me, because I’d just gotten off of the 56k I pounded out on Fortune’s Just a One Night Stand, and I still had my Poly Big Bang A Life More Ordinary yet to write.

2013 was the of Peter/Neal, not Peter/Elizabeth/Neal

At first, I’d say that this was, again, the year of the A/U – but it’s really always about the Alternative Universes for me. What has stood out this year is how I am gravitating towards true Peter/Neal relationships or Peter/Neal with El’s seal of approval and without her participation. I don’t know if it’s because canon doesn’t give me that vibe anymore or if I really, truly just enjoy writing Peter and Neal together. I suspect it’s mostly the latter, but informed by the former.

Looking at all of my longer stories, the trend towards Peter/Neal is very clear. Even Keep The Creatures Safe From Harm, the prison fic episode tag for In the Wind, it was clear that my ‘ship was Peter and Neal. That became more evident in my wcpairings fic, and of course it didn’t hurt/help that my recipient wanted Peter/Neal, not P/E/N. The trend continued in Red Velvet and Life More Ordinary, but kind of came to a head with the new ‘verse I started for my dear friend, sinfulslasher, the Nothing Will Remain ‘verse.

It’s not that I don’t like writing Elizabeth, or I think OT3 isn’t a valid ‘ship anymore. On the contrary, some of the best stories I’ve read this year were P/E/N or OT4, it’s just I find that I enjoy writing Elizabeth differently. I like giving her different roles, pairing her with other characters. I adore her and I adore her canon relationship(s), but I just seem to enjoy writing Peter/Neal more these days.

2013 – The Return of the Picspam Comic

My muse found her funny bone this past year and I’ve started another comic series - The Bennett Family Legacy, wherein James bequests more than just his blue eyes to Neal, he gives him the Giant Floating Stone Penis, too.



The Year End Meme Questions…
And now to answer the questions that everyone asks themselves…

1. Favorite. This one’s hard. I love all my children equally – at least that’s what I’m supposed to say. But I think that I love Red Velvet most of all. I loved having the opportunity to create different pairings and make them work – like Elizabeth/Moz and Elizabeth/Hughes. I loved exploring the psychological damage love can inflict and how people can get beyond that and heal.

2. Best. It’s hard to make a qualitative statement about my own fic, but if I had to pick one story, it would be The Complicated Heart.

3. Most Fun. It’s kind of evil to say, but Fortune's Just a One Night Stand. This one was a bitch to get started – more because I kept second guessing my story choices for the wcpairings exchange, but once I got going, it was like I only existed to get this story out of my head and into the computer. I pants it all the way, with only the vaguest idea of how it would end. This is an example of how Things Just Fall Into Place, as opposed to being outlined to death. I needed Neal to have an annoying client – so I settled on Daniel Picah from Home Invasion, that lead me to Adler and his “Foundation,” which set up the central conflict in the story. And also the casefic element, too – in the episode, Daniel has a very valuable Japanese sword and a little time spent on Wikipedia gave me a way to tie everything together. Of course, getting stuck for three hours in traffic at a key point in the writing didn’t hurt either.

4. Most Underappreciated. Don’t know – I don’t really track feedback anymore and I only post on AO3 as a backup.

5. Sexiest. Well, this year was not a good year for porn. I deloped on MMOM for the first time in three years, finishing only fifteen of the planned 31 fics. But of those, I’d have to say that Gods and Demons was the sexiest. Also, the Peter/Adler and Neal/Adler scenes in Red Velvet still make me squirm.

6. Holy Crap, That’s Wrong Even for You. Out to Pasture - Circus ponies Peter and Neal are retired.

7. Hardest to Write. Emotionally, The Quality of Light. I went through a box of tissues just getting the last few paragraphs out. My first deathfic in a long while.

8. Biggest Disappointment. Not finishing either of my promised Sandy fics. Or make that, not starting them.

9. Biggest Surprise. Kinship Analysis. All I can say is Hughes and Mozzie – brothers!

10. Riskiest. Red Velvet, because I made a very unpleasant stereotype the central emotional conflict of the story.



Looking Forward…

Any Story You’d Like to Rewrite: Nope – I am pretty happy with everything I’ve written this year.

How Will New Canon Change Your Writing: It won’t – I’ll keep on writing what I like to write, making the necessary course corrections for canon revelations, writing episode tags to fix the problems that canon creates. Just a normal day for the White Collar fic writer.

Goals for 2013 2014: This pretty much verbatim from 2012’s summary.

I’ve got four big stories I know I want to write:

1 – White Collar/Pern Crossover (for dmk0064)
2 – Complete the SPQR ‘verse (for leonie_alastair)
3 – Complete Vampire World – Blood of Helios – The good news is that I’ve signed up for final_touches, a Big Bang for unfinished, already-published WIPs. So maybe this will be done and published by August.
4 – Write the music box/George Devore and the boiler room case stories (from Something We Never Dreamt We Could Have) in the Wonder(ful) Years ‘verse, only in 2014 I’m not signing up for the casestory Big Bang.

Unlike 2012, when only bingo I managed to fill that year was a line the Angst Bingo card, this year I did a line for Trope Bingo, and two blackouts – one for Love Bingo and one for H/C Bingo (someone owes me knitted goods for each of those). Alas, my Kink Bingo card sucked and blowed… and my porn quotient was down this year anyway.

And that’s the 2013 Year in Review.

Acknowledgements, most heartfelt

None of this writing would have happened without the unconditional love and endless patience of my dearest friends, theatregirl7299, miri_thompson and coffeethyme4me, and of course the wonderful, wonderful, wonderful ladies of the wcwu, who are always there to listen to me, help me plot, chat and just be friends.

I also need to give a huge hug and a heartfelt thank you to my very dear and talented friend, kanarek13. She’s illustrated so many of my stories – some without me even asking. One of my goals for this year is to put up a post showcasing all of her awesome artwork. She’s also provided high quality screencaps that I’ve often used in my own artwork – a very generous gift to the fandom.

And no acknowledgement this year would be complete if I failed to give thanks to miri_thompson, who introduced me (and the rest of the WC writing community) to Word Wars. We’ve learned that it’s not the numbers at the end of that half hour that matter, it’s the words themselves. I don’t think I would have been half as productive without those thirty-minute increments.

And to everyone who reads my stories, thank you, thank you and thank you again – my appreciation for you is boundless. I haven't been so good at responding to feedback as I want to be, but please know that I cherish every kind thought and word you leave for me.

For those of you who made it all the way through, a beautiful bonus Bomer: