sophinisba | Year in Fic meme (+ whee vidding!)

OMG the fic year in review meme!

Fics posted in 2012:
January
nothing

February
falcon and a dove, Merlin: Gwen/Merlin
Drink His Kiss Down Dry, Merlin: Merlin/Nimueh

March
Her Balm, Her Bain, Merlin: Morgana/Morgause

April
Waking Up Stories (A Dancemix with Dragons), Merlin: Morgana gen
Son of Camelot (Quiet the Whispers Remix), Merlin: Arthur/Gwen/Lancelot

May
Beginning Partner Dancing (The Teacher's Always a Learner Remix), Community: OFC gen
One Year (The Two Girls Remix), Merlin: Gwen gen
All the Rest Behind, Lord of the Rings: Frodo/Rosie and others

June
Enough (to scratch the surface), Merlin: Arthur/Gwen
The Archer's Aim, The Hunger Games: Katniss/Peeta (poem)
A Drink Before the War, Merlin: Morgana gen
This Strange New Light of Day, Merlin: Freya/Merlin, Arthur/Freya
Let Them See Me Low, Merlin: Arthur/Merlin

July
Reset, Merlin: Lancelot/Morgana
Politics, Merlin: Elyan/Will
No, Seriously, How Many Times?, Merlin: Gwen/dudes
The Princesses and the Penis Symbol, Merlin: Morgana/Vivian
Delight, Merlin: Morgana/Morgause

August
An Ass of You and Me, Merlin: Gwaine-centric everyone/everyone

September
Between You and Me and the Sky, Spider-Man, Gwen/Spider-Man

October
If, Avatar: The Last Airbender: Longshot/Smellerbee

November
nothing

December
Havoc on the Throne, Merlin: Merlin/Mithian
I Like a Boy in Uniform, Merlin: Elyan + knights

Numbers and graphs!

I wrote just about the same amount of fic in 2012 as in 2011 (less than in previous years), but I also wrote like 1000 words to finish off my longest ever fic, "All the Rest Behind", which was mostly written in 2006 and 2007. So I'm putting that one in this first graph but taking it out of all the other calculations because it really didn't have much to do with what I was writing this year.

The Lord of the Rings is my first fandom and one I was in for a long time. But now Merlin is the fandom I've been in the longest and for which I've written the most - I'm not sure whether that became true this year or last. The other three non-Merlin fics and one poem I wrote were all short and all for fandoms I'd never written in before: Community, Spider-Man, Avatar: The Last Airbender, and The Hunger Games.

The last few months have been pretty busy, as I've complained about elsewhere, but I'm glad I got a little writing done at the end of the year. ("Havoc on the Throne", my

merlin_holidays fic, was written in November but posted on the AO3 in December and posted here on my journal a few minutes ago, and there are some other pornathons and such where I went with the AO3 posting date rather than the date it was first published.)

These graphs have some of the same patterns as last year (more about women than men, f/m the genre I wrote the most) but way more pronounced this year, gosh. I only wrote a tiny bit of boyslash for

summerpornathon, how about that. I did write more gen fic this year than last year, which I feel good about. I wrote my first fic about a genderqueer character and my second fic about a trans character. I had also intended to write fics about disabled characters but only did one little poem.

2011 was the one year in my fandom career where the majority of my fic was NC-17. This year I went back to writing more stories where people have sex but it's not necessarily described in detail. Probably I should have made more of an effort to write porny porn for

summerpornathon, but otherwise I'm happy with this.

questions

Altering the questions a little this year. Here are the ones I used, in case you want to copy and paste:

Where did you post your stories this year?
The AO3 and (later) my Dreamwidth/LJ. I had gotten into the habit of just posting at the AO3 and adding a link from my journal later, but the AO3 went through some hard times and

anatsuno and others talked about how it's important for us to have our stuff available on more than one site. I agree with that so I've been reposting more. OTOH I didn't post my fics to comms at all this year because of shyness/laziness.

Leitmotif(s) of the year:
Sex and loss. I think I wrote fewer happy PWPs than in 2011, more fics about people doing somewhat unhealthy things because they need to feel something. "Her Balm, Her Bane" is probably the starkest example.

Story I am proud of:
I like both "Waking Up Stories" and "Enough", my long-ish stories about post-season 4 Morgana and Gwen, respectively. Of my shorter ficlets this year, "This Strange New Light of Day" and "Reset" stand out for me.

My personal favorite story of this year:
So, of the two longer ones I mentioned in the last question, I think "Waking Up Stories" got more attention, between being written for a major challenge and being about a sort of more popular narrative (Morgana being screwed over by canon). But "Enough" is a little bit more personal for me as a Gwen stan and for the things it says, or at least attempts to say, about heteronormativity, idk. I love this story.

Most popular story:
"This Strange New Light of Day", in which Freya is a kinkster who experiments with a more vanilla kind of relationship, won a prize at

summerpornathon and I felt really happy about that! I then tried to be strategic by writing an Arthur/Merlin pretending-to-be-slaves ficlet, "Let Them See Me Low", and people liked it but I guess it didn't stand out as much.

LOL Pornathon strategery. See, I wanted to write some Arthur/Gwen porn because I ship it, but I'm aware that there are a lot of anti-that-ship feelings floating around the P-thon, so I didn't write it for any of the challenges people voted on, but I did write "No, Seriously" (in which Arthur and Gwen are married and have lots of guest stars) for a bonus challenge and then, yeah, it eventually got more hits on the AO3 than anything else I wrote this year. Moral of the story: porn gets people's attention.

Story of mine most underappreciated by the universe, in my opinion:
Eh, I'm not harboring a lot of resentment this year. Like, I'm generally sad that Gwen Stacey/Peter Parker isn't a wildly popular pairing, but that's mainly because I want to read and podfic it. And even if it were, "Between You and Me and the Sky" would not have been a popular fic because it's not very porny. I wish more people wanted to read about Elyan, and about Arthur/Gwen, but what are ya gonna do.

Most fun story to write:
I very much enjoyed my remix "Waking Up Stories", and also a lot of my Pornathon stories.

Sexiest story:
Maybe "Drink His Kiss Down Dry", but this was not an especially sexy year in Sophinisba fic.

Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters:
"Waking Up Stories" for Morgana, "Havoc on the Throne" for both Mithian and Merlin.

Hardest story to write:
I guess you could say "All the Rest Behind", considering all the years it took me. But to be honest, once I made the decision to go for it, it only took a couple days. I challenged myself with subject matter in some short fics this year but didn't really take on anything big where I could be hugely frustrated or disappointed, which leads us to...

Biggest Disappointment:
I didn't have any big disappointments this year! :D

Biggest Surprise:
I was surprised that I was able to go back and finished "All the Rest Behind" after all this time and so much angst and guilt about it. And as I mentioned above, I was surprised by the lovely response to "This Strange New Light of Day" and the hit count of "No, Seriously".

Most Personally Revealing Story:
Maybe "Havoc on the Throne". Like, you could read a lot of my het fic and think, "Dude, Sophinisba's really into sexually aggressive women using men as objects to satisfy their needs" (and I guess that would be pretty accurate), and this story starts out that way but ends with what I really want, which is cuddling.

Story I haven't yet written, but intend to:
At the moment I'm in the middle of writing a set of 25 drabbles for the new Tiny Bingos Mini-Challenge - attempting to cover the 25 squares on my second card with 25 different Merlin femslash ships. 11 down, 14 to go! I have some other ideas for short stories for my first card, and some of them are half written, but I'm not especially excited about any of them.

paperlegends, the Merlin Big Bang challenge, just announced that signups will open in February and that this will be the last round. A lot of my friends have said they're going to play and I'm tempted to join them, even though my longest Merlin fic was 25K and the only fics I've written that were longer than that took me years to finish. I just, with the show being over and all, it seems like the time to go for it. I'm pretty sure I want to write a Gwen-centric modern AU but I have a few different ideas for what to do with it and, well, whenever I try to write a Gwen fic I have trouble deciding how to end it because I ship her with everybody. I've noticed that most of my own longer fics are canon era, but a lot of the fics I've most enjoyed reading lately are Arthur/Merlin modern AUs that talk a lot about gay issues. And I'm like, yay for gay stuff but what about the ladies? Which makes me want to write about Gwen being gay, except I mostly ship her with dudes, so.

Anyway, it's nice to see so many people excited about that fest and others. Life will be different without more canon to look forward to, but maybe it will be fun. I know I have more stories Merlin to tell and I won't be the only one sticking around this fandom for a while, though I don't know how long it will last.

camelot_fleet, where I first found a comfortable place in Merlin fandom, hasn't been active in a long time and I miss it. It seems like

summerpornathon probably won't run again and I will miss that too. But there are a bunch of comms and maybe I will find another place where I feel good as a multishipper, podficcer etc. A couple people have talked to me about restarting

camelotremix and I would love to be part of that again, although not as lead mod. Or maybe I will just talk to my friends and sometimes post a fic on the AO3 and let people find it with tags, and that will be okay too.

bonus vidding section

Also this year I made my first vid, San Vicente, and my second vid, Red Football. The first one was for a rare/nonexistent fandom, and a few people were good enough to help me and comment on it anyway, and that was a nice, fairly gentle introduction to the process. Then the second one's gotten a lot more attention (being meta-ish and expressing a lot of people's feelings and all) and that's been exciting and gratifying! Now instead of playing the old "If I knew how to vid I would make a [ship/character] vid to [song]" game, I actually get to think about, you know, do I have/can I acquire this source, do I have the patience to make all those clips, and so on. Whee! I think I will make an old-fashioned shippy vid next, and that will have more limited appeal than Red Football but it will make me (and probably

flammablehat and a few other people) happy, so good enough! Maybe next year I will make enough vids that it makes sense to do a year in vids meme, or maybe not. :)