2008 fanfic year in review

[sholio]

So I did the fic meme after all! Here's last year's fic-year-in-review post.

Warning for a certain amount of gloominess towards the end of this one, since it's kind of difficult to talk about the last couple of stories I wrote without descending into emo territory.



January

Cold Comforts (gen, 5000 wds)

Rodney falls down a hole in the ice. Besides just being an excuse to write h/c, I wanted to explore the idea of an increasingly delirious narrator whose self-reporting of his physical condition is disconnected from reality. Rodney has no idea of how bad his condition is getting, while John, who for the most part is only a voice on the radio, is only too aware of it. It was an interesting writing challenge and I had fun doing it.


Thicker Than Water (SPN, gen genderswitch AU, 2100 wds)

I've never written genderswitch/genderfuck in any other fandom, but for some reason the idea of Sam and Dean as girls is irresistible to me. This started with an indelible image of a female Dean, which worked its way into Crossroads and then this prequel to the other story.



February

Gen Valentines ficlets (about 5000 wds)

I had offered to send in-character valentines or other greeting cards to people last year, but ended up being unable to finish all of them, so I wrote ficlets for the requested characters/prompts instead. I was prepared for mostly shippy requests, but a surprising number of people wanted gen, and there are no pairings in the ficlets. Most of the SGA characters are represented, along with a bit of SG1.


Second Verse (Same as the First) (gen with non-con, 3000 wds)

I have to say that the response to this story was incredibly gratifying to me. It's a very political story, a very pointed story that takes on both the show's colonialism and the fandom's uncritical fondness for AMTDI scenarios, and I was expecting people to react very badly to it. Instead, it got three pages of positive comments, which just blew my mind.



April

This was the month of sga_genficathon, and I wrote a ton of fic for it.


The Great Pegasus Train Robbery (gen, 10,000 wds)

A western AU; SGA does Butch Cassidy. This was too much fun to write, and I got to give Ford a big role -- one of the neat things about doing AUs is being able to give a better ending to characters who got shafted in canon.


The Pegasus Galaxy Darwin Awards (gen, picture-fic)

Someone had to do it, and John and Rodney are just the people.


Even Bonnie and Clyde Had Off Days (gen, 3200 wds)

This is basically Teyla and Ronon in the sort of goofball, "dorks do Pegasus" adventure that usually goes to John and Rodney. I figured it was about time the other teammates got to have some, er, "fun" too.


Luck of the Draw (gen, 4000 wds)

College AU with the teammates as roommates. In this version of reality, Ronon is a laid-back artist who's the one who pulls the team together. I will never get tired of Ronon-as-artist, and I enjoyed finding ways to fit in the other three teammates plus Ford in ways that reflected their canon existence without quite going in the obvious directions.


Knights Errant (gen, 5000 wds)

Total crack -- Knight Rider fusion with John in the David Hasselhoff role and Rodney as the car.


July

Selena of the Bears (Aesop's Choose Your Own Adventure Remix) (Carson/Ronon, 3300 wds)

This was my gateverse_remix story, a remix of Androcles and the Lion by seleneheart. It's also a wonderful example of why I love ficathons and remixes, because when I first got my assignment and saw the list of fic to choose from, I went "eeek!" -- it was mostly pairings that aren't on my usual reading list. But when I read this one, I immediately seized onto the idea of remixing it from Ronon's viewpoint, using a Pegasus myth that resembles the Androcles and the Lion story but ends differently, and exploring how the same set of events looks very different through a different cultural lens. The story itself became a meta-commentary on remixing, and ultimately ended up being one of my favorite stories that I've written in this fandom.


August

A Clear and Different Light (John/Rodney with heavy team presence, 88,000 wds, co-written with naye)

Ah yes, the story that ate last summer! There are fairly extensive notes on the collaborative writing process, and the story itself, at whaleverse. I really can't get over how well this worked, considering that neither of us had co-authored anything before -- we came up with the idea together, we both wrote and re-wrote more or less equal portions of the story, and the end product is seamless, at least to our eyes and those of our betas. A+++++, would collaborate again. *g*


Two porn snippets for Port Battle VI (OT4 and Ronon/Teal'c)

Not a whole lot to say about these; I rarely write sexually explicit material and wanted to try my hand at it, though I ended up running up against the comment limit on the Ronon/Teal'c one and cutting out the explicit part anyway. *g*


Colors Seen by Candlelight (gen, 1500 wds)

"Shrine" tag focused on Rodney and Teyla.


September

Untitled political fluff (gen, 900 wds)

I think the initial impetus to write this was because every politically-themed SGA fic I'd run across depicted John as a liberal, and not just any liberal, but a politically active liberal. Despite leaning heavily in the liberal direction myself, I just do not see him that way. Also, I figured that if all the election talk was getting old for us, it would be pushing Ronon and Teyla right over the edge.


Night Ops (Rodney/Keller, 17,000 wds)

astridv won my services in the livelongnmarry fandom auction, and requested Rodney/Keller adventure h/c, so that's what this is ... with a fair bit of John/Rodney friendship in there as well. Since I don't write romance all that much, I'd never tried to mix romance with a flat-out adventure plot, and I really enjoyed it; I'd like to do more of this.


October

Peace I Leave With You (Ronon/Jennifer/Rodney, 3500 wds)

At the risk of sounding whiny, I think this is probably the point where my interest in writing fic in this fandom took a big hit. In all my time in fandom, I hadn't yet had the dubious pleasure of getting bitched at for writing an unpopular pairing. It's not as if it really upset me, and I certainly always knew it's a possibility in any fandom, but I'd always thought of this fandom as one that is fairly welcoming of other pairings despite being very heavily dominated by a particular one. It was not pleasant to realize that this is not, in fact, true, and as my own fic is straying more heavily into experimental-pairing territory, I realized that I'm going to have to brace myself for this sort of thing every time I post something. I don't think I've posted anything since this story without bracing myself in that way -- or just turning comments off, because I'm a giant wuss.


November

Cheating the Other Guy (gen, 2000 wds)

My story for galpalficathon, in which Sam and Teyla find themselves in a Western, of sorts.


Untitled Rodney birthday ficlet (gen, 2400 wds)

Written for lavvyan's birthday.


December


Coming Down (gen, 8200 wds)

My sheppard_hc Secret Santa fic.


Woven Together, Seamless (gen, 8000 wds)

My story for sga_santa. This and the above were both written back in early November, so the story below is the only one I've worked on since my interest in the show really flagged.


Slightly Tarnished Armor (Rodney/Teyla, Ronon/Jennifer, John/Elizabeth, 37,000 wds)

There's a lot about this story that I wish had been different -- the writing process and my headspace while I was working on it, that is, not the story itself. I really enjoyed working on it in the beginning, but it was tainted for me with the suspicion that the fandom wasn't going to like this (lots of Jennifer, lots of weird pairings) -- I wish that anticipating the fandom's reaction didn't matter to me, but the more I worked on it, the more I remembered what happened the last time I posted a Jennifer-pairing story and the more bitter about it I got. Which is a shame, because this should have been a helluva fun story to write -- each of the three romances is a particular romantic cliche, which was fun to play with; I am totally selling myself on Rodney/Teyla, because I find them cute as the dickens; and while it really wasn't meant to be a John-and-Rodney story, the long-lost-brother bits were really enjoyable for me, especially the part where Rodney has to fight the Black Knight without knowing it's John. All in all, though, my memories of writing this story are mostly bad ones, and I was feeling more than a little bitter when I posted it.

I still honestly don't know if it's going to be my last story in the fandom or not. I would hate to go out on that note, though.



General Trends

I wrote almost nothing but SGA in 2008, unless I'm forgetting something. Previous years have been a lot more diverse in terms of fandoms. On the other hand, my SGA fic was more experimental than it's tended to be in the past -- I'm stretching myself more as a writer, and trying different things and particularly different pairings. My 2006 SGA fic was basically John/Rodney friendship adventures; my 2007 fic tended to be fairly dark and dystopic, as well as including a bit more non-SGA fic; my 2008 fic went back to a lighter and sweeter place, in general, and was more romance-heavy than my fic in this fandom has usually tended to be.

As the last few entries have made obvious, I'm very much on the fence about my future participation in SGA fandom in 2009 and beyond. What's making it really difficult is that so much of my social life is tied up in the fandom. As burned as I'm currently feeling, by both the show and the fandom, I don't want to lose it -- I can't really imagine finding another fandom that's this large and satisfying, let alone the unpleasant idea of drifting apart from the friends that I've made through the fandom. On top of that, I know that I've become a better writer because of the hundreds of thousands of words of SGA fic I've written. So ... yeah, still on the fence. I think it'll be easier to get an idea of where I stand with the show after the finale has aired and the dust has cleared.