My heart bleeded, girl

I guess it's past time for the end of the year writing wrap-up.






I think, if I remember correctly, and it's hard to tell since I'm very sporadic about using tags, that I did this late enough last year to talk about my MTYG story from 2007, The Fiction, the Romance, the Technicolor Dreams. But I will mention again that I thought for sure it would be my last popslash story ever, but it turns out I was wrong. I love it so very much, it's my most favorite and imo the best JuC I've written.

But I ended up writing seven more popslash stories in 2008, one of which was my only long-time WIP, No Exit. It felt like total closure finishing that, since I started it in 2003. :) I don't usually have WIPs, I have ideas in my head. If I start a story, I almost always finish it. I have trouble working on more than one story at a time.

Although that changed a bit this year. I started writing in a new fandom for the first time in seven years. I've always been obsessively mono-fandom, so it was very disconcerting at first to be writing in two different fandoms at once. I started in February with picfor1000, writing a SPN story that is pretty awful in its characterization and plot, but it was a start, me kind of feeling my way.

So like I said, I ended up writing seven popslash stories this year, Donkey Kong, No Exit, Disclosure, JC Chasez, Full of Grace (the Southern Comfort Remix) - which was JoshLynn, not something I ever expected to write - Fishing in Streams, and this year's MTYG. They were all for challenges, because that's how I roll. I seem to need both the ideas and prompts, and the deadlines. I've only been late for one challenge over the past seven years, and that was with A Bus to Ride, in 2003, which was ten months late, haha. Probably because that prompt inspired both that story and No Exit and I was confused, and also my mom was sick and I was distracted.

So when I started writing SPN, naturally the first thing I did was sign up for Big Bang, because it was the mother of all challenges. And writing that story, Hangman is Coming Down From the Gallows, was as intense a writing experience as The Epic of the Lambs was. Nothing has ever come close to matching those two stories. I thought nothing ever would after the Epic, but Hangman did, so now I have hope that in the future, maybe I can have that experience again. I was really happy with both how the story came out, and the response to it, being a new writer in such a big fandom.

I ended up writing fourteen SPN stories, and one J2. Eleven of them were for spnflashfic and I have mixed feelings about that. Having a prompt and deadline were comfortable and familiar territory, but writing a lot of short, fast pieces was kind of weird. I need ages to angst about a story and edit it a lot"" and I find that I can barely remember most of the flashfic I wrote. I also have two that I didn't finish before the deadlines, so I just abandoned them, and they're languishing on my hard drive waiting for someone to make them postable. On the other hand, it certainly got me to write SPN, gave me a way to get in the SPN groove, so to speak, and for that I'm grateful.

I've also been thinking about the difference between writing RPF and FPF and I've decided that for me, there isn't much of a difference at all. I started out writing Sentinel, moved to popslash, then SPN, which includes J2. So, back and forth. Maybe it's because when I started reading popslash, Justin was the only member of NSYNC I could have picked out of a line-up - and wasn't that prescient - so they became characters to me before they were real people and that's how I imprinted on RPF. I've had a semi-drunken conversation with Joey Fatone about my mom dying of breast cancer, me with my hands on his shoulders so I could stand on tip-toe to yell in his ear, him hugging me and patting my back, (it was at a Fatone Family Foundation fund-raiser for breast cancer) and that Joey has nothing to do with the character I read about in fanfiction. I know everyone has their lines, and that's good, as long as you don't expect your lines to be mine, or use the words creepy, stalkerish, or special hell when you talk about it.

Okay, I got distracted there for a minute. Um, except I might be done. My writing goals for 2009 are the same as they always are - to write stuff. I enjoyed mini_nano and it got my MTGY story written without angst, but setting daily word count goals only works for me if I'm in the middle of writing something I'm excited about. I write sporadically, and that works best for me.

Oh, I know what else. The difference between writing in a small fandom, which popslash is these days, and in a huge fandom where there is so much fic posted on a daily basis that I can't possibly read it all is not so big as you might think. Either way, there's that thought lurking in the back of my mind, why should I bother to write anything, no one's going to read it, either because there's so few people, or so much to read that anything I might come up with would be superfluous. Neither of those things are true, of course, but the thoughts still lurk.

If you made it through all that, have a cookie.