year in fic: 2024

[sword_logic]

word count for posted works: 38,500 (+ 907*) words
word count for unposted works (incl. wips): 36,326 words
total word count: 74,826 words

in stitches
one piece, zoro/sanji, law[?]luffy, rated T
4,119 words — posted 1/7

one of my writing goals from last year was to write something humorous, and i feel great about having achieved that with this fic, right off the bat at the start of the year. law has such an inherently funny pov on the straw hats and i’d love to come back to him for it. i’m also really happy with this as a B-side to the blood of the covenant.

situs inversus
one piece, zoro/sanji, rated E
16,396 words — posted 3/15

finally!!! i finally wrote bodyswap fic!!!!!!! my god!!!!!!!! i am SO happy with this fic. nuff said.

swordbearer
one piece, zoro/sanji, zoro & hiyori, rated G
5,201 words — posted 5/29

i joked about 2024 being the year of outside POV at one point and boy, it sure was. this fic got a bunch of attention at the end of the year; it seems that someone Popular (?) found it and recced it, and i’m really touched by the kind comments it’s received. i love outside POV and i’m happy to spread the word in any way.

consummate liars
destiny, shin/drifter
907 words — posted 7/29

this fic is my asterisk’d +907 words from my total word count – i found this in a document that hadn’t been touched since 2022 and it was cohesive enough to toss out there into the world on its own, and wouldn’t otherwise have seen the light of day. i miss shindrift.

susrevni sutis
one piece, zoro/sanji, rated E
4,190 words — posted 8/1

this was a B-side that had legs, lost the legs and became a PWP, and then regained its legs and became the next fic, lol. when i was in the process of writing situs i had considered writing out this scene, but it didn’t quite work with the flow and i’m glad i went with sanji’s POV for this rather than zoro’s. the yearning added to the spice, if i do say so myself.

chirality
one piece, zoro/sanji, rated E
8,097 words — posted 9/22

the PWP’s lost legs, regained! i wrote two B-sides this year (three, if you count the above PWP) and i really enjoyed writing all of them. i’d really like to do more B-sides and flipped POVs, i really love reading them.

return, return, return
one piece, zoro/sanji, rated G
2,246 words — posted 11/10

outside POV! outside POV! this is a fic about THE masterclass in outside POV, one piece fan letter, and i am very happy with how the mood of it turned out. OPFL was beautiful and personal and had such a feeling of triumph and hope to it, and it was really nice to write about all of those things.

i wrote a lot this year without any intent to publish it, and i really enjoyed doing that. i've done it in past years too, but this year i feel like i wrote A Lot More with the intention of not publishing it (rather than this category of word counts being high from cut fragments of other projects). i don’t really feel pressure when i’m writing, per se – not in the usual way that i feel a perfectionist itch – but i do want to post A Whole Thing when i’m posting something, and a lot of what i wrote specifically Not For Posting is just random strings of scenes, handfuls of sentences long, without any real cohesion.

i started the year off with a personal project that was Not For Posting: i took somebody else’s fic that scratched an itch for me but is also something i would have written (and characterized) differently, and did… just that. i went quite literally side-by-side with that fic and took all of the plot beats and most of the dialogue and did it My Way instead. obviously, this is not something i’m ever going to publish; it was just a personal exercise for me. it was really interesting! at one point i found myself trying to pick apart the whole underlying logic of the fic because i would do it so! differently! which is to say, i would not write this fic. and i didn’t, because it’s not my fic. it’s someone else’s. i had to yank myself out of Figure It Out mode and into Editing Mode, and when it became an exercise in [SNIPER DOTS APPEAR ON MY CHEST] editing [SNIPER DOTS DISAPPEAR] rather than “ooooughgh fuck i gotta make it work My Way” then it became a lot more interesting AND valuable. it was really neat to see my own style quirks in a literal side-by-side close-read comparison to someone else's whose writing is very different from my own.

a lot of times the fic i find myself rereading over and over isn’t the fic that’s got takes on The Character and The Ship that turn me inside out and make me scream OH MY GOD YOU GET IT, it’s the fic that’s really, really different from what i would write. there’s probably something there philosophically about seeking out what you can’t create, or whatever. it’s like looking at sweet lolitas and loving their coords but not having any interest in wearing sweet. Or Something. anyways, i routinely re-read this rewritten fic since it’s the ultimate sort of idfic – the kind of thing i’d never write myself because i don’t have any interest in writing it, but with the “voices” i use for the cast at hand.

i’m skipping the end-of-year meme for today because i did an AO3 Wrapped ask meme a while back and that covered most of the questions i usually go through. also, man, i’m very tired today. i had a good-busy week and now i’m Tired.

2024 was a really terrible year in so many ways — this was easily one of the worst years of my life, if not the worst — and i’m a little surprised that i managed to write anything at all. things have been settling for a little bit, though, and i’m slowly starting to feel like myself again. right now, i don’t really want to set any writing-specific goals for myself beyond “just keep writing” in the spirit of being gentle to myself. maybe i’ll come back to goals later in the year and see how i feel! for now, though, i’d like to just keep writing and hopefully finish the WIP i’m working on.

oh, actually, that’s a goal i feel good about setting: write a trope i really love! that's good motivation to keep working on this WIP, where the trope in question is fake relationship. tee hee.

Comments

[anneapocalypse]

Sometimes it's nice to noodle around with something just for yourself! Back when I was studying poetry we used to do that kind of "rewrite someone else's work/write an imitation of it in your own way" thing as exercises. It can be interested in discovering both what you like/don't like about someone else's style and what's distinct in your own.

Congrats on writing so much in a tough year! I hope this year is better than the last.

[sword_logic]

<3

that rewrite was really fun! i'm definitely thinking of doing it again, maybe with something even more different than what i usually write. as a certified Plot Overthinker it was a great challenge to not change the plot to be in line with how i would've written it. having the plot already "written" was also awesome in the sense that i didn't have to dedicate so much time and brain bandwidth to figuring out what's happening and how and when — i slammed out 13k words in a couple of days. amazing what happens when you take away all your avenues of overthinking :P