lady_ragnell (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lady_ragnell) wrote2020-01-03 01:04 pm
lady_ragnell) wrote2020-01-03 01:04 pm
Entry tags:
Writing Wrap-Up 2019
I did a lot of creativity in 2019 (I made so much art, you guys! I still wouldn't call myself great at it, but I made it, and I am improving, and that is what matters, becaus being good at everything is not the goal. And I wrote a song or two, which is a lot for me, I am the world's slowest composer), but I am specifically going to do a writing wrap-up first because I think it's what most people who happen to read this journal would be interested in and second because it's easier to talk about and find statistics for!
My writing this year fell into three loose categories, so I'll split it up into those categories for ease of discussion!
Godsfall Recaps
I write weekly recaps for my D&D game, in the form of letters from my character, and it's such a fun writing project! (If you ever want to read them, they should be mostly comprehensible to people who are not playing the game, and you can read the letterstosestrilles blog--I'd recommend sorting the "in character" tag chronologically, you won't miss much besides supplemental material and it's an easy way to sort.) Tragically I don't have a wordcount on exactly how much I wrote in 2019 because I've been writing recaps since the beginning and I switched documents at some point this year because the first one was getting unwieldy. But I am pretty sure I started that second document at least a month or two into the year and it's already at nearly 70k, so clearly I've been really invested in this! It's so niche, but I feel like I do a lot of really good writing in these recaps, I'm so happy I got enabled into this.
Fanfic
This is the easy one, I can just consult my AO3 statistics! I wrote 165,194 words that I posted to the AO3 in 2019, across six fandoms (well, seven if you count the two fairy tale retellings as different fandoms, which is always fuzzy for me).
My most commonly written fandom was Dungeons and Dragons--not the Godsfall campaign I mention above, but the one we call Five Dragons in my group--and I'm really pleased with my output for it! I had fun exploring the characters, continuing to extrapolate out from our canon, and aside from one short Killjoys fic, it's the only fandom I wrote in outside of an exchange or fest.
Speaking of exchanges and fests! I didn't try any new ones this year, but I kept up with ones that I've done in the past, and enjoyed them. First I did Once Upon a Fic, where I wrote a story and a pinch hit and really enjoyed both (the specific fairy tales were Rumpelstiltskin and Puss in Boots, for the curious). Retelling fairy tales is one of my favorite things to do as an author. Then there was the pod_together fest, which I habitually participate in with knight_tracer because it is such a fun collaborative experience and also always my excuse to write Star Wars fic for some reason. This year my corner of the Star Wars fandom was Rogue One, and I wrote some time travel fixit for Baze/Chirrut, because I love time travel fixits and hadn't written one before! And last I did Yuletide, which I felt rushed on because of NaNoWriMo, but which I always have such fun with, and I ended up writing four fics even though I was pressed for time! Two for a favorite comfort read, one for Killjoys, one for Still Star-Crossed.
And I'm already thinking about next year's Yuletide, if only in the sense of wishing I'd watched Barbie Star Light Adventure before since now I'm going to have to wait and remember to request it in like nine months.
Original Fiction
I actually wrote two novels in 2019! Well, one full one and most of the other, I really wanted to finish my NaNoWriMo project after I finished Yuletide fics (this being the first year since I started NaNo in my sophomore year of college that I haven't written a complete book within the month, though I still blew the wordcount out of the water) but I was feeling burnt out and didn't want to push. I am back at writing it, but I'll get to that in a moment!
The first book I wrote this year was a Regency romance novel, which I mentioned briefly here in September, and which remains titleless. I started it, I believe, sometime in April, and I started it with handwriting in a notebook on breaks at work! I always forget how differently I write when I'm handwriting, but it was nice to get back to it, too (until my first NaNoWriMo, all of my "books" were handwritten). Eventually my ideas outstripped my handwriting pace, and I typed it all up and got to work at speed. I took a lot of the summer off from writing it, since I had my pod_together fic to work on, and ended up finishing it in a major spree while I was house-sitting in mid-October. It came in precisely and satisfyingly at 82,082 words, and I think it's got some really fun moments in there! Lots of banter, an extremely oblivious heroine (our hero attempts to propose to her midway through the book and she and her whole family think he's there to propose to her sister), and a lot of fun with tropes that I enjoy. It's weirdly hard writing without fantasy elements, but I do hope to write a little more in this "series" at some point. Partly because Regencies are marketable, I admit, but also partly because Mary Balogh and Julia Quinn and all those other Regency romance ladies have been so much a part of my life, as much as all the fantasy and sci fi authors, and I really liked exploring that side of myself.
The other was my NaNoWriMo project (yes, I started a book two weeks after finishing another, I am not going to call it my wisest choice by any means, but once I start doing challenges or exchanges or similar it is very hard to stop). As of midnight when the year turned over, it was around 104k and officially the longest novel I've ever written. (Now it's nearly 109k and I am just praying it comes in below 120.) It's a sequel to last year's NaNo project, or sort of a sequel--last year was f/f political science fiction (uncreatively working titled Space Princesses), and this is set in the same universe but is about the main character's brother (it has a real(ish) title and it is The Four Welcomes). It's f/m/m, again with lots of politics, about a political marriage and its ramifications! I'm really enjoying writing in this world, it's helping me do a lot of connecting political worldbuilding to literal worldbuilding, the natural resources that politics center around. I still wouldn't call myself a great plotter, but I do think I'm doing pretty well with these books! And I could happily write a whole lot more in the universe and may do so, who knows?
I don't know what I'm going to do with either of these books! I mean, the dream is to someday be published, but my problem is that I prefer writing new things to editing old ones by such a margin that realistically, old things just never get edited. So we'll see what I end up doing with them? The sci fi anyway is going to be hard to market because the first book in the series would be fine, SFF is doing better at LGBT rep, but I think a main poly relationship may be a bridge too far. But who knows? Stranger things have happened!
What's Coming in 2020
First of all, a break. When I finish The Four Welcomes, I have told my friends to yell at me if I try to start a new writing project for a minimum of two weeks, and longer would probably be better even if I do start getting antsy without words to write. I got pretty burned out at a few points in 2019 and I really want to be excited about writing!
Beyond that, though:
Well, the recaps are going to continue (those are the only things I am allowed to write during my break, in fact)! Those are going to last for the whole campaign, I couldn't possibly stop now.
Fanfic, I don't know. There's more D&D fic in my head, and if I don't end up writing a Star Light Adventure fic for Be The First I will be extremely surprised, but I don't have any canons that I'm super passionate about right now, with so many closing in 2019. I'll no doubt do pod_together, and probably Once Upon a Fic and Yuletide, but I don't know how much outside of fests (and probably a round of prompt ficlets, I do like to do those) I might do. Considering the state of the world, I might do donation fics again? But I also saw a usually-fanfic author write a collection of short romances revolving around one subject and send them to people who donated certain amounts, which might be more what I want these days? I don't know!
And for original fic, there's so much I want to do! Both the novels I wrote can easily have sequels about different characters, in their own ways, multiple for each of them, and I don't know which ones will win out. Like I mentioned above, I could do an original connection for donations if I end up deciding to do that. I've got a novella about a pegasus farmer and a witch that I desperately want to write, and a short story portal fantasy I handwrote a couple pages of that has something there. I just want to write a whole bunch of original fiction this year, if I can manage it! Even if that means sharing less.
So! That is my 2019 writing recap! I have had people mention being interested in my writing and my process and me talking about it here once in a while but I really have no idea how to do that, so I leave those questions up to you to ask or not ask, as you desire.
My writing this year fell into three loose categories, so I'll split it up into those categories for ease of discussion!
Godsfall Recaps
I write weekly recaps for my D&D game, in the form of letters from my character, and it's such a fun writing project! (If you ever want to read them, they should be mostly comprehensible to people who are not playing the game, and you can read the letterstosestrilles blog--I'd recommend sorting the "in character" tag chronologically, you won't miss much besides supplemental material and it's an easy way to sort.) Tragically I don't have a wordcount on exactly how much I wrote in 2019 because I've been writing recaps since the beginning and I switched documents at some point this year because the first one was getting unwieldy. But I am pretty sure I started that second document at least a month or two into the year and it's already at nearly 70k, so clearly I've been really invested in this! It's so niche, but I feel like I do a lot of really good writing in these recaps, I'm so happy I got enabled into this.
Fanfic
This is the easy one, I can just consult my AO3 statistics! I wrote 165,194 words that I posted to the AO3 in 2019, across six fandoms (well, seven if you count the two fairy tale retellings as different fandoms, which is always fuzzy for me).
My most commonly written fandom was Dungeons and Dragons--not the Godsfall campaign I mention above, but the one we call Five Dragons in my group--and I'm really pleased with my output for it! I had fun exploring the characters, continuing to extrapolate out from our canon, and aside from one short Killjoys fic, it's the only fandom I wrote in outside of an exchange or fest.
Speaking of exchanges and fests! I didn't try any new ones this year, but I kept up with ones that I've done in the past, and enjoyed them. First I did Once Upon a Fic, where I wrote a story and a pinch hit and really enjoyed both (the specific fairy tales were Rumpelstiltskin and Puss in Boots, for the curious). Retelling fairy tales is one of my favorite things to do as an author. Then there was the pod_together fest, which I habitually participate in with knight_tracer because it is such a fun collaborative experience and also always my excuse to write Star Wars fic for some reason. This year my corner of the Star Wars fandom was Rogue One, and I wrote some time travel fixit for Baze/Chirrut, because I love time travel fixits and hadn't written one before! And last I did Yuletide, which I felt rushed on because of NaNoWriMo, but which I always have such fun with, and I ended up writing four fics even though I was pressed for time! Two for a favorite comfort read, one for Killjoys, one for Still Star-Crossed.
And I'm already thinking about next year's Yuletide, if only in the sense of wishing I'd watched Barbie Star Light Adventure before since now I'm going to have to wait and remember to request it in like nine months.
Original Fiction
I actually wrote two novels in 2019! Well, one full one and most of the other, I really wanted to finish my NaNoWriMo project after I finished Yuletide fics (this being the first year since I started NaNo in my sophomore year of college that I haven't written a complete book within the month, though I still blew the wordcount out of the water) but I was feeling burnt out and didn't want to push. I am back at writing it, but I'll get to that in a moment!
The first book I wrote this year was a Regency romance novel, which I mentioned briefly here in September, and which remains titleless. I started it, I believe, sometime in April, and I started it with handwriting in a notebook on breaks at work! I always forget how differently I write when I'm handwriting, but it was nice to get back to it, too (until my first NaNoWriMo, all of my "books" were handwritten). Eventually my ideas outstripped my handwriting pace, and I typed it all up and got to work at speed. I took a lot of the summer off from writing it, since I had my pod_together fic to work on, and ended up finishing it in a major spree while I was house-sitting in mid-October. It came in precisely and satisfyingly at 82,082 words, and I think it's got some really fun moments in there! Lots of banter, an extremely oblivious heroine (our hero attempts to propose to her midway through the book and she and her whole family think he's there to propose to her sister), and a lot of fun with tropes that I enjoy. It's weirdly hard writing without fantasy elements, but I do hope to write a little more in this "series" at some point. Partly because Regencies are marketable, I admit, but also partly because Mary Balogh and Julia Quinn and all those other Regency romance ladies have been so much a part of my life, as much as all the fantasy and sci fi authors, and I really liked exploring that side of myself.
The other was my NaNoWriMo project (yes, I started a book two weeks after finishing another, I am not going to call it my wisest choice by any means, but once I start doing challenges or exchanges or similar it is very hard to stop). As of midnight when the year turned over, it was around 104k and officially the longest novel I've ever written. (Now it's nearly 109k and I am just praying it comes in below 120.) It's a sequel to last year's NaNo project, or sort of a sequel--last year was f/f political science fiction (uncreatively working titled Space Princesses), and this is set in the same universe but is about the main character's brother (it has a real(ish) title and it is The Four Welcomes). It's f/m/m, again with lots of politics, about a political marriage and its ramifications! I'm really enjoying writing in this world, it's helping me do a lot of connecting political worldbuilding to literal worldbuilding, the natural resources that politics center around. I still wouldn't call myself a great plotter, but I do think I'm doing pretty well with these books! And I could happily write a whole lot more in the universe and may do so, who knows?
I don't know what I'm going to do with either of these books! I mean, the dream is to someday be published, but my problem is that I prefer writing new things to editing old ones by such a margin that realistically, old things just never get edited. So we'll see what I end up doing with them? The sci fi anyway is going to be hard to market because the first book in the series would be fine, SFF is doing better at LGBT rep, but I think a main poly relationship may be a bridge too far. But who knows? Stranger things have happened!
What's Coming in 2020
First of all, a break. When I finish The Four Welcomes, I have told my friends to yell at me if I try to start a new writing project for a minimum of two weeks, and longer would probably be better even if I do start getting antsy without words to write. I got pretty burned out at a few points in 2019 and I really want to be excited about writing!
Beyond that, though:
Well, the recaps are going to continue (those are the only things I am allowed to write during my break, in fact)! Those are going to last for the whole campaign, I couldn't possibly stop now.
Fanfic, I don't know. There's more D&D fic in my head, and if I don't end up writing a Star Light Adventure fic for Be The First I will be extremely surprised, but I don't have any canons that I'm super passionate about right now, with so many closing in 2019. I'll no doubt do pod_together, and probably Once Upon a Fic and Yuletide, but I don't know how much outside of fests (and probably a round of prompt ficlets, I do like to do those) I might do. Considering the state of the world, I might do donation fics again? But I also saw a usually-fanfic author write a collection of short romances revolving around one subject and send them to people who donated certain amounts, which might be more what I want these days? I don't know!
And for original fic, there's so much I want to do! Both the novels I wrote can easily have sequels about different characters, in their own ways, multiple for each of them, and I don't know which ones will win out. Like I mentioned above, I could do an original connection for donations if I end up deciding to do that. I've got a novella about a pegasus farmer and a witch that I desperately want to write, and a short story portal fantasy I handwrote a couple pages of that has something there. I just want to write a whole bunch of original fiction this year, if I can manage it! Even if that means sharing less.
So! That is my 2019 writing recap! I have had people mention being interested in my writing and my process and me talking about it here once in a while but I really have no idea how to do that, so I leave those questions up to you to ask or not ask, as you desire.
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Happy New Year!
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As for where things end up--I mean, the amount of novels I have written and done zero things with is frankly embarrassing, so "wherever they end up" may well just be my file of books I've written! But even if I don't get published, I'd like to serialize something a la "The Course of Honor" someday, so who knows what may come?
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