lady_ragnell (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lady_ragnell) wrote2022-01-01 02:51 pm
lady_ragnell) wrote2022-01-01 02:51 pm
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2021 Writing Wrap-Up
This hasn't been my best writing year for sure, but I did do some decent work, and I can't blame myself for it too much, in year two of the pandemic! As usual, I'll split my writing into three categories and talk about how all of them went over 2021, and then say a bit about 2022 plans and goals.
Godsfall Recaps
Yes, I persist in writing in-character recaps after every episode of my D&D game, which live on a tumblr blog and are tragically little-read for how much I enjoy them. (I mean, I don't blame people, reading D&D recaps isn't the same as actual play, it's just a good game and we don't want to podcast it, so this is the only way I can share it.) As we get closer and closer to the endgame, I am really enjoying using them to lay out character groundwork for where I'm hoping my character ends up at the end of things. Anyway, I've written somewhere between 75,000-100,000 words of recaps this year, by my best guess (I do not keep effective records, whoops), so it's a solid chunk of my writing for the year!
Fanfic
My AO3 count for the year is 85,691 words, a downturn from last year. The wordcount is spread across eight fics in five fandoms, and as with last year, my largest wordcount went into the Five Dragons D&D fandom, with a 45k post-canon fic and an 18k modern AU. For the Once Upon a Fic fest, I wrote a Sleeping Beauty story about the fairies, and for Yuletide, my assignment was in Killjoys and I wrote a treat for Ted Lasso, combined about 14 or 15k. And then to round out the fandoms, I posted several Leverage fics, two quite short ones from a ficlet round and one longer one I wrote to reconcile some feelings about the new show.
I also wrote a small round of ficlets posted to tumblr in June, which I estimate came out around 5-8k, wordcount wise, 21 ficlets in 8 fandoms, and two of the Leverage fics from that round are the ones from the AO3.
Original Work
I had three main original projects this year. Two of them were novellas in the 30-40k range. One was an f/f Regency romance set in the same series as the novel I wrote two years ago, which was like pulling teeth to write (I started it in, I believe, July, and didn't finish it until Halloween. I think perhaps writing romances without magic or space might not be my original fiction genre, unfortunately). Not much to say about that, and not many lessons learned, other than, I suppose, what genres do and don't keep my attention. The other was in my series about political marriages in space, set just before the first novel in the series, and it practically wrote itself! It was my NaNoWriMo project, and I finished it in 12 days and just worked on Yuletide fic thereafter.
My last main project, which is actually my first one, was for once not a first draft! I spent much of March, April, and May doing a fairly drastic overhaul on the first book in that series about political marriages in a sci fi universe, and the edits really made it so much better. (Hate how that happens, really.) More cohesive plot, better character arcs, clarified some villain things, collapsed a few characters together because I always make too many, and definitely learned a lot from the project. It needs another pass or two, but they shouldn't be quite so structural. Maybe this year I'll edit the next in the series? (That's going to be a wholly different kind of edit, I need to cut a whole bunch and then add a whole bunch in, oof.)
What's Coming in 2022
As before, I think that outside of exchanges, D&D is going to continue being my biggest fandom. My fellow players and I are starting a sort of exchange/bang situation together (just got our assignments today!), 5k minimum, and we're starting with Five Dragons but may do a Godsfall one at some point as well. So there will be that, and probably Yuletide and Once Upon a Fic unless I feel wholly uninspired, but as in the past few years, I feel myself trending away from fanfic and towards more original projects. That could change at any time, of course, should the right canon drop, especially given how much I miss getting regular comments in fandoms where I was writing a big OTP, but I am doing great things in original work. (And with the recaps. Those will also continue, even if I am one of three people who really cares about them.)
For original work, I have two big first drafts I want to write. One is another in that political marriages series, the second-to-last in the series proper (though novellas threaten, we'll see if I manage to resist), and the other is one I've been threatening for a year or two now, which I think I've finally worldbuilt enough that it's worth starting to put a plot and timeline together, which is going to be a long and fiddly process but one I really want to try to do.
I also want to do that next edit, as mentioned above, but that's a scarier project, because I do think that big edit sapped a lot of first draft energy out of me and that's why I got so little written in the second half of the year compared to what I usually do. It's always hard to find the balance between taking breaks between projects and not losing momentum, and a pandemic makes the balance even harder. But I do want to get a lot of creative work done this year!
And hey, maybe one of these years I'll be brave enough to query a few agents?
Godsfall Recaps
Yes, I persist in writing in-character recaps after every episode of my D&D game, which live on a tumblr blog and are tragically little-read for how much I enjoy them. (I mean, I don't blame people, reading D&D recaps isn't the same as actual play, it's just a good game and we don't want to podcast it, so this is the only way I can share it.) As we get closer and closer to the endgame, I am really enjoying using them to lay out character groundwork for where I'm hoping my character ends up at the end of things. Anyway, I've written somewhere between 75,000-100,000 words of recaps this year, by my best guess (I do not keep effective records, whoops), so it's a solid chunk of my writing for the year!
Fanfic
My AO3 count for the year is 85,691 words, a downturn from last year. The wordcount is spread across eight fics in five fandoms, and as with last year, my largest wordcount went into the Five Dragons D&D fandom, with a 45k post-canon fic and an 18k modern AU. For the Once Upon a Fic fest, I wrote a Sleeping Beauty story about the fairies, and for Yuletide, my assignment was in Killjoys and I wrote a treat for Ted Lasso, combined about 14 or 15k. And then to round out the fandoms, I posted several Leverage fics, two quite short ones from a ficlet round and one longer one I wrote to reconcile some feelings about the new show.
I also wrote a small round of ficlets posted to tumblr in June, which I estimate came out around 5-8k, wordcount wise, 21 ficlets in 8 fandoms, and two of the Leverage fics from that round are the ones from the AO3.
Original Work
I had three main original projects this year. Two of them were novellas in the 30-40k range. One was an f/f Regency romance set in the same series as the novel I wrote two years ago, which was like pulling teeth to write (I started it in, I believe, July, and didn't finish it until Halloween. I think perhaps writing romances without magic or space might not be my original fiction genre, unfortunately). Not much to say about that, and not many lessons learned, other than, I suppose, what genres do and don't keep my attention. The other was in my series about political marriages in space, set just before the first novel in the series, and it practically wrote itself! It was my NaNoWriMo project, and I finished it in 12 days and just worked on Yuletide fic thereafter.
My last main project, which is actually my first one, was for once not a first draft! I spent much of March, April, and May doing a fairly drastic overhaul on the first book in that series about political marriages in a sci fi universe, and the edits really made it so much better. (Hate how that happens, really.) More cohesive plot, better character arcs, clarified some villain things, collapsed a few characters together because I always make too many, and definitely learned a lot from the project. It needs another pass or two, but they shouldn't be quite so structural. Maybe this year I'll edit the next in the series? (That's going to be a wholly different kind of edit, I need to cut a whole bunch and then add a whole bunch in, oof.)
What's Coming in 2022
As before, I think that outside of exchanges, D&D is going to continue being my biggest fandom. My fellow players and I are starting a sort of exchange/bang situation together (just got our assignments today!), 5k minimum, and we're starting with Five Dragons but may do a Godsfall one at some point as well. So there will be that, and probably Yuletide and Once Upon a Fic unless I feel wholly uninspired, but as in the past few years, I feel myself trending away from fanfic and towards more original projects. That could change at any time, of course, should the right canon drop, especially given how much I miss getting regular comments in fandoms where I was writing a big OTP, but I am doing great things in original work. (And with the recaps. Those will also continue, even if I am one of three people who really cares about them.)
For original work, I have two big first drafts I want to write. One is another in that political marriages series, the second-to-last in the series proper (though novellas threaten, we'll see if I manage to resist), and the other is one I've been threatening for a year or two now, which I think I've finally worldbuilt enough that it's worth starting to put a plot and timeline together, which is going to be a long and fiddly process but one I really want to try to do.
I also want to do that next edit, as mentioned above, but that's a scarier project, because I do think that big edit sapped a lot of first draft energy out of me and that's why I got so little written in the second half of the year compared to what I usually do. It's always hard to find the balance between taking breaks between projects and not losing momentum, and a pandemic makes the balance even harder. But I do want to get a lot of creative work done this year!
And hey, maybe one of these years I'll be brave enough to query a few agents?