#just hit 14k this is the longest fic i have written in like YEARS

[dollsome-does-tumblr]

help i am having feelings about my neverending succession WIP

[sapphicscholar]

✨ao3 wrapped 2023✨

Tagged by @lilolilyr - thanks for kicking it off!

Works published: 9 (much lower than in years past and a testament to how much time the job market + wrapping up the dissertation have taken)

Word Count: 57,926 - this is my first ever year since getting an ao3 account where I dropped below a 6-figure number with most other years averaging ~300k or 2 years between rounds of grad school with 600k+ words each (lmaoooo truly laughable amounts of free time compared to now)

Extra Stats:

Most popular by kudos: Two corpses. Everything's fine. (Hacks post-s2 murder mystery party)

Most popular by hits: see me in hindsight (Hacks post-s2 dream AU)

Longest: indulgence (Julia, Blanche x Judith) coming in just barely shy of 14k words

Shortest: (coming apart) at the seams (Julia, Blanche x Judith smutty missing scene one-shot) at 1,859

Most Comments: adrift with 34 comment (although it's a multi-chapter, so a bit of a leg up there, that I will get back to after i have some real work done)

Fics that made me cry: none sorry haha

Fics that made me smile: I like to think all of them did! There's a joy in creating something!

gifts:

- tangled up with you all night from the very person who tagged me! I *still* have this in my AO3 to read 😭 I think I've read maybe 3 fics all year with how much work has been kicking my ass

-and I gifted flicker to @trying-to-get-somewhere-real as our lovely champion of the Judith x Blanche fandom <3

collaborations: none this year! the handful of things I've written have been mostly unexpected time I carved out for myself (some of which perhaps I shouldn't have taken but ya know...) so I wouldn't have wanted to collaborate with anyone and subject them to the whims of this very hectic year

events: I organized the Hacks Week 2023 fandom event and added my Good, Tomorrow fic to the AO3 collection!

Consider yourself tagged if you'd like to participate! I know lots of people are traveling and with family and friends this time of year, but it's always fun to see what other people got up to during a year I feel like i've largely missed in fandom (not in a sad way, more just in a literally: I was so logged off/out that I straight up didn't know what was up haha)

[stevethehairington]

✨ 2022 ao3 wrapped ✨

thank you to @pizzaqueen and @hexmionegranger and @thefreakandthehair for the tag!! 💕💕💕

Works Published: 16!

Word Count: 108,136

(which is FANTASTIC bc i FINALLY broke 100k words in a year again!! and also this number MAY jump up too bc i'm still bouncing back and forth on whether or not to post my bigger tumblr ficlets to ao3 🤔)

Hits: 73,112

Bookmarks: 4,251

Most popular by kudos: good for my boy aka the first installment of my wayne pov fic! it has 2,744 kudos which actually blows my whole entire mind every single time i see it, holy shit

Most hits: lol also good for my boy with 13,119 (thanks for clicking friends!)

Longest: i want to hold your hand which is 14k of sweet sweet hand holding lol

Shortest: and stars, and stars, and stars which is 1.5k of tender body painting and first surprise i love you's

Most comments: i want to hold your hand which shows it has 91 comment threads which!!!! holy shit that's so many!!!

Fic that made me cry: mm none of the fics i've written this year have made me cry (mostly because they're pretty much all fluffy LOL) but the most cathartic to write was if you have a minute, which is steve's anxiety acting up big time and eddie finding a way to help.

Fic that made me smile: ooh well, i generally had a good time writing all my fics (even the ones that were a total PAIN lmfaoo) but one that made me smile the most while writing was probably temptations of trouble bc it was just a silly goody concept and it was prompted by friends and it was so fun to write!

Gifts: i gifted one fic this year! waving down the wind was my gift for kostas for the very fruity halloween gift exchange!

and i have also been SO lucky to receive 3 gift fics from 3 absolutely wonderful incredible friends, and i adore them so very much 💕

Events: this year i participated in the Very Fruity Halloween Gift Exchange put on by @averyfruityhalloween (waving down the wind) and Lex's Spicy Six Winter Prompt Challenge put on by @thefreakandthehair (i wish i knew how (your eyes are like starlight now))!

tagging: oh man so many people have been tagged already, but it's hard to keep track of who, so if i tag you and you've already been tagged/done this feel free to ignore lol.

@rougenancy @henrystars @toburnup @greenlikethesea @sparklyslug @stargyles @ruthofrhythm @solosnail @aidaronan @fastcardotmp3 @songbvrd

[appreciatingtokrev]

6 n 8 for the fic ask game ‼️‼️

ty ty for the ask taku <3

6. Is there any fic that makes you super embarrassed to reread and remember you wrote that?

pfahahaha oml yeah. i’m over my cringy warrior cats fanfictions fron 5 years ago but i am NOT over my ayathoma smut fic from september 2021. seriously the only reason it’s still under my name is so i can flex with my 14k hits and 570 kudos adhkgsfjgd 😭 god i am begging all of you to ignore and forget that it exists. thanks 😭😭

8. What’s the oldest (longest since last update) fic you most want to continue (unfinished or no)?

ohh okay i actually have two answers for this bc i’m not entirely sure abt the older one. but that would be an entire warrior cats fan arc, even with some special adventures and a short adventure. i started working on it in 2019 and to date i’ve only written three chapters, plus i’d have to revamp it all, but something kinda tempts me about it... (this one is actually published lol but i am not gonna tell you where)

the other one is the first tokrev fic i ever started writing, that was back in december 2021. so old... okay. the fic is in hanma’s pov. basically kisaki survives getting hit by a truck but is in a coma for months (close to a year?), and when he finally wakes up he’s lost most of his memory, including everything he used to know about hanma. hanma is devasted but tries to befriend kisaki again, but kisaki doesn’t want to have anything to do with delinquents now because he can’t remember hina and thus doesn’t have any reason to. meanwhile hanma is still hopelessly in love with him, but kisaki doesn’t even know that... they try to become friends some more, until kisaki eventually tells hanma that this won’t ever work and hanma confesses in despair. kisaki tells him that he’s sorry, but that he doesn’t at all feel the same (perhaps anymore, since he doesn’t remember what he used to feel) and hanma finally accepts that kisaki simply doesn’t like him at all now. that’s it lol tho uhm. tbh i kinda wanna revamp it now... with a happy ending... and focus on kisaki still having all of his feelings/emotions from before but taking a while to figure out that the person he misses so much bc he’s in love with them is hanma because he can’t remember hanma, only his feelings for him? like. amnesia fics where they fall in love again are cool and all but like. what if neither of them ever fall out of love. what if the only problem is kisaki is so fucking dense he doesn’t know who he’s in love with even though he sees hanma every day. because kisaki can’t piece the longing ache in his heart together with the guy who visits him every day bc apparently they were best friends or smth before he lost his memory even tho he feels weirdly warm n comfy around him and gets those familiar comfy feelings when he’s with him and also hanma looks very nice and makes kisaki feel safe and happy and all giddy inside. but even then kisaki longs bc they’re friends and not boyfriends, and kisaki just can’t piece together that the longing is for hanma even if they’re close bc he longs for romantic love when they’re only platonic and he is fucking STUPID and oblivious when it comes to himself

ask game link

[the-lincyclopedia]

4, 7 and 18 for fic asks!

Thanks for the ask, @jonsaremembers! I really appreciate you inviting me to talk about my writing even though we don't share a fandom.

4. What piece of writing are you most proud of?

Looking over my fics from the past year, I think overall I feel more affection than pride. Like, I don't think most of them suck! But it's more "oh, that was fun!" and less "oh man, that's that Good Writing (TM)." I think the one I'm most proud of "who could ask to be unbroken (or be brave again)," partially because, at 14k, it's definitely the longest fic I've written in the last year. (What can I say? I do one-shots.)

The fic is the third installment in my a cappella AU, which got started because I thought it would be funny if SMH stood for Samwell Men's Harmonies instead of Samwell Men's Hockey (and then I spent nearly 30k exploring the idea). In this installment, it's Jack’s junior year at Samwell, and SMH adds three new singers, including a baritone named Eric whose classical vocal training is more of a liability than an asset. Somewhere along the way, Jack falls for him. This fic has so much vocal music technique and pedagogy in it, courtesy of @themeaningoflifeischeese.

7. What's the story or fic that you're most excited to work on or share next year?

I have very little in the works right now, fic-wise, largely because I'm trying to focus more on original stuff. That said, I'm participating in a New Year's exchange for the Murderbot Diaries, which is a pretty new fandom for me. So I've written a one-shot for that, and I think it'll be revealed either later today or tomorrow. It contains spoilers for the latest book in the series, which may limit its reach, but the title is a lyric from the musical version of Legally Blonde, so obviously I had fun with the assignment.

18. Do you have a fic that you wish received more attention?

I think you asked me this last year, too, and I've got a similar answer: it's a weird thing to go from writing a popular crossover of two popular fandoms as a teenager and having well over 1,000 people subscribed to one of my fics, to writing in small fandoms as an adult and struggling to exceed 1,000 hits on a fic, let alone subscribers. I know this is about the sizes of the fandoms I've been in, and about switching to AO3 late in the game and not having name recognition there, so I try not to let it be sad, and I'm pretty successful at remembering that it's not a comment on my growth as a writer, but it's still weird.

So basically: it's tempting to say I feel this way about nearly all of my fics. But the one with the most disappointing effort-to-attention ratio is probably "You Won't Grow Out of It; You Will Find Clothes That Fit." It's a Harry Potter/Check Please crossover, and I think that might be why people have avoided it, since the Check Please fandom doesn't seem super enthusiastic about crossovers. It's set in the Check Please universe, and it's about Ginny Weasley being roommates with Lardo, and how they both come to realize over the course of college that they're nonbinary. It's another one of those fics that I poured myself and my own journey into, and only one person commented (and I adore you, cricket, but ideally your comment would be one of several, you know?).

I just realized that my answer to this question last year was also a nonbinary!Lardo fic. I wrote four fics with nonbinary!Lardo this year (though I only added that tag to three of them because Lardo's pretty minor in the fourth one). Those fics are never super popular, but it's easier to let that go when they're under 1k versus over 5k. I think the overall unpopularity has more to do with people preferring my Zimbits than with people actively disliking the way I write Lardo, and I'm not mad. It can just be disappointing to put effort into something that people don't wind up reacting to all that much.

Anyway, thanks for the ask, @jonsaremembers! Get in on the ask game!

[3hobbitsinatrenchcoat]

Real Love Myself Hours are at 5AM Apparently

I got tagged by @halogalopaghost and @endae so I guess it’s real love myself hours. (5am is a good time for that, right?)

Rules: It’s time to love yourselves! Choose your 8 (ish) favorite works you created in the past year (fics, art, edits, etc.) and link them below to reflect on the amazing things you brought into the world in 2020. Tag as many writers/artists/etc. as you want (fan or original) so we can spread the love and link each other to awesome work!

I’m gonna get really sappy right here in the first half... I was in a huge rut before June this year. Yeah, I made a Whole Entire Hobbit costume... but it’s still lacking a jacket so I’m not gonna count that as finished yet. BUT... in June I watched Gravity Falls and fell into the fandom so hard I think my head is still spinning. To date I have written 22 works on AO3 (to the tune of over 79k words), plus my 50k+ unfinished NaNo project, and drawn more in the past two months than I have in the past two years.

And it’s all thanks to Gravity Falls and the wonderful people I have met through this fandom. ANYWAY *cracks knuckles* here’s my 8 top hits of 2020 (and boy was it hard to pick.

1. Age is Just a Number and Gender an Illusion This one takes the first spot because it’s the first fic that I wrote in the Gravity Falls Universe. I was just looking for fics where the main characters were enby and there weren’t a lot of Stan. So I made one of my own. There are a lot of inconsistencies with this fic because I was still getting a feel for the universe, but I still love it a lot.

2. A Small and Trusting Thing I wrote most of this in a insomniac fever dream on my phone at like... 3am. And then the image of Mabel floating in front of the open black maw of the portal wouldn’t leave me alone so I drew it. This takes such a high ranking because... it’s the first legitimate art that I made in well over 3 years. I hadn’t regularly drawn anything since I kinda... dropped out of The Hobbit Fandom, so this was a huge accomplishment for me.

3. Soosly 2020 Entries Ok, so this is kind of a cheat but I honestly couldn’t pick just one. Soon after I rejoined tumblr (after being functionally gone since 2016), I discovered Soosly and... well... I had to celebrate my favorite lad. Of these four works... “There’s Wisdom in the Delicate Art of Punching” and “A Real Family Man” are my two favorites. I feel like I really got the tone of Stan and Soos’s son-ployee relationship down in those two pieces and I... I’m just so soft for them, yall.

4.The Invitation Another thing I did as soon as I returned to Tumblr was create an AU because that’s what all the cool kids seemed to be doing. XD So I came up with my Professor Stan AU... and promptly wrote nearly 10k of utter chaos. I love my little robot dino mayhem disaster with all my heart.

5. Packing Heat This is still one of the silliest, plotless little bits of domestic mystery trio nonsense I have ever written. It requires minor knowledge of gender affirming devices but like... what’s funnier than yeeting your gross homemade ding dong at someone who is vexing you? Nothing. That’s what.

6. how do I feel by the end of the day I said I was gonna do it and by golly I did it... to the tune of 14k words. So far this is my longest FINISHED fanfic of all time and I couldn’t be prouder of it. It was a wonderful chance to examine all of Stan’s years on the road and write about his family caring for him.

7. Imposter Bill Cipher We’re getting into the art now and there’s... not much yet, I hope next year there will be more. But this dumb Among Us Bill Cipher is kinda... I love him. He’s shaped like a potato. A murderous potato with homicide on the brain.

8. No thoughts, head empty. Just a girl and her pig. I drew this as a reaction to being told my art was getting better. And. Yeah. With this drawing I started to see it. I love Waddles’ lil cheek squish, I drew my favorite Mabel sweater, I drew a hand I didn’t immediately hate. I... somehow got 400+ notes which hasn’t happened on anything original of mine since I made that stupid Forcibly Escorted meme format post about the One Ring. XD I hope to improve more this coming year... but for now this simple art of a girl and her pig serves to remind me that I CAN do it. And that means a lot to me.

Honorary mentions: This Hand and What it is Attached To I refuse to link the actual image because tumblr nerfed it the first time, but it’s the best Stan I have ever drawn. In a similar vein... all the smut that I have written this year also goes in honorary mention. I like all of it too much to pick a favorite.

Thank you so much for tagging me in this, it was a wonderful walk down memory lane. I’m always weird about tagging people in stuff like this but... @avi17 and @singing-sorrowless, you were the two people that immediately came to mind. You don’t have to do it, but I wanted to tag you just in case you wanted to. ^^

[jessalae]

7, 9, 19!

7. Share a snippet from one of your favorite pieces of prose you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.

I am inordinately proud of this moth-to-the-flame metaphor I wrote in accessories to murder (which I co-wrote with @akisazame, but this specific snippet was mostly me):

Like a horribly self-aware moth drawn to a petite sweatshirt-clad flame, Eliot works his way through the party, complimenting outfits and bartering for exam answer keys until finally, inexorably, he's settling himself on the couch next to Quentin.

"What are you drinking, little Q?" he asks. He knows the answer, of course: sangria made with cranberry schnapps and candied oranges. But he waits until Quentin tells him before he waves a hand at the pitcher, sitting on a shelf across the room, and watches it carefully float over the heads of the crowd until it settles in his hand and he can top up Quentin's glass.

[...]

Quentin's mouth does a strange thing again. Eliot, the hapless moth, takes a deep breath and reminds himself the flame is not there for him. He cannot have the flame. The flame will hurt him.

And then Quentin says, "I still haven't quite gotten used to this new tongue piercing." And he opens his mouth and sticks out his tongue and shows him.

The flame becomes a bonfire, consuming Eliot's poor little moth self whole. He thinks the bass just dropped in the background music, which is exceedingly strange since he's pretty sure Ella Fitzgerald predates bass drops. Or possibly that's just his heartbeat? He feels like he's suddenly underwater, he can hear his breath echoing in his ears. The little barbell glints in the dim light of the party, a fat bead of silver sitting in the middle of Quentin's— Quentin's tongue. Which exists in Quentin's mouth, between Quentin's lips, and now there's a hard little metal sphere in there that would drag up the length of—

I just think it's funny, honestly. And I love love love writing desperately-horny-and-pining inner monologues.

9. Which fic has been the hardest to write?

I think probably know your story like I do, which was my first Magicians fic and my first foray back into any fandom in about three years. What made it difficult was less the fic itself and more my emotional state while writing it -- I had binge-watched through the first three seasons of the show, read a little bit of fic, abd started playing around with the idea of a season 3 fix-it while I was watching the first half of season 4, going through a number of different ideas and drafts of how to get it all started. Then 4x05 hit me like a goddamn freight train and suddenly I HAD to write this fic, and I HAD to finish writing it before I watched the rest of the season (I knew what was coming and was pretty sure I'd be too destroyed to write after 4x13). I didn't know anyone in the fandom, had no one to talk to about my FEELS, didn't have a beta. I also next to no experience writing anything but PWPs, and my longest fic by a large margin at the time was under 8k (this one ended up at 14k), so I was waaaaay out of my comfort zone in those respects as well. It was an extremely weird and fraught writing experience and I would like to never ever repeat it; I enjoy writing much more when I'm writing because I want to tell a fun story vs. because my heart has been ripped out of my chest and I need to make it better or I may never sleep again.

Despite how intense the writing process was, though, I do still like the fic! And I actually like several of the half-started drafts I wrote and discarded while I was trying to make all the pieces I wanted to incorporate fit together. I might repurpose some of them into other fics in the future, who knows.

19. Stephen King once said that his muse is a man who lives in the basement. Do you have a muse?

I don't know exactly what form my muse takes, but whatever they are, they're horny. Very very very horny.

[maih-em]

fic writer tag

Thanks to @ladyaj-13 for tagging me!

AO3 Name: wherehefoundtheporcupine

Fandoms: predominantly Endeavour. (I haven’t written any non-endeavour content for like a year and don’t really plan to stop.) In the past though I’ve written Dirk Gently’s holistic detective agency and I have abandoned ones for doctor who, good omens and marvel that I don’t think i’ll ever finish. I also had a doctor who and a harry potter one on wattpad when i was 12 but i’ve repressed that.

Number of Fics: 6 (on a03, at least)

Fic I spent the most time on: ‘spinning on that dizzy edge’, mostly because I’ve taken ALMOST A YEAR TO WRITE THE SECOND CHAPTER. I have no excuse not to write the last two scenes but I KEEP GETTING STUCK.

Fic I spent the least time on: ‘but I want it (it’s a crime)’ because it’s pretty short and I wrote each chapter in a weird 2am haze.

Longest fic: currently ‘I’m not falling for you (I already did)’ (almost 14k, probably about 17-18k once the last chapter’s done). But ‘spinning on that dizzy edge’ will be about 21k once finished.

Shortest fic: I forget that i have non-endeavour fics on A03 but it would be my dirk gently one ‘in which dirk is oblivious and tina saves the day’

Most hits: ‘a study in unwanted touches’ which is at 1176, because it’s my oldest one

Most kudos: ‘a study in unwanted touches’ again with 150

Total Word Count: 38846

Favourite Fic I Wrote: this is so hard - probably ‘but I want it (it’s a crime)’ because I wrote it in such a different way to my other stuff and i just Like It.

Fic You Want To Rewrite/Expand On: I don’t really know how to answer this?? I’m always making little tweaks to stuff I’ve already posted because I sometimes read my own fics and come across sentences that I suddenly despise and have an accidental editing session. But I don’t think I’d ever care/dislike something enough to rewrite it?? I guess my old dirk gently ones would warrant a heavy edit because my writing has changed so much in 2 years that I’m sure they’d make me cringe to read, but I’d only do that if I was incredibly bored and it was 1am and I could bear to read them in the first place.

Share a Bit of a WIP or story idea you are planning on: I’m literally working on like 6 WIPs but here’s a snippet of a magic one I’m working on:

 The man sighed bitterly. “I’ve been patient enough, don’t you think? How much fucking longer do I have to wait?”

Though nobody was around to see it, an unmistakable glow surrounded the man’s body; orange, autumn evening sky, but when you looked at it for too long, white-hot embers emerged and grew brighter until you could scarcely look at it.

Someone who didn’t know better would call it a trick of the light.

also i have this idea for a cowley group team building camping trip crack fic kinda thing which i thought of recently. Like a combination of some of the squad training things they do in brooklyn 99 and the trauma of doing my bronze Duke of Edinburgh's award

don’t know whos already been tagged but @imaginationtherapy and @parvasilvi and anyone else who wants to have a go

[thegingerwithcurlyfries]

Not to be like annoying or needy or anything, but I posted a fic on Saturday night that I spent three years writing on and off.  It’s 14.4k words long (the longest thing I’ve ever written) and is something I was extremely proud of.  Partly because I thought I wrote it good but mostly just for finishing and putting something that meant so much to me out there.  I say that I ‘was’ proud of it because it’s been three days since I posted it and it’s gotten 51 hits but no kudos or comments.  That’s disheartening.

I understand that the Dragon Age tag on Ao3 (especially the Origins one) probably isn’t filled with readers.  I understand that Alistair/Female Tabris isn’t the most popular ship on that tag.  But still, 51 people clicked on my fic and either finished it without leaving any mark they had or didn’t finish it.  I don’t know which it is because no one has said anything.  I’m left wondering if this thing that I’ve devoted so much creative energy to is just plain shit.

Furthermore I understand that a 14k one shot is daunting.  I get it if you got halfway down and were like “nah”.  But that couldn’t have been everyone and if it was I want to know why.

I don’t want to be whiny and needy but it just feels crappy because this is the hardest I’ve worked on a fic but the least amount of response.

If you want to read it please do and leave some sort of feedback - kudos, comment or pm me here on tumblr.  Here it is.  I want feeback, no matter how bad it is.

Sorry, thank you.