2024 Fic Year in Review
Jan. 3rd, 2025 02:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bookishdagger2024: Fic Year in Review
The Stats:
☆ Total Word Count: 41,736
☆ Total Fics Written: 7
☆ Fandoms Written In: Seventeen, IVE
habit (Seventeen, Seungcheol/Jeonghan, 13988w)
After Kfic Big Bang I was soooo burnt out from writing, like truly in the trenches, and as Ellie and I were talking about this she sent me a few prompts to get the writing juices flowing. One of those prompts was “Jeonghan is finally ready to get back together but Scoups has finally moved on”. I started noodling on that and well. Here we are! I think at the time I wrote this fic I was not in a very good place mental health-wise and also was starting to really and truly feel Some Type Of Way about my place in fandom/ficdom, so honestly I don’t look back on it as fondly as I think it deserves. I know intellectually this fic slaps, and maybe I’ll reread it soon and truly feel that, but for now this is a fic I keep forgetting about.
Fun (?) fact is I finished and posted this fic while I was extremely sick and pretty much stuck in bed for like three days. That probably contributes to how ambivalent it made me feel about my place in ficdom because I did not have the energy to do anything but mindlessly scroll on my phone. Oh well!
where you don’t see me
(Seventeen, Jun/Minghao, 4702w)
This fic was written for a prequels/sequels exchange with friends!! My dear friend AO3 user miissedappointments is the one who really opened my third eye to 8jun when I was first getting into Seventeen, and this fic is in some ways a love letter to that galaxy-brained vision she showed me. Writing a gift fic is always really nerve-wracking, but luckily I knew exactly what she liked about this ship, so that made it a bit easier to navigate. I remember writing parts of this fic during downtime at work, which is a recurring theme for this year in general up until I quit my job.
I am so, so, so proud of this fic, and it makes me a bit sad that it hasn’t been as widely read as some other things I’ve written. It’s probably the best thing I wrote the whole year (spoilers for a future question I guess haha) and I feel like I conveyed exactly what I wanted to with it. Also this fic was a real accelerant for the terminal Wen Junhui brainworms I inexplicably developed early in 2024. He is just so good….like SO good….
We are! Boo v. SeokSoon!
(Seventeen, Soonyoung/Seokmin, 6730w)
A co-written fic with AO3 user Naladot, my beloved!!! This started from us riffing in dms off this idea Ellie had for a Seungkwan POV fic about exes Seoksoon and then we were like wait, this is really funny, let’s open a Google Doc about it! I had an absolute blast working on this fic—it was my first time co-writing something, and it was such a delight to write with the sole purpose of making Ellie laugh. It was also nice to write something more lighthearted and purely silly after a string of very emotionally heavy fics, and I look at this fic extremely fondly. Ellie and I are so funny <3
keep on pretending pretty girl
(IVE, Yujin/Wonyoung, 2145w)
Miissedappointments baited me with Chappell Roan songfic and I had no choice but to deliver! I am quite new to IVE fandom—Accendio just flipped a switch in my brain, and Ahn Yujin is so……I also am so compelled by Wonyoung’s It-Girlisms and how it’s an image she’s held since she was like THIRTEEN??? I banged this out in like a day and I’m quite happy with how it turned out.
want want
(Seventeen, Jeonghan/Mingyu, 11303w)
I wrote this for a small closed remix event and I had a BLAST doing so. It was so fun to expand a short ~1k fic into 11.3k of shenanigans, and I had a great time balancing the silliness of the premise with the more emotional moments. I’m not sure that I’ll write more gyuhan after this, but it was also nice to dip my toes into a new ship!
love me anyway
(Seventeen, Seungcheol/Jeonghan, 1838w)
So once I started school my writing ability plummeted off a cliff, and more importantly my feelings about fic and fandom were such that I was considering never writing again, melodramatically deleting my AO3 account, etc. However! I really wanted to write a birthday fic for Ellie, who has been so kind, supportive, and encouraging, truly one of the main reasons I’ve been able to keep writing. I’m very happy with how this turned out/how many feelings I didn’t even know I had about enlistment I managed to fit in.
Funniest part of writing this fic was that I had to pause in the middle to take a quiz, and right before I left my roommate was like oh I’m sorry I keep bothering you when you’re trying to study…and I had to tell her I was in fact writing fanfiction LOL.
hold onto hope, if you’ve got it
(Seventeen, implied/pre-relationship Seungcheol/Jeonghan/Joshua, 1030w)
I wrote this in…two hours? for a fest run by a friend. I really liked how this one turned out, and I hope to expand this into a series of oneshots in the same universe soon!! My vision is for this series to be a triptych of oneshots, each from the POV of a different leg of the Jihancheol triangle. And also each part will cover an iconic piece of svt predebut lore, but sadder because they’re on a survival show. The first part was the rings being taken on 17Project obviously, and as for what the future parts will cover….you’ll have to find out :)
✿ Overall Thoughts ✿
🖨 Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you’d predicted? If you predicted anything.
This is interesting because on the one hand I feel like melodramatically proclaiming that my writing career is Over and died a tragic death this year etc but like...41.7k is not nothing!! Compared to last year it is a steep falloff, but I did want to slow down my pace of writing after all…idk I think the main thing is more that I wanted to put out more Projects this year, fics I spent more than two sittings on that took time and effort and planning. I ended up putting out 3 fics that fit that bill, but they were all in the first half of the year. Which makes sense, because school, but I don’t think that was the main issue so much as me feeling disconnected from writing as a whole. So in the end I wrote less than I wanted to but more than I thought I would be able to.
🖨 What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted at the start of the year? Did you get into a new pairing/genre/fandom?
Writing IVE fic was a total surprise to me. I’m not sure that I would say I’m “in” the fandom in the sense that I don’t actively seek out fic, but I definitely See Annyeongz in a way I did not before.
🖨 What’s your own favorite story of the year?
Like I mentioned before, I think the best thing I wrote this year was where you don’t see me. I’m so happy with how it turned out, how I adjusted to writing Jun POV (new to me), how I managed to snipe my friend so directly, etc etc. I really love this fic and I want more people to read it!!
🖨 Did you take any writing risks this year?
Uhhhhhhhhh I’m not sure….I guess starting a series is risky in the sense that…I have to actually finish it? But otherwise, I’m not sure that anything I wrote was all that risky.
🖨 Biggest source of inspiration this year?
Looking back I’m pretty sure my answer to this is “my dms with Ellie” and “prompts from friends more generally”. A lot of nudging from friends was needed to get me to write anything this year I fear!! Also, I wrote two remixes this year, so “other people’s fics” I guess were also a source of inspiration.
🖨 Is there a character you've really enjoyed writing this year?
JUN!!! I really got to express so many of my Thoughts And Feelings about Jun and I really really loved writing him. I also loved writing Seungkwan because writing a comedic narrator is just such a blast.
✿ Looking back at 2024: ✿
If you’ve bothered to read this far you know that 2024 was a really hard year for me, both personally and in terms of fic-writing. I don’t need to rehash everything I’ve already said, but the gist is it feels like I don’t have much of an actual writing Community. It feels like my options are a community/set of friendships that kind of calcified in 2021-2022 or a newer crop of writers who I don’t really fit in with (and who I also don’t feel as much of a sense of community with, in terms of feeling supported).I don’t mean to be hyperbolic, or to discount the fact that I do have friends who support me, but to be honest for most of this year I just kept wondering if I was doing something wrong, or if people didn’t like me, or if people didn’t like me enough to care, etc etc. Obviously this was probably compounded by my mental health being quite bad until July, at which point I instead became stressed about the social dynamics of being in a new school environment. I’m still stressed about that, to be honest!
I’m also, quite frankly, kind of annoyed with what fics of mine do and don’t get popular. I know it’s a fickle game, and the most popular ships are inevitably going to mean the most popular fics, but I don’t want to be pigeonholed into just writing one ship or feeling like people will only show up for a ship they care about. Again, that’s how it works, so I don’t mean to sound whiny, it’s just frustrating.
Looking at the fics I wrote before I started school….it feels like they were written by a different person. I’m still proud of what I managed to write after, mostly because it’s a miracle I was able to write at all. But this was a very weird and pretty sad year for me, writing-wise.
✿ Fic-writing goals for 2025: ✿
I would love to Get Fics Written in the new year but more than that I think I want a return of ambition to my writing. Ambitious concepts, ambitiously long fics (for now this means fics longer than 2k), ambitious formatting, new fandoms which for me is ambitious, etc. I just want to feel truly proud of what I’m writing, and to have longer-term Projects. Also ideally I would have a normal relationship to fic and fandom by the end of the year/figure out a balance where I can still engage and write but not feel like shit all the time but….we’ll see.
If you read this far, thank you so much <333 I hope 2025 brings you nothing but the best, writing-wise and personally <33
The Stats:
☆ Total Word Count: 41,736
☆ Total Fics Written: 7
☆ Fandoms Written In: Seventeen, IVE
Fic-by-fic commentary
habit (Seventeen, Seungcheol/Jeonghan, 13988w)
After Kfic Big Bang I was soooo burnt out from writing, like truly in the trenches, and as Ellie and I were talking about this she sent me a few prompts to get the writing juices flowing. One of those prompts was “Jeonghan is finally ready to get back together but Scoups has finally moved on”. I started noodling on that and well. Here we are! I think at the time I wrote this fic I was not in a very good place mental health-wise and also was starting to really and truly feel Some Type Of Way about my place in fandom/ficdom, so honestly I don’t look back on it as fondly as I think it deserves. I know intellectually this fic slaps, and maybe I’ll reread it soon and truly feel that, but for now this is a fic I keep forgetting about.
Fun (?) fact is I finished and posted this fic while I was extremely sick and pretty much stuck in bed for like three days. That probably contributes to how ambivalent it made me feel about my place in ficdom because I did not have the energy to do anything but mindlessly scroll on my phone. Oh well!
where you don’t see me
(Seventeen, Jun/Minghao, 4702w)
This fic was written for a prequels/sequels exchange with friends!! My dear friend AO3 user miissedappointments is the one who really opened my third eye to 8jun when I was first getting into Seventeen, and this fic is in some ways a love letter to that galaxy-brained vision she showed me. Writing a gift fic is always really nerve-wracking, but luckily I knew exactly what she liked about this ship, so that made it a bit easier to navigate. I remember writing parts of this fic during downtime at work, which is a recurring theme for this year in general up until I quit my job.
I am so, so, so proud of this fic, and it makes me a bit sad that it hasn’t been as widely read as some other things I’ve written. It’s probably the best thing I wrote the whole year (spoilers for a future question I guess haha) and I feel like I conveyed exactly what I wanted to with it. Also this fic was a real accelerant for the terminal Wen Junhui brainworms I inexplicably developed early in 2024. He is just so good….like SO good….
We are! Boo v. SeokSoon!
(Seventeen, Soonyoung/Seokmin, 6730w)
A co-written fic with AO3 user Naladot, my beloved!!! This started from us riffing in dms off this idea Ellie had for a Seungkwan POV fic about exes Seoksoon and then we were like wait, this is really funny, let’s open a Google Doc about it! I had an absolute blast working on this fic—it was my first time co-writing something, and it was such a delight to write with the sole purpose of making Ellie laugh. It was also nice to write something more lighthearted and purely silly after a string of very emotionally heavy fics, and I look at this fic extremely fondly. Ellie and I are so funny <3
keep on pretending pretty girl
(IVE, Yujin/Wonyoung, 2145w)
Miissedappointments baited me with Chappell Roan songfic and I had no choice but to deliver! I am quite new to IVE fandom—Accendio just flipped a switch in my brain, and Ahn Yujin is so……I also am so compelled by Wonyoung’s It-Girlisms and how it’s an image she’s held since she was like THIRTEEN??? I banged this out in like a day and I’m quite happy with how it turned out.
want want
(Seventeen, Jeonghan/Mingyu, 11303w)
I wrote this for a small closed remix event and I had a BLAST doing so. It was so fun to expand a short ~1k fic into 11.3k of shenanigans, and I had a great time balancing the silliness of the premise with the more emotional moments. I’m not sure that I’ll write more gyuhan after this, but it was also nice to dip my toes into a new ship!
love me anyway
(Seventeen, Seungcheol/Jeonghan, 1838w)
So once I started school my writing ability plummeted off a cliff, and more importantly my feelings about fic and fandom were such that I was considering never writing again, melodramatically deleting my AO3 account, etc. However! I really wanted to write a birthday fic for Ellie, who has been so kind, supportive, and encouraging, truly one of the main reasons I’ve been able to keep writing. I’m very happy with how this turned out/how many feelings I didn’t even know I had about enlistment I managed to fit in.
Funniest part of writing this fic was that I had to pause in the middle to take a quiz, and right before I left my roommate was like oh I’m sorry I keep bothering you when you’re trying to study…and I had to tell her I was in fact writing fanfiction LOL.
hold onto hope, if you’ve got it
(Seventeen, implied/pre-relationship Seungcheol/Jeonghan/Joshua, 1030w)
I wrote this in…two hours? for a fest run by a friend. I really liked how this one turned out, and I hope to expand this into a series of oneshots in the same universe soon!! My vision is for this series to be a triptych of oneshots, each from the POV of a different leg of the Jihancheol triangle. And also each part will cover an iconic piece of svt predebut lore, but sadder because they’re on a survival show. The first part was the rings being taken on 17Project obviously, and as for what the future parts will cover….you’ll have to find out :)
🎊 🎊 🎊
✿ Overall Thoughts ✿
🖨 Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you’d predicted? If you predicted anything.
This is interesting because on the one hand I feel like melodramatically proclaiming that my writing career is Over and died a tragic death this year etc but like...41.7k is not nothing!! Compared to last year it is a steep falloff, but I did want to slow down my pace of writing after all…idk I think the main thing is more that I wanted to put out more Projects this year, fics I spent more than two sittings on that took time and effort and planning. I ended up putting out 3 fics that fit that bill, but they were all in the first half of the year. Which makes sense, because school, but I don’t think that was the main issue so much as me feeling disconnected from writing as a whole. So in the end I wrote less than I wanted to but more than I thought I would be able to.
🖨 What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted at the start of the year? Did you get into a new pairing/genre/fandom?
Writing IVE fic was a total surprise to me. I’m not sure that I would say I’m “in” the fandom in the sense that I don’t actively seek out fic, but I definitely See Annyeongz in a way I did not before.
🖨 What’s your own favorite story of the year?
Like I mentioned before, I think the best thing I wrote this year was where you don’t see me. I’m so happy with how it turned out, how I adjusted to writing Jun POV (new to me), how I managed to snipe my friend so directly, etc etc. I really love this fic and I want more people to read it!!
🖨 Did you take any writing risks this year?
Uhhhhhhhhh I’m not sure….I guess starting a series is risky in the sense that…I have to actually finish it? But otherwise, I’m not sure that anything I wrote was all that risky.
🖨 Biggest source of inspiration this year?
Looking back I’m pretty sure my answer to this is “my dms with Ellie” and “prompts from friends more generally”. A lot of nudging from friends was needed to get me to write anything this year I fear!! Also, I wrote two remixes this year, so “other people’s fics” I guess were also a source of inspiration.
🖨 Is there a character you've really enjoyed writing this year?
JUN!!! I really got to express so many of my Thoughts And Feelings about Jun and I really really loved writing him. I also loved writing Seungkwan because writing a comedic narrator is just such a blast.
✿ Looking back at 2024: ✿
If you’ve bothered to read this far you know that 2024 was a really hard year for me, both personally and in terms of fic-writing. I don’t need to rehash everything I’ve already said, but the gist is it feels like I don’t have much of an actual writing Community. It feels like my options are a community/set of friendships that kind of calcified in 2021-2022 or a newer crop of writers who I don’t really fit in with (and who I also don’t feel as much of a sense of community with, in terms of feeling supported).I don’t mean to be hyperbolic, or to discount the fact that I do have friends who support me, but to be honest for most of this year I just kept wondering if I was doing something wrong, or if people didn’t like me, or if people didn’t like me enough to care, etc etc. Obviously this was probably compounded by my mental health being quite bad until July, at which point I instead became stressed about the social dynamics of being in a new school environment. I’m still stressed about that, to be honest!
I’m also, quite frankly, kind of annoyed with what fics of mine do and don’t get popular. I know it’s a fickle game, and the most popular ships are inevitably going to mean the most popular fics, but I don’t want to be pigeonholed into just writing one ship or feeling like people will only show up for a ship they care about. Again, that’s how it works, so I don’t mean to sound whiny, it’s just frustrating.
Looking at the fics I wrote before I started school….it feels like they were written by a different person. I’m still proud of what I managed to write after, mostly because it’s a miracle I was able to write at all. But this was a very weird and pretty sad year for me, writing-wise.
✿ Fic-writing goals for 2025: ✿
I would love to Get Fics Written in the new year but more than that I think I want a return of ambition to my writing. Ambitious concepts, ambitiously long fics (for now this means fics longer than 2k), ambitious formatting, new fandoms which for me is ambitious, etc. I just want to feel truly proud of what I’m writing, and to have longer-term Projects. Also ideally I would have a normal relationship to fic and fandom by the end of the year/figure out a balance where I can still engage and write but not feel like shit all the time but….we’ll see.
If you read this far, thank you so much <333 I hope 2025 brings you nothing but the best, writing-wise and personally <33
no subject
Date: 2025-01-04 02:32 am (UTC)i do agree in terms of performance though - i've been working on separating the thought that reception = good (so many of my fav fics are hidden gems!) and also i worked on writing more things that are in line with what i want to read and like reading which was fun! a reminder of why i started writing fic to begin with: because i wanted to entertain myself!
looking forward to what you bring in the new year, whatever that may be. ty for letting me talk at you through last year also!!
no subject
Date: 2025-01-04 02:52 am (UTC)No matter where fic writing takes us, I'm glad we got to share storytelling together this year!