elwinfortuna: Rainbow Fëanorian star, surrounded by text: "through sorrow to find joy." (Default)
I've been looking over my AO3 stats for the last year. Initially I thought I hadn't written much, but actually, 2022 has been about average at approx 37,000 words. (2015, when I apparently lived in a cave and wrote 224,000 words, is an outlier adn should not be counted.)

I wrote 13 stories in 2022, ranging from over 8000 words to just 224.

My most popular story this year was Heart In Paradise, a modern AU for Hua Cheng/Xie Lian from Tian Guan Ci Fu (Heaven Official's Blessing). I'm not a modern AU sort of person at all, but I really like the way this one came out. There is SO much background research; you should've seen all the work I did trying to figure out if my setting details were appropriate. If there's one thing I worry about, it's that I feel the setting did end up a bit vaguelandia, I was trying for China but I didn't want to set it in a specific city in case I got the feel entirely wrong. But in my heart the story is set in Shanghai.

Next in popularity is Release from Bondage, also a TGCF fic, but this time for Quan Yizhen/Yin Yu, my favourite secondary ship from the book. I adore Quan Yizhen as a character; he's such a wild card to play with. An adorable fluffy puppy of a person with zero shame and zero mouth filter. And his relationship with Yin Yu just intrigues me so much!

Then, the story that will probably come to my mind if I were asked sometime in the future what I wrote in 2022: Ten Thousand Years of Love, a Wen Kexing/Zhou Zishu story for Word of Honor, my longest fic this year. This was one of those sheer indulgence fics on my part; I gave them everything I wanted to see for them, kadianed every section by writing either 511, 1129, or 1640 words in each one, and posted it on the anniversary of the first episode of Word of Honor airing in China. I love WenZhou so much; they've grabbed hold of my heart in a way I haven't experienced in years. Such a glorious couple, such a wonderful show!

Fourth, another indulgent fic on my part: Find Home, a crossover story featuring Maglor from the Silmarillion, and Hua Cheng from TGCF. These two needed to meet, and I thought it would be so nifty if Maglor's sword ended up in Hua Cheng's armoury as a gift for Xie Lian. There had to be a fair bit of balance in this story; they needed to find common ground, and they do in their similar definition of what home is. Also, Maglor's power impresses Hua Cheng, but it's his honesty that wins him over.

My next most popular fic is a short scene, In This Moment (Word of Honor). Along with A Moment in the Sun (Word of Honor), Joyous Moment (Silmarillion), and A Moment of Respite (Silmarillion), it was written as part of a bunch of short shippy ficlets for [personal profile] nerdyjellyfish for Trick or Treat, just a box of sweet little treats. I do love Trick or Treat so much for its low word count minimum; it's one of the exchanges I'm always excited about every year.

Then, the only Junzhe fanfic I managed to write this year, For Real This Time, for the DZZS Server Exchange. I like the way it turned out, but it was tough to write. This whole year has been a hard time to be writing Junzhe fic. I have so many thoughts and ideas burning a hole in my head for them, but it's been difficult to get them onto the page. Maybe 2023 will be kinder to Junzhe fandom, and most importantly, to Zhang Zhehan.

And now, my Innumerable Stars story, A Cup of Tea and a Message from Beyond the Sea. I really loved this one; it's so delightful to get two characters talking and see what comes out. In this case, Elwing and Gandalf really do have a bit to talk about, and it was so much fun to weave through Gandalf's thread about trying to learn how to act like a mortal rather than a Maia. I think also, I wanted to write Elwing as contented, settled, matured, and happy with her life. She has regrets, but she's old enough to realise that her younger self didn't have much in the way of choices, and what's done is done.

My Bëor/Finrod magnum opus for the Tolkien Reverse Summer Bang, Give Back the Gift, is pretty low down on this list, perhaps less popular than it deserves. It's a sad story but with hope sprinkled throughout, it's bittersweet but I hope not heartbreaking. I didn't put any smut in it but I do want to write a couple of smutty/shippy side stories at some point. I wrote it while struggling with my mental health and I think it impacted not the story itself but the way I dealt with the story afterwards; I didn't really promote it properly. But despite that, I've had a lot of love from readers, and I did my best to write a story I've been wanting to write for years, so I'm happy with it.

Lastly, there's two stories I wrote for The Untamed, Stay Forever, and Close Together. I'm not surprised at all that these two aren't super popular; both involve rarepairs and unique scenarios, as requested by my exchange recipients. I, however, am very happy with them both, and would definitely prefer to both read and write more rare ships and different takes than any Extruded Fic Product(tm) that this fandom in particular seems to be so very fond of. (It's the curse of fandoms that are very mainstream and large, sadly.)

Next year, with a little effort, I'm pretty sure I can top a million words total on AO3; I'm about 73k out from that now. In terms of fandoms, definitely going for more Junzhe and Wenzhou, more Hualian, more Silmarillion fic of whatever kind, some rarepairs, maybe some rarer fandoms, maybe some Star Wars, maybe that long long overdue sequel to my Truce of the Games Space AU. Or maybe something original that I'll try and publish, who knows?
elwinfortuna: (adipose hello)
A lot of what I've been feeling, mentally and physically, in the last couple of years, is "stuck," just surrounded by too much, both in my head, and in my house, to really be able to move forward properly. In a physical sense, it's the aftereffects of having to deal with everything of my mother-in-law's, which has been an impossibly slow process, hampered by health issues and Covid worries.

Two days ago, I got a load of things removed from the house, including my mother-in-law's bed. Lot of emotions around that, but ultimately I'm glad to be free of it and able to move forward. I'm actively working on clearing things up, getting things donated to charity, selling what I can, and just plain allowing myself to throw stuff out. I sometimes struggle with getting rid of things that could be useful but if it's sitting in a box or a drawer not being used ever, then it's not very useful, is it?

There's a lot more to do, but this feels like the start of really being able to get things looking like how I want them to look, have my house the way I would like it to be. My ultimate reward is getting my own office space, as we don't need a spare bedroom anymore. (I'm planning on putting in a sofa that converts into a bed, in case we have guests, but that will likely be a very rare thing.) I have a huge collection of various kinds of merch (mostly Word of Honor/Junzhe themed) that I'm planning to plaster my walls in, and really make it the sort of space I will enjoy and can relax and work in. I'm going to mount my computer monitors on the wall, and have space for doing crafts. I'll have a couple of good bookshelves as well, a cozy chair to sit and read or to play games in, and a cat bed on the windowsill for my cats to sit and look out.

So that's all good, and I'm so glad to be able to breathe a bit more easily. But even more difficult than the physical logjam is the mental one. I've really struggled with posting to social media for a long while now and I've been trying to figure out why that is. It's not a simple question.

I think on some level I'm worried that my life is kind of boring right now. Let me be clear, it's not boring to me in the moment as I live it, but I can see from the outside how it might be perceived as boring. It's not really moving forward in any clear direction. I'm still unemployed (and not likely to be employed anytime in the near future). I'm studying, yes, but I'm in the first year of what's likely to be a six-year course. I have a lot of mental and physical health things going on, but I worry that talking about them too much comes off as being complainy or whiny or consistently negative.

It's important to note that I don't feel this way about anything I see from anybody else! In fact it's the reverse, I love hearing about people's real lives, no matter how mundane the content, I don't find talking about mental or physical health issues to be whiny, and all this is just a massive set of double standards that I'm applying to myself and nobody else.

So I guess what I need to do is just break that logjam with a giant hammer, and start talking about my life, in all its mundanity. And Dreamwidth feels like the safest place to do that. I've always loved the LJ style anyway, more than any other social media. Twitter is, well, I don't think I need say much there. And Tumblr is not really a good place to talk about personal stuff. Facebook, though it's important to me, as it's the one social media pretty much everybody I know in RL has, it's such a mixed audience that I feel unable to be truly candid there.

Also Dreamwidth, as an organisation, has values and ethics I agree with and support. It's a small business in a way that none of the mainstream social media companies are, certainly not Twitter and Facebook! I feel like I can talk about anything here, in a way that I absolutely can't on Twitter and Facebook, and to some extent can't on Tumblr as well (less to do with policy and more with culture).

This is just to say, then, that I'm going to try to post more here, and just talk about my life, along with what I've been watching, reading, etc, and also doing in fandom. I remember back in the LJ days I never had any worries about posting whatever randomness came into my head, and I want to get a bit of that attitude back.

September 2024

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