regshoe

I posted seventeen fics in 2022, across eight fandoms (these numbers have been remarkably consistent for the last few years) and to a total wordcount of 82,508. This was my first full year of doing Write Every Day, and it's definitely been good for me—that's already my highest ever annual wordcount without accounting for the as-yet-unposted longfic I've been working on since September (which as of 31 December had 29,000 words of beta-ready second draft and another 17,000 words of rough first draft). I am pleased with this!

The theme of the year has been length! In April I posted my longest fic to date, at 14,000 words; then in May I posted my longest fic to date at 18,500 words; and in August I posted my longest fic to date at just under 20,000 words; and now, well, here we are with the longfic. Early this year I gave up outlining my fics in detail and tried starting to write with only a basic idea of how the story would go; I think I needed the detailed outlines to be sure of where I was as a less confident writer, but they also restricted what and how much I could write, and changing my technique has enabled me to start writing longer stuff uninhibited. In any case this is definite proof of progress as a writer, and I'm happy about it.

I did more exchanges than ever last year, signing up to Once Upon a Fic, Hurt/Comfort Exchange, Rare Male Slash Exchange and Yuletide. As ever, exchanges were a great opportunity to try stuff I wouldn't otherwise write—all five of the fics I wrote for those four exchanges were for fandoms I'd never written before, and two of them were for fandoms totally new to me. I especially enjoyed writing the two Kidnapped fics for Rare Male Slash, When I am sick and like to die and And ilka bonny lassie sang.

It's been a good year for Flight of the Heron and adjacent fandoms; the three longer fics were all for FotH, one being a crossover with White Cockades, and then there's the Kidnapped fic. I also revisited, changed my mind about and started writing fic for The Wounded Name, which was lovely. I've loved getting properly back into FotH this year—the read-along which finished just about a year ago inspired more fannish energy and more fic—and all three of those longer stories explore different aspects of it. Writing my own NOTP in The Two Loves was an... interesting experience, but I think a worthwhile one, and I liked exploring Lachlan's character in A Grimly Ghost, which is one of my favourite fics of the year.

My most popular stories were the two Kidnapped fics and A Propitious Season of Living, the A Little Princess story I wrote for Hurt/Comfort Ex—being exchange fic for a fairly widely-beloved classic probably helped that one, but I do think it's a good story and I enjoyed writing it.

All in all, a pretty good year! My big writing goal for this year is to finish the longfic, at least to 'only needs minor polishing edits before posting' stage; it's currently at 40,000 words of second draft and 8,000 of first draft, and I imagine it'll end up somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 words. And I probably won't have time for loads of stuff besides that, though ideas are certainly not lacking—we'll see how it goes. (Er, I may have motivated myself to write this post because I have the first short fic of 2023 almost ready to post and thought it'd be sensible to get this written first...)