regshoe | Entries tagged with writing

I felt like my writing did not go brilliantly this year, so it's gratifying to go to my AO3 stats page and see that that's not entirely the case. I published twelve fics in 2024, and my total posted wordcount is 43,882—lower than the last few years, but really not that bad, especially considering the ~25k draft also finished but not posted.

And my total posted works count has passed 100. In fact it's currently 103 and was never (or at least never showed as) exactly 100, because number 100 was my Yuletide assignment and I then posted another two Yuletide fics which were all revealed as mine at the same time, but never mind, it's something to be pleased with! Here are the last few fics running up to that total, which I didn't share here at the time:

( A few fics )

At the end of the year I also wrote a ficlet for one of my occasional Raffles Christmas cards, which I've just posted on AO3 now:

A Ham Common Christmas (420 words) by regshoe
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Raffles - E. W. Hornung
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Bunny Manders/A. J. Raffles
Characters: Bunny Manders, A. J. Raffles
Additional Tags: Christmas, Fluff
Summary:

Raffles and Bunny receive an unexpected present.

I have kept up my writing, more or less. My current WIP is a Kidnapped f/f genderswap AU, and is currently 32 notebook pages long, so somewhere around 16,000 words, and getting near the end of the draft—just a few loose ends to clear up now. It's definitely a wobbly first draft, but I'm pleased with it on the whole. (It was a good idea! I keep saying I want f/f with the dynamics of my favourite m/m pairings, and, well, this is one way to get it, and it is indeed pretty great.)

I've been re-reading the book, keeping pace with myself as I wrote the AU and also collecting material to make a timeline. I've just finished the re-read and the provisional result for the timeline is: Robert Louis Stevenson definitely could not count. There are five exact calendar dates in this book; would you like to guess how many of them don't contradict either each other or other information we're given about the timeline?

Answer:

~~One! 27th June 1751, the date of the shipwreck.~~ ETA: I spoke too soon! I've now started putting the timeline together; this date doesn't definitely contradict anything else, but there are approximate details that are difficult to reconcile with it. More to follow...

Between this, the David's age thing and the certainly deliberate wrong historical year, I'm beginning to think he did it all on purpose.

I've also finished a short Jill fic, a crossover with E. W. Hornung's Peccavi, but it came out kind of weird, I decided to put it on one side for a while and since then have been distracted by the Kidnapped fic. Perhaps I'll go back to it in between drafts.

If it runs on a similar schedule to last year,

raremaleslashex nominations will be opening in a few weeks. I've been contemplating making a tentative step back into exchanges, and I think this would be an especially good one right now. Anyone else in my fandoms thinking of signing up? (I was thinking Kidnapped book and play, Armadale, The Red House Mystery, Raffles—goodness, Raffles/Bunny is almost ineligible; a good opportunity for Raffles/Mackenzie or other rarepairs—perhaps other Jacobite stuff...)

Isobel McArthur's Pride & Prejudice* (*sort of)—her most successful work to date, and a major precursor to Kidnapped—is touring locations in England this autumn. I'll see how I feel closer to the time, I think, but it's a cool opportunity!

Tagged by

verecunda over on Tumblr—thank you! :D

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

88 excluding as-yet-unrevealed collections, but some of those are podfic, so for the purposes of a fic writer meme, 82.

2. What's your total AO3 word count?

416,274 (again excluding unrevealed works). Over six-and-a-bit years, I don't think that's too bad.

3. What fandoms do you write for?

At the moment chiefly the Jacobite And/Or D. K. Broster Extended Universe fandoms; in the past Raffles and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, to which I still sometimes return; and a long string of one-off (or two-off) fandoms largely written for exchanges, mostly old books and traditional songs.

( More questions and answers )

If you would like to answer these questions, please consider yourself tagged!

Having done some last bits of editing following beta feedback, I now have a more or less complete draft of my Flight of the Heron/Kidnapped crossover longfic! It's about 117,000 words long, which is comfortably more than five times longer than the next longest thing I've ever written, and has taken just over a year to get to this point. I am slightly amazed—I can write longfic now! Writing it has been quite an experience, but on the whole I am pleased with it. :)

I absolutely could not have got this far without the help of

luzula and

sanguinity, who are lovely and amazing beta readers and cheerleaders. ♥

The next stage is more editing and polishing—I'm planning one more complete read-through and edit, and this evening have been preparing for that by going through my (long and not terribly well organised) notes document to pick out things I still want to address. I also want to polish the vocabulary and punctuation to match D. K. Broster's (the fic being in third person, I'm vaguely aiming at a style similar to hers rather than RLS's)—I've written a simple R script to compare the words used by two texts, and it's pretty interesting seeing which words I use that Broster doesn't and vice versa!

Another challenge I now face is the sad lack of a title. The only thing I can think of so far is 'we can make love not ~~war~~ Jacobite risings (and live at peace with our hearts)', which would amuse me but is perhaps not really suitable. (I'm sure Erasure would have said 'Jacobite risings' if they'd known their song was going to feature so memorably in NTS Kidnapped). I'm a little bit sad, because IME fics that don't have a title by this stage of their composition usually never get a good one—OTOH I can do my final read-through with the goal in mind of finding a line to quote as the title, which may turn up something in all those thousands of words...

It's not going to be ready for posting entirely before Yuletide, but I might manage to get it done by the really busy phase of the exchange. I hope so—I want to get properly into Yuletide this year, and relax by writing lots of short and silly treats!...

Current Music: A Little Respect by Erasure

Well, now that the busyness of hosting WED is over, I'm taking a review of the other fannish things I have going on and trying to do some sorting out. So! At the moment I am working on:

My Flight of the Heron/Kidnapped crossover longfic! I'm on chapter 17 at the moment and the total wordcount has just passed 90,000; I think I've got another four or five chapters to go, give or take a little epiloguing, which suggests a final wordcount somewhere in the 110-120k range. This is exciting! There are definitely plot difficulties, but I am making steady progress working through them and keeping going (very much thanks to beta feedback from the excellent sanguinity and luzula). If all continues well, I'm fairly comfortably on track for my goal of getting to 'only final edits needed' stage within this year.
Another meta post resulting from the FotH Wikipedia research. This one has been fully written up for months, I just haven't got round to posting it; I will soon.
A meta post about the textual history of Kidnapped. Also mostly written, needs a bit more polishing.
The Flight of the Heron ebook! This has slowed to a crawl due to various technological problems, but I'm now three-quarters of the way through scanning and OCR-ing the text and hoping to make a final push on the last quarter soon. And then will follow the pleasant text-corrections stage in which I get to read FotH again. :D
A Wikipedia article on NTS Kidnapped. ♥
A vague plan to make my own fansite, probably over on Neocities. This is an idea I've had for some time, resulting from a convergence of 'I love all this cool HTML and CSS I'm learning for ebooking, what else can I do with it?', 'I want to archive my Flight of the Heron and Kidnapped fic somewhere where no one can tell me they know better than I do what the fandom is called' and 'hmm, it'd be nice to have some kind of permanent place to put all this stuff I'm digging up about FotH and D. K. Broster', and the recent Things happening to do with AO3 have lent it further impetus. I've got a collection of disorganised and half-finished HTML files, which need a lot more organisation before I can do anything with them, and I need to make a decision about the scope of such a site ('everything I'm interested in' is all very well for Dreamwidth, but I feel a proper website ought to be a bit better-defined; but it needs to include at least both FotH and Kidnapped, and fic, meta and general canon/history info; perhaps a broad 'old books about Jacobites' theme?). But it's progressing, somewhat.

So that's enough to keep me busy for a while, and who knows how long any of it will take. But it's good fun :D

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...)

I have reached 40,000 words on my FotH/Kidnapped crossover longfic! And I think I have got to the point of needing a break from it—the last couple of weeks of writing have been a bit tough, and various things are not working out quite how I want. But I am going to be pleased with this achievement, and put it aside and work on Yuletide stuff for a little while—and then go back and decide what to do next. One possibility is that I start to re-draft the earlier chapters before writing more; at the moment it's feeling a bit weighed down by plot and characterisation that I know I haven't got right yet and want to change. We shall see!

Chantemerle is making slow but steady progress. It's the longest ebook I've done so far at 158,000 words, about a third as long again as Sir Isumbras. I'm working my way through rewrapping the text file (making all the lines the right length and organising them nicely); after that will come the slightly daunting task of formatting the (many, varied) chapter epigraphs in both text and HTML.

...But in the course of (unsuccessfully) trying to look up one of those chapter epigraphs today, I have found another Jacobite novel from 1905 which looks like it might be about an intense loyal friendship between female characters! One of them is the famous Lady Nithsdale who memorably and ingeniously helped her husband escape from the Tower of London after the '15. I will read it immediately and report back.

I learnt yesterday that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote an alternative set of lyrics to the Skye Boat Song—number XLII in this collection. I think I like this version better than the more well-known original! The images are less hackneyed and more evocative, and there's a lovely wistfulness to it.

I've been continuing my D. K. Broster researches by looking her up in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, to which I have access through the public library. The entry has some interesting details that I hadn't heard before, including that she thought The Yellow Poppy was her best book, but her favourite was The Wounded Name (I think that shows excellent and hilarious judgement; although the DNB doesn't say, and I'd like to know, when she said it—how many, if any, of her later books were not written yet to compare to those two?), and a little bit about her personality: she was known as a worrier, obsessed by the difficulties of daily living, the need to be ready for any and every emergency. I probably shouldn't quote the whole entry here, but I'm happy to send a copy to anyone who would like one! I'd like to continue these biographical researches properly; I think I'll make another delve into the Ancestry records (now only accessible actually in libraries, so I'll have to make a visit to one), and then see if I can work up the courage to ask the people at St Hilda's College Archive if I can go and have a look at these papers, which sound terribly interesting.

( Various rambling about my own fic titles and fic titles in general )

I posted eighteen fics in 2021, in eight fandoms: Childe Rowland, Flemington, Flight of the Heron, Malory Towers, Raffles, Song Composed in August, The Silmarillion and The Stolen Child. Total word count was 73,121.

This is slightly more than last year, and given that my last year's writing goals were 'keep making progress and expanding my horizons', I think I've done well.

Fandom-wise it was a year in two halves: lots of Raffles writing early in the year, inspired by the Raffles Discord read-along, and a return to Flight of the Heron with the read-along for that later on. I enjoyed revisiting my Raffles obsession and writing what I think is some of my best fic ever for that fandom—but it's nice to be back firmly in FotH world too, and with the read-along still ongoing I have plenty more ideas to keep me occupied here for a while.

I also wrote for various one-off fandoms in exchanges: I signed up to Once Upon a Fic, Femslashex and Yuletide, and wrote a treat for Hurt/Comfort Ex. I always enjoy the opportunity that exchanges provide to try writing new things—this year that included a second, more ambitious Malory Towers fic and my first ever Tolkien fic, which I'm especially pleased with! I also wrote a bird-related Robert Burns fic for Pod Together, in collaboration with

luzula, which was great fun—writing specifically for podfic was an enjoyable new approach to take, and gave me lots of opportunities to include folk songs in the story. :D

A Fortunate Day is my most popular fic of 2021 by hits and kudos, but it's not even in the top five by comments—whether that says anything especially profound about the nature of feedback in different fandoms I don't know, but there you go. Top by comments is Where the White Lilies Grow, the post-Gift of the Emperor fix-it AU. That is also one of the ones I'm most pleased with!

Besides that, I think Lovely on the Water, a gloomy folk-song inspired Ham Common fic, is especially good (happy fic must be balanced by gloomy fic, or at least that's how it always seems to work out...). I also had a great time with my two Yuletide stories, Thy Kingdom's Pearl for Flight of the Heron—a new aspect of my favourite fandom, and plenty of enjoyable historical research—and Feathers Anew for Flemington—a new Jacobite fandom which I was very pleased with managing to write a fix-it for.

Overall, a pretty good year! I'd like to be a bit more consistent about writing in 2022, and I hope that doing Write Every Day—which I discovered in November and have really enjoyed doing since then, if not quite literally—will help with that. And I'd like to sign up for a few more exchanges, about which I have some vague ideas.

I posted sixteen fics in 2020, to a total of 66,248 words, for seven different fandoms: Flight of the Heron, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Childe Rowland, Malory Towers, Lolly Willowes, Cargill and Piranesi.

This is more than three times the word count of 2019, which I'm pretty pleased with! I have met all the writing goals I set myself last year, including some of the specific fandoms I was thinking of writing :D

Definitely the fandom of the year has been The Flight of the Heron, which I wrote for the first time in February and ended up posting eight fics for over the year. I've really enjoyed getting properly into a new fandom, and contributing to the much-deserved general growth of Broster fandom that's been going on :) It also got me really into historical research and detail in a way I wasn't before, and I think my writing is better for that. I also wrote for five new one-off fandoms, of which one fic was joint first in the fandom with two other Yuletide fics and one other is still the only fic in the fandom tag on AO3. I've greatly enjoyed expanding my fandom horizons and writing more new stuff, especially the folk song fic!

I signed up for two exchanges, Once Upon a Fic and Yuletide, as well as writing a treat for Femslash Ex. All great fun! I'll definitely sign up for more exchanges this year—I'm already considering which Child Ballads I'd most like to nominate for this round of OUaF...

Writing JSMN for Yuletide seems to be a fairly reliable way to get my most popular fic of the year—it's certainly the closest I ever get to a big fandom, haha—and The Education of a Magician is already top on all metrics despite only being revealed two weeks ago. I am fairly pleased with it!

I think the story I'm most proud of is No Man Can Shun It, a relatively long (for me) fic which involved developing a fairly complicated idea, doing some historical research on a period I started knowing next to nothing about and creating original characters, and which, judging by the comments, was pretty successful :) But it's also very depressing, so I'll also mention my other favourite of the year, my FotH fix-it duology Up in the Grey Hills and It Will Be Summer, which made me very happy to write.

I don't have any particular goals for this year—keep making progress and expanding my horizons, I suppose. I already have a couple of ideas in development, so we'll see where they take me. :)

I wrote eleven fics in 2019, for a total of 20,701 words—a smaller total word count than in 2018 but a larger number of fics, which I think is probably a more relevant number unless the fics are very long or very short. I'm quite happy with this. I had a vague goal of writing one fic a month or 12 across the year, which I didn't quite manage, but only just missed! So I think I'll set the same goal again for 2020, with an additional one of increasing the total word count, and see how I go.

Those were for six different fandoms: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and Raffles, plus four that I'd never written before, including one (Peccavi - E. W. Hornung) which was the first in that fandom (and will probably remain the only one for the indefinite future—I did go pretty obscure there :P). The two ballad fics I wrote for Yuletide were both joint first in the fandom: no fics until this year's Yuletide but multiple fics written for it! Writing the first fic in a fandom was another vague goal from last year, so I'm quite happy about this—always good to keep increasing the range of AO3, as well as my own as a writer.

The most popular by hits and kudos has been Iron Enough To Make a Nail, my argument on the humanity of John Uskglass. I am quite pleased with this one, so it's good to know other people agree :D

I signed up for Yuletide for the first time this year (I wrote a couple of treats last year but didn't actually sign up), and wrote three fics. This was a challenge—the actual amount written wasn't that much for the amount of time, but keeping multiple fics on the go at the same time with a deadline for all of them was a bit more pressure than I'm used to. In any case the whole thing was a great experience, and I hope to sign up again next year, and possibly do other exchanges if I see any that look fun.

To sum up, my writing goals for 2020 are:

Write at least twelve fics over the year (not necessarily one in every calendar month, but the equivalent of one a month).

Write more total words than I did in 2019.

Write for more new-to-me fandoms. Some possibilities for these: more Child Ballads; Flight of the Heron (I really hope so!); any Rosemary Sutcliff novel; Piranesi (if I can be that quick).

Post the first fic in a new fandom on AO3.

Participate in at least one fic exchange.

I’ve been tagged in two different end-of-year fic memes, one by

the-prince-of-professors over on Tumblr and one by

potentiality_26 here—thank you both!—so I’m combining questions from both memes and posting on both sites. :D

How many fics did you write this year? How many words?

30,554 words across 6 fics.

Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you’d expected?

About what I expected, although I am fairly pleased considering I wrote nothing in the incredibly busy first half of the year.

Are there any fandoms you didn’t expect to write for but did? What about fandoms you expected to write for but didn’t?

Shirley was definitely a surprise—it was just another nineteenth-century book I particularly enjoyed but hadn’t really thought of being fannish about, until I saw

alona’s Yuletide prompt for a Shirley/Caroline Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell fusion and simply had to write it.

Speaking of JSMN crossovers, I had hoped to write one for Lolly Willowes, and got quite a long way on a draft before getting stuck. I’m hoping to get unstuck on this one shortly!

Do you have any fanfic or profic goals for the new year?

I’d like to write a bit more this year, but I’m not setting a specific target. Finish some of the multiple incomplete drafts that have been languishing on my computer for months. Write the first ever fic on AO3 for a fandom, specifically E. M. Forster’s The Longest Journey (I mean, I certainly won’t be complaining if someone beats me to it, but it would be cool).

What were your most popular fics this year, and how would you estimate that? By comments, kudos, hits, or some combination of the three?

I don’t need to do complex estimations, because When the Winds Begin to Sing is by far the most popular on all three metrics (it got about half my total comments and kudos for the entire year). I'm fairly proud of this one and I hope it deserves the attention, although it being for Yuletide certainly helped.

Story of mine most under-appreciated by the universe, in my opinion:

The Curious Case of the Bracknell Emeralds, although I realise it’s a pretty niche crossover :P

Were any fics you wrote this year particularly difficult? Were any particularly easy?

Under the Jewelled Sky took quite a lot of effort in the planning stages—it’s the longest and plottiest fic I’ve written so far, and required a bit of historical research for a period I’m not familiar with—but once it got to the actual writing I found it came together fairly easily. So, both?

Did you get out of your comfort zone at all?

This has only been my second year (first full year!) of writing fic, so a lot of things were new—writing longer fics with more involved plots, writing in more different fandoms, writing exchange fic for specific prompts. I’m pretty pleased with things, on the whole.

Biggest surprise:

Likewise, I have surprised myself with how much I’ve achieved this year in general! There’s still a lot more to do, however, and I hope I can continue experimenting and broadening my writing skills in 2019. :D