Year in Fic Meme...

[amatara]

... in two parts, just like last year (now with links to AO3):
 

Babylon 5 (4 fics: 3 gen, 1 M/M)

He should have gone easier on the wine. [Of Wine and Virtue, Londo/G’Kar]

Hugging with a battered arm would have been a bad idea in any case. [Five Times Vir Wanted to Hug Londo, but Didn’t, Vir & Londo]

There are rituals to be observed. [Rituals, Lyta & G’Kar]

“He’ll be fine,” John had told her, just a few days ago, as they returned from the Centauri homeworld. [The Eyes that Saw, Vir]

Lost (4 fics, all gen)

He isn’t sure, in the end, why he chooses to stay. [Et In Arcadia Ego, Ben & Alex]

There is something to being a single mother that feels – right, in a way. [Wake Your Ghost, Rousseau & Alex & Ben]

“He takes first watch?” Hurley asks, still sounding breathless. [Vigilantes, Ben & Locke & Hurley]

His conscious mind says run, and yet, seconds after James and the others have sprinted for cover, he’s still not running. [Ad Fundum Calicis, Locke & Ben]

Star Trek TOS (2 fics, both gen)

Entering Starfleet Academy hadn't been the hard part. [Five Times Spock Tried Earth Cuisine, Spock]

The first time, he doesn’t want a soul to see. [Human Conditions, McCoy & Spock]

Twin Peaks (9 fics: 4 gen, 4 M/M, 1 M/M + F/M)

Life was a bitch. [Wake up and Face the Music, Cooper/Albert]

There is a moth on the ceiling. [Elegy in Five Movements, Cooper & Albert]

Realism is an undervalued art. [Cold Comfort, Cooper & Albert]

They take the stairs, on his insistence. [Beds are Burning, Cooper/Albert]

The woods are awake, always.[Flashes of Light, Cooper/Albert + Cooper/Laura]

“Diane, once again, the first lesson I ever learned at the Bureau – there is no such thing as an easy case – finds itself confirmed.” [The Magnificent Tree, Cooper & Albert]

“So, Dr. Rosenfield.” The man opposite him sprawled backward almost languidly, chair balanced on two legs. [Five Times Albert Rosenfield Lied (and once he only thought he did), Albert]

The second he steps in is when his sunglasses fog up. [Suburban Dreams, Cooper/Albert]

The doorknob was cool to the touch, but not freezing. [Acquainted with the Night, Cooper/Albert]

Others

Thunderstorms are nothing to be scared of. [The Storm, Stilled, Stargate: Atlantis, Elizabeth & Rodney]

You joked about it once, with Martha: what the Doctor touches turns to gold. [Midas Touch, Torchwood, Jack gen]

In Margo’s experience – and she liked to think she had a few – there were two survival skills that mattered. [Sweet Villainy, Despicable me, gen]


*** 

Favourite Story (of my own): My first serious Twin Peaks fic, Wake Up and Face the Music, because it was truly a labor of love. I struggled with it for four months, writing bits and pieces in between working on other fics, which is the most time I ever spent on a story. I still love the mixture of angst, humor, action, horror and sexiness that I managed to squeeze in; and as plot usually isn’t my strong suit, I’m still kind of proud of the resolution to Cooper’s possession storyline that I came up with.

Best Story: Both of my Lost vignettes, Et in Arcadia Ego (aka Ben’s sideways-verse epilogue) and Vigilantes (aka Ben, Locke and Hurley camping), surprised me in that I wrote them in a really short time and they still turned out almost exactly the way I wanted them. I also have a very soft spot for the characterization in Five Times Albert Rosenfield Lied, not just of Albert but also and particularly of Diane. And I’m quite fond of the premise of Flashes of Light: the switching between sexytimes and the Black Lodge, which I think made for a nicely atmospheric and disturbing piece.

Most Fun Story: That’ll be a tie between the Twin Peaks-themed slapstick from The Magnificent Tree and Sweet Villainy, the Despicable Me fic I wrote for this year’s Yuletide. The former is much darker in its humor than the latter, which was really light-hearted and innocent, but both were equally fun to write.

Sexiest Story: This is – hard. Flashes of Light is definitely the most explict that I’ve gone, but apart from a few isolated lines, it doesn’t feel sexy to me as much as screwed-up and tragic. (Seeing as I wrote it for P0rn Battle, that sounds kind of weird, but there it is. *sheepish grin*) So I’d have to go for Beds Are Burning, even though the buildup to the sex takes up a lot more space than the sex itself, but I kind of like that about it. Also, the few explicit lines it contained turned out quite well, I think.

Story with the single sexiest moment: That could be Flashes of Light, maybe? That one line “Curls back his fingers to the sound of Albert’s muffled groan in the pillow” still gives me a little shiver on re-reading, which doesn’t often happen with stories that I wrote myself.

Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters: I don’t think I could name a story that did, although Rituals did force me to consider Lyta’s motivations for fighting in the Telepath War, in a lot more detail than I did while watching the show. Also Human Conditions helped me reevaluate the relationship between McCoy and Spock as seen through McCoy’s eyes, which obviously I had an idea about, but had never laid out to myself in any kind of detail.

Worst story / Most overrated story, in my opinion: Not most overrated, because in retrospect I liked it too, but I hadn’t quite expected the flood of squee over Elegy in Five Movements (aka the one where Albert takes care of Cooper post-Caroline.) My fear was that it might be received as rather gratuitous hurt/comfort, which wouldn’t have been entirely unfounded, but instead everyone ended up praising it as a lovely and subtle character piece. The comments I got on that story, including from a number of people who’d never commented here before, meant an awful lot to me.

Most unintentionally telling story: Cold Comfort? Yes, dammit, I wrote that because it was the closest I could comfortably get to writing Albert-whump, which I’m (no-longer-so-)secretly craving with the burning heat of a thousand suns. *crosses arms and dares anyone to have an issue with that* ;)

"Holy crap, that's wrong, even for me" story: The Black-Lodge sex in Flashes of Light I’d call pretty wrong, yes. Also the Ben/Locke UST in Ad Fundum Calicis leaves me faintly uncomfortable upon re-reading, for reasons that I can’t quite put my finger on, except that Ben/Locke is supposed to leave one uncomfortable for the simple reason that they’re Ben and Locke… but still. It feels a little like dub-con at a platonic level, which I’m kind of squeamish about.

Hardest Story to Write: Human Conditions took me devilishly long to start, and even longer to finish, and I struggled really hard to settle on the right mood and theme and POV. It eventually turned out entirely different from what I’d been intending to write (i.e. what the person I was writing for had actually requested, being some nice Spock & McCoy hurt/comfort and not an infinitely melancholy character study of loss and coping) and no matter how much I tried to bend it into another, more light-hearted direction, it stubbornly kept refusing to.

Biggest Surprise: Rediscovering my love for B5 while writing The Eyes that Saw. Not quite the omg-I-would-never-have-believed-it-possible kind of surprise, but the intensity of my rekindled fannish love for those characters still kind of blew me away a little.

Story most tragically underappreciated by the universe, in my opinion: Oh dear, I couldn’t name any this year. Given the amount of effort I put into it, I’d have loved to get a bit more feedback on Wake Your Ghost, but given that Rousseau isn’t quite a main character in Lost, plus I essentially had her put Ben in his place, I can’t say that was unexpected. And the feedback that I did receive on that story was lovely, so I have nothing at all to complain about.

 

That’s 21 fics, guys! That’s two per month, which, for me, really is a lot! *feels accomplished*

And let me just say a heartfelt thank you to all of you reading and/or commenting here - all interaction, discussion and squee is adored, and I am just so lucky with you guys. Here's to another year just as productive, and just as fun.