2020 fic year in review

I was tagged by my lovely @khorazir! Thanks, you! 

Total number of completed stories: Three, but two of them were fairly long? I wrote: 

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: John/Sherlock, 50,689 words, explicit, John POV. Set in New York, because I was itching to go there and couldn’t, and setting a fic somewhere is the next best thing. Probably my most political fic to date, this one was a deliberate reversal of the fake-couple-for-a-case trope, aka I wanted to create a setting wherein John and Sherlock become a couple during a case but need to keep it a secret for the sake of the case. So I set it at a massive, anti-gay conference in the US. Naturally. :P 

Sine Nomine: John/Sherlock, 45,626 words, explicit, mostly John POV with sections of Mycroft and Sherlock POV as well. In fact, though the sections aren’t equal in length, it’s symmetrical: it goes Mycroft POV/John POV/Sherlock POV/John POV/Mycroft POV. This story has a dark premise and a particularly dark setting for one section. It’s based on the concept of Mycroft rewatching the footage of John beating Sherlock in the morgue for the hundredth time or so and revisiting the question of whether John had been the making of his brother, or made him worse than ever. He’s definitely come to the latter conclusion, but decides to give John one final chance in the form of a test. John, for his own reasons, makes what Mycroft deems the incorrect choice, and Mycroft basically sends him into a death trap. The setting of this place is officially set in Serbia with indirect hints at events similar to the Srebrenica Genocide in Bosnia, but the actual setting is Syria, which I’ve just spent the past year studying intensely. Putting a slice of that into the dark core of this story, albeit disguised as another place, was strangely cathartic for me. The title, which is Latin for “no name”, is a double reference to the village here, which Sherlock and Mycroft never name, ominously referring to it only as “the village”, both to each other and to John, as well as John’s never-named or owned feelings for Sherlock. This one is close to my heart for a lot of reasons, but most of all because of Syria. Also, the vast majority of the time in my writing, I choose a singular POV and stick to it very closely for the entire story. Choosing to rotate between these three men essentially allowed me to show how they’re all justified in their own decisions here, and to examine the relationships between all three of them. It’s a story about reckonings and eventual, hard-won reconciliations. 

The Secret of Hazel Grange. Sherlock/John, 18,181 words, explicit, Sherlock POV. I’m going to claim that the reason I only managed to swing three fics this entire year is partly that I put another project on hold in order to write this one, lol. This is the third Christmas fic I’ve written and I’m happy with how it came out. It’s also the only story I’ve written that’s explicitly set during this pandemic, and during the second London lockdown, which is eerily similar to the code red lockdown my own city is in, so it just felt right. It’s been a somewhat miserable holiday season for me (so many reasons, including unhappiness at work and an illegally high rent increase that my apartment building is putting through, on top of the pandemic and all of that isolation and all of those cancellations), so writing some happy endings for someone else was pure escapism for me. Hopeful for others, too! 

Total word count: 114,496 words of posted fic. 130,796 if we’re counting my work-in-progress that got interrupted for the Christmas fic. :)

Fandoms written in: BBC Sherlock.

Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you’d expected? I wrote about what I thought I expected to be able to write. Right now, I have a full-time job, a part-time job, and then freelance work, all to attempt to make ends meet, so I have very little spare time to write in, unfortunately. So getting over 100k words in is actually somewhat miraculous to me. It feels like not very much when it’s just three stories, but I guess it still amounts to a fair number of words? 

What’s  your own favourite story of the year? Picking favourites is always tough, but for the Syria connection, I’d have to go with Sine Nomine. 

Did you take any writing risks this year? I suppose that going so hard on the whole Republican anti-gay groups thing could be considered “risky” in some circles, but not really hereabouts! LGBTQ+ rights is one of my areas of advocacy (in fact, I’m a founding member of the Rainbow Equity Council at my workplace and spent a crap ton of time this month drafting governance documentation for it), but genocides are the issue that are really closer to my heart, so the Syria connection, even if it wasn’t named outright, could also be seen as a “dangerously” political stance, I suppose. But compared to other writing choices (like Scars, which features actual rape, or any of my Freebatch stuff, or any of the stories where Mary is an overt terrorist (rather than “just” a freelance assassin, lol)), I don’t really think I was terribly risky this year. 

Do you have any fanfic or profic goals for the new year? The first item on the agenda is to get back to work on Nocturne, my WIP. After that, we’ll see. That said, I STILL would like to get back to searching for an agent for my novel, which is strongly based on Against the Rest of the World. I would also like to write that Johnlock cookbook I keep vaguely promising (it would feature recipes from my fics), and in a quirky “other” sort of project, I also wrote a heap of haikus about Republicans this fall that I’d like to see about getting published. Want a taste? Sure you do. I give you: 

Brett Kavanaugh

Brett has a face like

a snarly little hedgehog.

He likes beer, okay?!

Mitch McConnell

Moscow Mitch is a

corrupt turtle who keeps his

balls in his neck pouch

Most popular story of the year? Well, the longer a story is posted, the more time it has to collect hits, kudos, bookmarks, and comments, obviously, so that makes The Four Horsemen the clear winner here. 

Story of mine most under-appreciated by the universe, in my opinion: From this year or in general? :P I often find that my plottiest, most detailed, most researched stories that I personally think contain some of my most thoughtful writing are the ones that get the least attention. For instance, after series 3 aired, I wrote three back-to-back intensely-detailed series 3 fix-it fics (which all, to their credit, do get plenty of attention, though none so much as Vena Cava, the third of the three). Then I wrote a light-hearted, almost-crack porn fic, more as mental relaxation than any sort of literary genius, and that fic - Best of Three - remains my most wildly-popular story of anything I’ve ever written. It used to frustrate me, but now I’m just grateful to have anyone read anything of mine. But along that theme, yeah: the most complex of this year’s stories (Sine Nomine) is probably the one I feel is the least appreciated, but that’s also fine. No complaints here - I’m very lucky to have the readership I have!! 

Most fun story to write: Sine Nomine, for all the reasons I talked about above, though I’d also call this the most emotionally-invested story of mine from this past year. That said, setting any story in Manhattan is always going to be fun, and I loved researching approximately 500 holiday rental properties in various parts of England in order to finally just create my own, aka Hazel Grange, lol. 

Most unintentionally telling story: Ha, well, if you weren’t sure about my stance on gay rights, marriage equality, or Republicans in general, The Four Horsemen should clear that up pretty distinctly, lol! 

Biggest disappointment: Just that I haven’t had more time to write. 

Biggest surprise: Possibly that I felt so able to represent all three POVs in Sine Nomine as equally as I did. By that, I don’t mean being able to write in their perspectives, but rather in presenting their arguments with (I hope) equal persuasion: Mycroft thinks that John’s entire presence in Sherlock’s life has spelled nothing but disaster for Sherlock. He’s arguably not wrong. He decides that John is out of chances, and that he’s justified in being the one to make that call. Sherlock disagrees, hard, and he’s not wrong. John makes the choice he makes for his daughter, not for the choice Mycroft gives him between choosing either Mary or Sherlock once and for all, and he’s not wrong to have done that, or unjustified in wanting to go and demand some answers from Mary, who isn’t dead after all, here. But then I think that their various reasons for reconciliation are all equally justified, too. I hope! Usually when you stick to one perspective, the story naturally gears itself to persuade the reader to identify with that one character and to take their side. Here, I hope I manage to juggle the balance fairly equally. 

I don’t know who’s been tagged in this already, but I’ll tag: @totallysilvergirl, @blogstandbygo, @nade2308, @weneedtotalkaboutsherlock, @hubblegleeflower, and anyone else who writes.