Jan. 3rd, 2023 12:53 am
2022 Fic Writing Wrap up
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averytreeIn 2022, I wrote almost exactly 100K words of fic, and also posted a lot of words that I wrote in 2021. This is very unusual for me– I have never had a writing year like this before! I credit a huge amount of this to making friends with a bunch of other wonderful, creative, productive writers; so much of my writing was done because I wanted to keep up with them, or have fun doing the same thing they were doing. Having regular weekly and also random impromptu writing groups on discord has been such a game changer in the past year and a half. Writing has been the opposite of a solo hobby; it has become the center of my social circle and the hub that the majority of my friend groups orbit around. I am so happy with everything I wrote, and excited to see what the future brings!
This year I posted 6 complete stories ranging from 950 words to 44K words, and also updated my very big, ongoing co-written WIP. Pretty much all of them were a first for me in one way or another, so I wanted to write a little bit about each of them.
Promises Broken and Made — SVT, Seungkwan/Vernon | 23,032 words | April
When I started this story I had never written Seventeen before, never written a story set in Seoul before, never written a breakup/makeup and never written either of these POVs! The whole idea started when I joked to Poppyseedheart about an AU of Seungkwan as a CEO and Vernon as a rapper; I threw the idea at them in a twitter ficlet prompt thread and she didn’t respond, so I decided to write it myself. It got so much longer and more earnest than I was expecting! But I had such a good time weaving in every SVT member plus some BTS cameos and other kpop and kdrama and TV personalities. I spent a lot of time researching various neighborhoods, stores, clubs, and parks to try and set scenes in real locations. I also had such a good time digging into the contrast of Vernon’s more mellow and big picture POV versus a very neurotic, anxious and fixated Seungkwan. He’s my guy and I love him so much! I want to write more of him in 2023.
Rings — SVT, Mingyu/Jeonghan | 950 words | May
This short story was written from a Voiceteam prompt, and all in one sitting. I am still getting used to writing to prompts and slowly growing my own confidence in writing to fullfill challenges. This story is also based in the real tradition of SVT members getting a new group “promise ring” every couple of years. Can you believe they are in a 13-way engagement? Congrats to them all.
You Know I Can’t Leave You Alone — SKZ, Jisung/Hyunjin, Jisung/Hyunjin/Seungmin, Jisung/Hyunjin
/Minho | 14,095 words | July
This is a story I didn’t think I would write. It’s a remix of Poppyseedheart’s what's mine is yours kind of?? More like, I took the same concept and ran with it in a completely different direction. The concept is an idolverse AU in which Stray Kids have a group bond, which is based on the transfer of pain from one member to another in a chain. Poppyseedheart’s take on this is a very upsetting MinChan in which the painbond complicates and probably worsens their ability to communicate with each other. My brain said, but what if Hyngsung kink negotiations? I wrote 2K of it in maybe February and shared it in a google doc with a few people and thought that was the end of it. Then I read a couple of Alexenglish’s Jisung POV stories over the summer and they made me also want to dip back into writing Jisung POV, so I picked the story back up and wrote the other 12K in about a week and a half. I literally don’t know where it all came from! I’d say this is the most explicit fic I’ve written though most of the spicy scenes are not exactly traditional ones? Anyway, I really love this AU verse and I am interested in maybe writing something else in it again at some point.
Bright Enough To Light Up Any Dark — SVT, Mingyu/Jeonghan/Seungcheol | 44,082 words | September
My epic! This is the longest prose story I have ever finished, though not the longest I have started (see The Same Sky). This idea came to me in mid April when I went to see the “Seventeen: Power of Love” movie in theaters with three members of my writing group. I remember seeing Jeonghan huge on the screen and thinking, “Wow, it looks like he’s been burning the candle at both ends” (affectionate). And then seeing Mingyu look like the picture of glowing health and thinking, “If only there was some way that Mingyu could transfer some of his energy to Jeonghan.” Sortly before this I had read the first two books of the Scholomance series by Naomi Novik and the idea of Mingyu as a mana-sharer came into my head. I knew kind of right away that I wanted it to be a complicated triangle between Mingyu, Jeonghan and Seungcheol, and that I wanted every member of Seventeen to appear and that I wanted it to be kind of a rewrite of the first book in the series. Initially I was going to kill off one or more characters in the story, but I walked it back a little. A few of the other twists at the end only occurred to me while I was writing (which took place between April-September, interrupted by the two week madness of You Know I Can’t Leave You Alone and my slower, more consistent work on Same Sky). I wanted to thank Colourexplosion and Pammie for both betaing this story, which lead to a late addition of a short but key scene.
804 –– SVT, Minghao/Jun | 3630 words | November
This one was written for a fest in a writing discord I am part of. As a group, we threw a bunch of tropes into a spinner wheel and came up with a set of prompts. Eight of us all wrote stories to fit these tropes and submitted them to an anonymous collection, and then had a week or two to read them and try to guess who had authored each story. You can find the list of prompts we wrote to, and all of the stories from the fest, here. I did pretty badly guessing other people’s stories (only 3 out of 8- or I guess 4 out of 8 if you could knowing which one was mine). But this story was my first time writing Minghao’s POV, and my first time writing a story with unrequited feelings, and my first time intentionally trying to disguise my writing style! I’m hoping we run another one of these fests this year because it was a lot of fun (and maybe I could do better both hiding myself and guessing next time?) I want to thank jamesbonds for betaing this one, and encouraging me to cut the last scene, around 1000 words, that really softened the ending.
Spirit of the Season — SKZ, Jisung/Minho | 8585 words | December
This is my first ever Yuletide story! I’ve known about Yuletide for a few years, and considered signing up last year but was intimidated by the idea of writing for a small fandom outside of the kpop I’ve writing since I got back into writing fic in mid 2020. But all the writing I did earlier in the year gave me a lot of confidence, and also I realized I could sign up for individual kpop MVs even if the groups themselves had too many fics to qualify. I signed up for SKZ Christmas Evel and The Thunderous NOEASY trailer, knowing that I probably wanted to combine them, though I also signed up for a couple book series and a podcast. I was really expecting to get assigned to a stranger but no! I got Poppyseedheart which made it both easier and harder to write the story; easier because I knew I could include a bunch of story aspects and side characters I thought they would enjoy, but harder because then I had to keep it a secret from her the whole time I was writing it. However, I this time I made zero effort to disguise that the writing was mine, and I believe they guessed within like three paragraphs lol. Well, I guess by the end of this writing year I had a brand. Thank you again to Colourexplosion for betaing this one.
The Same Sky (cowritten) — BTS, Namjoon/Jin & Hoseok/Jimin | currently at 134K | started posting in July 2021, latest update in November 2022, wrote about 2K of it this year, the rest of this year’s words written by my fantastic collaborator ShinySherlock.
What can I even say about this story 134K words in? I love it so, so much. Shiny and I both started writing it in mid-2020. It was born out of a Podtogether project (so far, the only one I’ve done). We both fell into BTS around the same time, and we both love co-writing, and we both love the Firefly world. We have a shared google drive folder that has nearly 50 documents in it. Shiny basically taught me how to use google docs via this project, and has improved my writing alot over 2.5 years of working together. This story is the most ambitious writing project I’ve ever embarked on, and I am so fond and amused to look back to the absolute fearlessness with which I divided into something so huge even though I hadn’t written prose since 2015. I had zero hesitation of beginning a story with eight main characters, which covers 7 years of their lives, which I knew from the beginning would probably be over 100K. I worked on this as my NaNoWriMo project in 2020 and then on and off over most of 2021. I didn’t actively write as much of it in 2022, because I had gotten so far ahead in the story beyond our posting schedule. But with the next chapter we post, we will have caught up to where I am in writing, and it will be time to write some more! I know we are getting close to the end, as we are now sitting right at the edge of the story’s climax. But will it take us 20K more, or 40K more? Time will tell.
LOOKING AHEAD TO 2023
My biggest fic writing goal for 2023 is to finish The Same Sky, but I also know that the story needs to grow at its own pace and can’t be rushed. But I would love, love to wrap it up and get to see the whole thing in completion. My other goals are to co-write with some other friends! I have two kind of loose ideas tossed out with people that I think would be really fun. I also just want to keep being open to story ideas as they arrive in my brain. I am not one of those writers who is overwhelmed with plot bunnies or WIPs. In general, I am never working on more than two or at most three stories at a time. I like beginning something and working on it through its completion without big gaps generally. At the moment, my only two WIPs are Same Sky and a T4T Mingsung story from Jisung’s POV which is currently at 3700 words, but I have no idea how long it will be in the end. I haven’t plotted it out very carefully and also I did set it down to write my Yuletide story and record ITPE podfics and to participate in Voiceteam Mysterybox, so I will have to re-acquaint myself with it next time I open the doc. Other than that, who can say what 2023 will bring! I certainly could not have guessed what would happen in 2022 this time last year.
This year I posted 6 complete stories ranging from 950 words to 44K words, and also updated my very big, ongoing co-written WIP. Pretty much all of them were a first for me in one way or another, so I wanted to write a little bit about each of them.
Promises Broken and Made — SVT, Seungkwan/Vernon | 23,032 words | April
When I started this story I had never written Seventeen before, never written a story set in Seoul before, never written a breakup/makeup and never written either of these POVs! The whole idea started when I joked to Poppyseedheart about an AU of Seungkwan as a CEO and Vernon as a rapper; I threw the idea at them in a twitter ficlet prompt thread and she didn’t respond, so I decided to write it myself. It got so much longer and more earnest than I was expecting! But I had such a good time weaving in every SVT member plus some BTS cameos and other kpop and kdrama and TV personalities. I spent a lot of time researching various neighborhoods, stores, clubs, and parks to try and set scenes in real locations. I also had such a good time digging into the contrast of Vernon’s more mellow and big picture POV versus a very neurotic, anxious and fixated Seungkwan. He’s my guy and I love him so much! I want to write more of him in 2023.
Rings — SVT, Mingyu/Jeonghan | 950 words | May
This short story was written from a Voiceteam prompt, and all in one sitting. I am still getting used to writing to prompts and slowly growing my own confidence in writing to fullfill challenges. This story is also based in the real tradition of SVT members getting a new group “promise ring” every couple of years. Can you believe they are in a 13-way engagement? Congrats to them all.
You Know I Can’t Leave You Alone — SKZ, Jisung/Hyunjin, Jisung/Hyunjin/Seungmin, Jisung/Hyunjin
/Minho | 14,095 words | July
This is a story I didn’t think I would write. It’s a remix of Poppyseedheart’s what's mine is yours kind of?? More like, I took the same concept and ran with it in a completely different direction. The concept is an idolverse AU in which Stray Kids have a group bond, which is based on the transfer of pain from one member to another in a chain. Poppyseedheart’s take on this is a very upsetting MinChan in which the painbond complicates and probably worsens their ability to communicate with each other. My brain said, but what if Hyngsung kink negotiations? I wrote 2K of it in maybe February and shared it in a google doc with a few people and thought that was the end of it. Then I read a couple of Alexenglish’s Jisung POV stories over the summer and they made me also want to dip back into writing Jisung POV, so I picked the story back up and wrote the other 12K in about a week and a half. I literally don’t know where it all came from! I’d say this is the most explicit fic I’ve written though most of the spicy scenes are not exactly traditional ones? Anyway, I really love this AU verse and I am interested in maybe writing something else in it again at some point.
Bright Enough To Light Up Any Dark — SVT, Mingyu/Jeonghan/Seungcheol | 44,082 words | September
My epic! This is the longest prose story I have ever finished, though not the longest I have started (see The Same Sky). This idea came to me in mid April when I went to see the “Seventeen: Power of Love” movie in theaters with three members of my writing group. I remember seeing Jeonghan huge on the screen and thinking, “Wow, it looks like he’s been burning the candle at both ends” (affectionate). And then seeing Mingyu look like the picture of glowing health and thinking, “If only there was some way that Mingyu could transfer some of his energy to Jeonghan.” Sortly before this I had read the first two books of the Scholomance series by Naomi Novik and the idea of Mingyu as a mana-sharer came into my head. I knew kind of right away that I wanted it to be a complicated triangle between Mingyu, Jeonghan and Seungcheol, and that I wanted every member of Seventeen to appear and that I wanted it to be kind of a rewrite of the first book in the series. Initially I was going to kill off one or more characters in the story, but I walked it back a little. A few of the other twists at the end only occurred to me while I was writing (which took place between April-September, interrupted by the two week madness of You Know I Can’t Leave You Alone and my slower, more consistent work on Same Sky). I wanted to thank Colourexplosion and Pammie for both betaing this story, which lead to a late addition of a short but key scene.
804 –– SVT, Minghao/Jun | 3630 words | November
This one was written for a fest in a writing discord I am part of. As a group, we threw a bunch of tropes into a spinner wheel and came up with a set of prompts. Eight of us all wrote stories to fit these tropes and submitted them to an anonymous collection, and then had a week or two to read them and try to guess who had authored each story. You can find the list of prompts we wrote to, and all of the stories from the fest, here. I did pretty badly guessing other people’s stories (only 3 out of 8- or I guess 4 out of 8 if you could knowing which one was mine). But this story was my first time writing Minghao’s POV, and my first time writing a story with unrequited feelings, and my first time intentionally trying to disguise my writing style! I’m hoping we run another one of these fests this year because it was a lot of fun (and maybe I could do better both hiding myself and guessing next time?) I want to thank jamesbonds for betaing this one, and encouraging me to cut the last scene, around 1000 words, that really softened the ending.
Spirit of the Season — SKZ, Jisung/Minho | 8585 words | December
This is my first ever Yuletide story! I’ve known about Yuletide for a few years, and considered signing up last year but was intimidated by the idea of writing for a small fandom outside of the kpop I’ve writing since I got back into writing fic in mid 2020. But all the writing I did earlier in the year gave me a lot of confidence, and also I realized I could sign up for individual kpop MVs even if the groups themselves had too many fics to qualify. I signed up for SKZ Christmas Evel and The Thunderous NOEASY trailer, knowing that I probably wanted to combine them, though I also signed up for a couple book series and a podcast. I was really expecting to get assigned to a stranger but no! I got Poppyseedheart which made it both easier and harder to write the story; easier because I knew I could include a bunch of story aspects and side characters I thought they would enjoy, but harder because then I had to keep it a secret from her the whole time I was writing it. However, I this time I made zero effort to disguise that the writing was mine, and I believe they guessed within like three paragraphs lol. Well, I guess by the end of this writing year I had a brand. Thank you again to Colourexplosion for betaing this one.
The Same Sky (cowritten) — BTS, Namjoon/Jin & Hoseok/Jimin | currently at 134K | started posting in July 2021, latest update in November 2022, wrote about 2K of it this year, the rest of this year’s words written by my fantastic collaborator ShinySherlock.
What can I even say about this story 134K words in? I love it so, so much. Shiny and I both started writing it in mid-2020. It was born out of a Podtogether project (so far, the only one I’ve done). We both fell into BTS around the same time, and we both love co-writing, and we both love the Firefly world. We have a shared google drive folder that has nearly 50 documents in it. Shiny basically taught me how to use google docs via this project, and has improved my writing alot over 2.5 years of working together. This story is the most ambitious writing project I’ve ever embarked on, and I am so fond and amused to look back to the absolute fearlessness with which I divided into something so huge even though I hadn’t written prose since 2015. I had zero hesitation of beginning a story with eight main characters, which covers 7 years of their lives, which I knew from the beginning would probably be over 100K. I worked on this as my NaNoWriMo project in 2020 and then on and off over most of 2021. I didn’t actively write as much of it in 2022, because I had gotten so far ahead in the story beyond our posting schedule. But with the next chapter we post, we will have caught up to where I am in writing, and it will be time to write some more! I know we are getting close to the end, as we are now sitting right at the edge of the story’s climax. But will it take us 20K more, or 40K more? Time will tell.
LOOKING AHEAD TO 2023
My biggest fic writing goal for 2023 is to finish The Same Sky, but I also know that the story needs to grow at its own pace and can’t be rushed. But I would love, love to wrap it up and get to see the whole thing in completion. My other goals are to co-write with some other friends! I have two kind of loose ideas tossed out with people that I think would be really fun. I also just want to keep being open to story ideas as they arrive in my brain. I am not one of those writers who is overwhelmed with plot bunnies or WIPs. In general, I am never working on more than two or at most three stories at a time. I like beginning something and working on it through its completion without big gaps generally. At the moment, my only two WIPs are Same Sky and a T4T Mingsung story from Jisung’s POV which is currently at 3700 words, but I have no idea how long it will be in the end. I haven’t plotted it out very carefully and also I did set it down to write my Yuletide story and record ITPE podfics and to participate in Voiceteam Mysterybox, so I will have to re-acquaint myself with it next time I open the doc. Other than that, who can say what 2023 will bring! I certainly could not have guessed what would happen in 2022 this time last year.
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