Happy 10th Ficversary to me

[nubianamy]

(crossposted from Tumblr, because I still almost never post either place)
Here it is, May 15, when I celebrate the day I started writing Glee fanfiction. I can't believe it's been ten years of absurdly prolific story-making.

This year, during the pandemic, even while spending ten months recovering from a virus, teaching from home, and struggling to focus on life in general, I somehow managed to put almost 500k on AO3. (That does not count the two collaborative stories we started writing in December 2020, neither of which have been published anywhere yet, and together which total over 300k. Good grief.) I passed the 4 million word mark earlier this year.  

I finished the Puckurt theater series There All The Honour Lies. It was so meaningful to dig into all the source material, but even more, after eight years, to finally give them their happy ending.

I did NaNo in November and also in April this year, which boosted my output, but the big commitment this year is Get Your Words Out. I jumped in with both feet with a pledge of 350k words. The community is full of long-time fanfic writers and it's so nice to have their support, and the daily wordcount spreadsheet provided to participants has really helped me stay on target.

It's been a year of collaboration. I have felt so lucky to have weathered the summer of the pandemic with other writers on Discord. I met brain twin and cowriter

beshrew-my-very-heart

and for that I feel grateful every day, even if we don't always have time to write together. It's amazing to share my enthusiasm for this weird, flawed fandom with someone else who gets it. Infinity reverses, my friend.

This was the year I finally decided to dip my toe in the Hawaii 5-0 McDanno bay, and wow, is the water warm. I wrote one long story for the 2020 Big Bang and one short story just for fun. It's been a while since I tried a new fandom, but they made me feel very welcome! I'm looking forward to participating in the Big Bang again this summer.

That wasn't the only new (well, new to me) fandom I wrote for this year. While re-re-rewatching The West Wing, I began a series of vignettes following Leo, Abbey, and Jed's relationship through each episode. It's very intimidating to write anything at all for such an illustrious and dedicated group of readers, but I have really enjoyed it.

I also discovered Glee is not as dead a fandom as I thought it was. In particular, fans still love Dave Karofsky as much as ever, and I've had a blast writing all kinds of Dave-centric short stories. I am proud of one in particular, which I wrote across the two days of vote-tallying of the November 2020 US election. I also wrote a story for the Prom King zine, celebrating Dave's character over 10 years.

And, of course, to the five people who are still reading the Donutverse, I can't tell you how much I appreciate you. Not only does it sustain me, but it provides my therapist a lot of amusement. I've been revising the whole series, continuing to write the season 2 story, and done a whole bunch of plotting for future stories with nefarious collaborators. What do Peter Pan, a leather bar in New York City, and the CIA have to do with the Donutverse? Stay tuned.

Here's to another year!

Other ficversary posts: 2013 | 2015 and again and again | 2016 | 2019 | 2020