snowflake_challenge

In your own space, celebrate a personal win from the past year: it can be a list of fanworks you're especially proud of, a gift of your time to the community, a quality or skill you cultivated in yourself, something you generally feel went well. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

2021 was a crazy year for me, with so many things both good and bad happening and life jumping from the snail's pace of 2020 to rocket speed and back to snail speed sometimes in the span of the same month. Some wins I'm celebrating:

• First thing's first, I'm clapping myself on the back for making it through 2021 mostly intact!
• I wrote for 5 fandoms and had 9 different ships as the main ships (for the fics I wrote where there were romantic ships), which is a big increase in variety from 2020.
• I succeeded in staying away from doing too many events: like I said, my 2021 was insanely unpredictable and doing these would have just added more stress.
• AO3 says I wrote 116k of fanfic in 2021, and given I took over two months off and that number doesn't include several unposted zine fics + a ~45k unposted rough draft, I'd say that's pretty impressive. 

Fingers crossed 2022 is slightly less whiplash-inducing than 2021 (not betting on it given the first two weeks alone LOL)! 

If I only do one challenge this year, it has to be this one. I'm primarily an AU writer. If characters have magic powers/sci-fi skills that basically give them magic powers in canon, I feel almost obligated to strip them away, and the reverse is true for characters with no powers. (I've just been doing more of the former because of what I've been watching and reading, but every sports anime I watch tempts me to give the characters magic powers.) I think stripping away powers forces me to really explore what makes a character interesting in the first place: who are they at their core without powers? Which is excellent for focusing on some juicy character development and placing it front and center.   

I also love writing AUs because I'm a control freak. I like worldbuilding a lot—it's one of my favorite parts of writing, and I don't like giving it up to someone else LOL—and I like having absolute control over it, because even if the setting is contemporary Japan/China/America/wherever canon takes place, there's still a lot of worldbuilding work that can go into writing contemporary settings. My longest fics (including one I'm still working on) use timestamps to mark dates, and I use timelines when I write to make sure everything has a logical flow and could actually happen when it's supposed to, so I guess that's also become my Thing as well haha. I do a lot of research when I write--I'm actually planning on including a selected bibliography with a WIP once I've posted it, because catching up with what the scientific literature for a certain subset of academia looked like ten years ago was more trouble than it was worth. When I both read and write, I have a weakness for historical AUs and those based on folklore and myths.

An AU that I wrote fairly recently based on folktales is when the rabbit comes down the mountain, a BNHA Fuyumi/Miruko fic about gods and humans.