Hey, this is a great start of the new year; get infected by the plague. Okay, not a literal plague but shortness of breath, fever, runny nose, hurty throat, loads of congestion in the lungs… it’s brilliant. Great start of the New Year. Let’s do it again!!!! I’m having a hard time concentrating on things and even though I should be in bed, I have a cat who doesn’t like to be locked up in his room and he’s too much of an asshole to be allowed to roam free.
Meeko sent me some Christmas gifts! The package includes measuring spoons and measuring cups (we don’t “do” spoons and cups here that much, we’re metric and some recipes just simply aren’t), a Chuckle Buddy Donkey (and it’s hilarious!) named Oliver because I tend to make him chuckle when we’re writing… a small booklet on Why I’m so awesome and it’s hilarious. If you didn’t know the context of some things, you’d think I was a psycho or a terrorist.
AND! She gave me a F*ck Cancer t-shirt. (No image available, it was too dark!) Now all I need to do is to prepare her package and send it off as well. It won’t be as cool as her package but it’ll be a package 🙂
You know what surprises me? I haven’t done a fic for this for Stargate Atlantis yet. Or… well… nope. I think… I have done one for NCIS but I don’t think it’s that great, anyway… a while back I posted a little fic from 2008 on this website, it’s a Numb3rs fic called Retrogression that deals with Alzheimer’s. You see, when I write things, I want to write different things, things that some people are afraid of of tackling.
If I have to be honest with myself, now that I’ve had more years of writing under my belt, I could have done a better job, but eh. *shrugs* It’s there. I’ve also written an NCIS fic in this style… but I’m not really happy with it as I am with Retrogression or Antiques.
While writing up my Year in Review meme of the last three years (I usually go over what I’ve written every year, I just forgot the last few years), I found out that I wrote another fic like Retrogression. It’s a White Collar fic called: Antiques and I just posted it here. I wrote it in 2011 so it’s not that old.
In the last three years I’ve written only 15 fics. Well, completed fics anyway. Two were co-written (one with a friend and of course, Gambling Hearts with Meeko). Five were original stories and I haven’t really touched fandom since the beginning of 2013. And most of it isn’t even worthy of publishing but I did anyway.
You know what the funny thing is? I can explain the slump in writing stuff. I honestly can and I hate myself for it. Let me explain… I started to write with a friend again and Oh boy. I’ve learned from this experience. Don’t co-write a story with someone who’s not at the same level of writing as you are. Seriously. It’ll only pull you down, your writing will start to suck and you have to spend so much time and energy into explaining things to the other writer or fixing their problems that you’ll eventually get a burn out. Which I did.
I’ve started to grow a hatred towards the stories we are/were writing and that’s because we wrote so compulsively and I had to fix a lot in the beginning. This is not on her, it’s all on me. I’ve talked to her about this and we’ve cut our work on most of our active stories. If we manage to finish at least one this year, it’d be great.
My friend is great to write with, really. She has some wicked ideas and sometimes I have to slow her down because they get too “out there” but her imagination never ceases. I am so happy for her that she’s started to make some baby steps into writing on her own again because writing should be fun, not something you feel like you have to do. At least when writing on her own, she doesn’t have to deal with me! *grins*
Anyway, in 2014 or the end of 2013 really, I got a writing burn out and I told her that I needed a break from all our stories. I really didn’t know what story we were working on in the end and I had gained a massive self esteem issue when it came to my writing and it took me a long time to pick myself up from it.
It wasn’t until Meeko poked me about writing together again, that we still had a lot of stories unfinished. And, instead of working on those, we started a completely new fic. Which was great. And I apologized a lot about the way that I wrote, since I had gotten lazy about it.
2014 was also the year where I didn’t want to write Stargate Atlantis or NCIS or Sanctuary or even Numb3rs fics anymore. I had been weened off NCIS to begin with, losing my interest in the show and things like that, but we also lost a very very good fandom friend in February; Claire. Claire loved Stargate Atlantis, Sanctuary and Numb3rs. She made me ship people I didn’t think were shippable. And apart from a fandom friend, she was also a normal friend. Before she got really sick, we chatted on messenger – a lot. So when she passed, I just… It’s still hard. I can’t watch SGA or Sanctuary AT ALL. Whenever I spot one of her favorite actors doing a guest stint on a tv show, I cry. Because we can’t squee about it like we used to.
However, enough is enough. Claire will always be missed and I just have to man up and face the music. Meeko and I will finish at least one of our Stargate Atlantis fics in 2015, it’ll probably be Toe the Line as Claire would have loved seeing it completed.
Apart from writing and finishing stories with Meeko, my 2015 resolution will be that I’ll write more stuff on my own again. Proper stuff. Three thousand words or more. It doesn’t have to be fandom, but it would be nice.
I have read 53 out of 50 books in 2014 so I beat the challenge that I initially set to 12. In 2015, I’ve put my goal on 50 again. Reading is fun. Reading is good. Add me on goodreads if you want to keep up with what I’m reading. I can’t promise you that all books will be good though.
Apart from adding the White Collar fic Antiques to the website, I’ve also uploaded Chapter 4 of Boondoggle (it’s also on our fanfiction.net page).
Now, I’ve spent the entire day, including re-writes, on this post. Now I’m going to bed. Catch you all later:)
