I usually recap the year of writing, answering some questions to get some insight on my own progress and post that to my livejournal (it’s dead, but I still have people there). I thought it’d be fun to share it with you guys too.
So here’s what I wrote this year with the links, and the questions I’ve answered.
Happy New Year! xx Buggy
Last year my resolution was: 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.
Needless to say, I did it!
Sanctuaire (wordpress | fanfiction.net) Twilight/The Originals | Bella Swan/Kol Mikaelson
On a class trip to New Orleans, Bella stumbles upon history like she never anticipated. Learning about one’s self is never easy, but discovering new things is always an adventure to true independence.
Pandore (sequel to Sanctuaire) (wordpress | fanfiction.net) Twilight/The Originals + Person of Interest | Bella Swan/Kol Mikaelson + Sameen Shaw/Klaus Mikaelson
Three hundred years in the future, the balance of supernaturals in New Orleans has shifted in the favor of the witches, who kicked out the vampires a few generations back. Abandoned by his siblings, Klaus returns to Mystic Falls and decides to open Pandora’s box.
Fractured Marionette (wordpress | fanfiction.net) Twilight/The Originals | Bella Swan/Klaus Mikaelson
He believed ending a nearby vampire community was a political move. Klaus never expected his brother to bring home a stray from in a bleeding heart decision. Just what had these creatures done to this broken, young woman who never experienced a normal, human life? And how did he have a hand in her life before he even met her?
Missed Connections (wordpress | fanfiction.net) Twilight/Teen Wolf | Bella Swan/Isaac Lahey
Runaway bride Bella decides to live life to the fullest and in freedom and doesn’t care about responsibilities anymore. She decides to do anything and everything her heart desires and stumbles upon a pretty boy who’s in for some fun.
The Hellblazer, a witch and a spirit walk into a bar (wordpress | fanfiction.net) Constantine/Harry Potter
One night, a strange widow becomes possessed and tries to kidnap a ghost hunter.
In the van, on the floor (wordpress) Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD/The Vampire Diaries | Skye/Kol Mikaelson
A simple one night stand, or is it?
The Woodnymph (wordpress | fanfiction.net) Twilight/The Originals | Bella Swan/Kol Mikaelson
She’s the girl who waited. With a temper. And a tendency to talk to trees.
On the Sixth Day of Christmas, My Brother Gave to Me… (Lemonade) (wordpress | better in texas) Twilight/The Vampire Diaries | Bella Swan/Damon Salvatore
Stefan gifted his brother and his girlfriend a weekend away in a snowy cabin. A blizzard keeps them there and is that a human hiding in the closet?
On the Seventh Day of Christmas, My True Love Gave To Me… (Seven Heads A-Rolling) (wordpress | better in texas) Twilight/The Originals | Bella Swan/Kol Mikaelson
Meet Bella, the human who keeps saving Edward Cullen, and is fed up with it. She’s also pissed off because she was supposed to be turned at Christmas.
On the Eighth Day of Christmas, My Sister-in-law Gave to Me… (A God of War) (wordpress | better in texas) Twilight/The Originals | Bella Swan/Klaus Mikaelson
Bella doesn’t like it that Elijah is so miserable all the time and finds him a date.
TOTAL WORDCOUNT: 400.035 words (seriously?!) – Actually there’s more, but I’ve only listed my completed fics and no collaborations.
Shortest story: The Hellblazer, a witch and a spirit walk into a bar (1450 words)
Longest story: Fractured Marionette (101.455 words)
How has my writing changed from last year to this year, according to me:
What has changed? WHAT HAS CHANGED?! Well, first of all, as you can see, I switched subjects to write about. I’m using fandom bicycle Bella Swan and throw her in with some new vampires and make her more interesting. You can blame Meeko, she started it and pulled me to the dark side through our Twilight/Arrow crossovers. Actually, without Meeko, I probably wouldn’t have been able to write Sanctuaire. She gave me a prompt and I ran with it. I ran with it and I never looked back. Little did we both know that it’d turn into a long fic (with a sequel! But I’m never doing that again!) and so easily as well.
She then also dragged me into a new world of friends on facebook and we both made an account with our pen names and friends accumulated. Great friends. So much fun. So much craziness that I used to have on livejournal. I’ve abandoned livejournal in favor of my writing facebook and my website, mainly because mostly tumbleweeds are rolling through here and things are simply not the same.
Change of scenery does one good, I suppose.
My writing has changed. Yes. Mainly because I’m writing about the supernatural now. Magic. Vampires. Werewolves. More is possible. There are more rules to keep in mind, but also, it’s so freeing that it’s the biggest sandbox ever.
My writing also hasn’t changed. I still don’t mind stomping around like an elephant in a porcelain chest. I write dark things. Fractured Marionette got exceptionally dark, but it was great. For the life of me, I can’t write fluffy stuff without having a partner who can reign in the darkness. When I write with Meeko, things get dark, but she also makes me write the lighter stuff. But solo? I struggle. But I trod on and heh. Words.
So many words.
I even participated in Camp Nanowrimo this year. I used it as a kickstarter for Pandore. 25k words a month first, but I beat that in the first or second week. Upped it to 50k and I managed to write that. So many words. I failed at Nanowrimo last year, but I don’t know, maybe there’s less pressure during Camp?
Where did you post your stories this year? Thanks to my wifey Meeko, I have a shiny wordpress website where I posted my fics. I’ve also started posting them on fanfiction.net again and there’s this cool website called BetterInTexas and I post there as well. I only post links on my livejournal.
My favourite story this year: It’s a tie between Sanctuaire and Fractured Marionette. While I struggled at first with Sanctuaire – mainly because it was my first solo Twilight fic and while I have read the books once and seen the movies once… I loved the relationship between Bella and Kol and all the other Mikaelsons. Fractured Marionette was an exploration on how far I could push things, plus, Klaus and Bella are cute together. Yes. Cute.
My best story this year: Oh, I don’t know. If you go by review and view count, I’d say Sanctuaire. But I think that mostly came from it being different from anything out there. Nobody wrote Bella/Kol, it was new. However, if you go by viewer enthusiasm, I’d say Fractured Marionette. And I can’t choose between them.
Story most under appreciated by the universe, according to me: Pandore. The sequel to Sanctuaire and I know WHY. 1) It’s a sequel that I hadn’t originally planned and 2) I used a different format and it just… It hasn’t been read well apart from a handful of regular readers that came to the story from Sanctuaire but no. It’s not popular and I won’t ever do a sequel again. Nor writing in first person, like I’ve done for The Hellblazer, A witch and A spirt walk into a bar… nope. Not for me.
Most Fun story: Missed Connections. I had a guest reviewer on Sanctuaire who asked if I could write a Bella/Isaac from Teen Wolf and I did. It started as a crazy one shot and, by popular demand, grew into a multi chapter fun romp. The tone was very different from the rest of the stories.
Most Sexy story: Writing in a new fandom brings its challenges, which is worse when you start to write in several new fandoms. Young fandoms. Reviewers demanding a lemon. Oh yes, new jargon for me as well. Of course, I’ve heard of lemons, but I never ever used it for any of my fics. So, apart from The Hellblazer, A witch and A spirt walk into a bar…, every story has sex in it. Yep. Hot vampire sex. Rawr.
So to answer this… hmmm… I suppose it’s Missed Connections. While, yes, Bella’s in trouble, it’s more about a game, a chase, she has going on with Isaac. In the beginning anyway, before he decides he’s going to help her out with some friends of his. I wrote this with the word ‘crack’ in the back of my mind, so the story is very different from the rest of the stories, and it’s not really crack. It’s very playful.
Story with single sexiest moment: In Fractured Marionette, Bella’s a broken doll. She’s been broken by the Cullens in so many ways that re-adjustment is… hard. It takes time and patience to deprogram someone and teach them that there’s a different way of living, and there’s a scene in the story where she feels like she’s not pleasing enough for her new King and proceeds to seduce Klaus over breakfast. Knowing that she’s not ready for it at all – and he doesn’t want to take advantage of her – he has to compel her not to do things like that anymore until she’s ready.
Hardest story to write: The first four stories listed. While they were a lot of fun, they were also the hardest as I did a lot of research for them. Especially for Sanctuaire, because of the unfamiliarity with the fandoms. I mean, I watched Twilight and I watched The Originals, but that was it. I had no desire to write for it, so why take the plunge? I also had google maps open all the time. Wikipages. Everything. While it was hard, it was also so much fun to do research. So much fun.
Easiest story to write: All stories were quite easy to write. I wrote the Woodnymph (50.000 words and a little bit extra) in only two weeks. I suppose the last few stories were the easiest to write due to all the research I’ve done for Sanctuaire, Fractured Marionette and Pandore.
Most “Holy crap, that’s wrong, even for you” story: It’s funny how people get a certain view of you over the internet, or in real life, for that matter, and people who just get to know me are quite shocked about the fact that my stories tend to be a little bit leaning to the darker side of life? Fractured Marionette is a story with major warnings for triggers slapped on it because I couldn’t help myself when my head descended into this dark pit and decided to write it. It was fun to find the balance between dark and light and sometimes fall in the story before throwing in a ladder to crawl out of the darkness. People who’ve known me for a long time on livejournal know that I can go dark and angsty! So it was entertaining to see people discover this side of me. If it wasn’t for Meeko, the story would have gone even darker.
Coming in 2016:
(Twilight/The Originals) Beautiful Soul | Bella Swan/Klaus Mikaelson
(Twilight/The Originals) Northern Light | Kol Mikaelson/OC (this is a companion story to Meeko’s Neon Light which is a Bella Swan/Elijah Mikaelson)
with Meeko:
(Person of Interest/The Originals) Blood bath | Sameen Shaw/Klaus Mikaelson
(Covert Affairs/Twilight) TBD | TBD
(Twilight/Arrow) Raising the Stakes – a sequel to Gambling Hearts.
(Twilight/Arrow) Boondoggle
(Stargate/Stargate Atlantis/NCIS/Dancing with the Stars) Toe the Line
Incomplete versions of these stories already can be found on the internet if you know where to look.