The Unfortunate Result Of Spare Time

Belated thanks for the birthday wishes -- they were very much appreciated!

Finished editing the WIP o'Doom (and nearly a full week ahead of schedule!), so will hopefully be a little less AWOL for... well, until the next ill-advised fic idea hits, I suppose.

For now, though: that educational meme that's been going around recently.

( Cut for Questions! )

I promised myself I'd try to post some little check-ins for this, so here we go.

A little late for the start of the month, but... eh, it's February. All bets are off.

So. getyourwordsout check-in #1:

Had a pretty awesome start, all told. A few little hiccups means a lot of time got taken up by Technical Issues (TM), but I still got what I wanted out of the month, creatively speaking, so it's all water under the bridge.

Total word count for the month was the highest it's been in well over a year (which is very good, because my GYWO pledge is the highest it's been in many years!), and I achieved my main goal for the month, which was to finish the first draft of Ye Endless WIP O'Doom Part 2 (Electric Boogaloo).

Tragically, this means that the entirety of February (at the very least) is going to be spent on editing said first draft... which, as we all know, is the worst, most exhausting, most soul-sucking part of any creative pursuit.

Writing longfic is my happy place. Editing longfic is the bane of my existence.

I would very, very much like this whole thing to be done, edited, cleaned up, and posted by the end of the month... but given the fact that February is the other bane of my existence, I'll accept this is highly optimistic.

If I can see an end to this darn thing by the time we hit March, I'll call it a win.

Someone posted this quote from Fane in Divinity Original Sin 2, and I thought it was worth keeping.

If you have spent your life staring at a thing, you can write about it with knowledge. You can write about it with love. But it is almost impossible to write about it with wonder.

I've never kept Fane around long enough to get any of his banter, but maybe I should change that...

Skipped the Top Ten because I couldn't think of anything to list!

Was going to skip this one too, because talking positively about myself is terrifying and horrible, but dammit, if there was ever a good reason to step out of one's comfort zone...

Challenge #7

LIST THREE (or more) THINGS YOU LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF. They don’t have to be your favorite things, just things that you think are good. Feel free to expand as much or as little as you want.

Sticking to fannishness for this one, for probably obvious reasons...

( Oh, this got long? )

Write a love letter to fandom. It might be to fandom in general, to a particular fandom, favourite character, anything at all.

Not quite a letter -- I suck at all things epistolary -- but a great big shout-out and a whole wide world of love to tiny fandoms and the people in them... be they writers, readers, or lurking squee-ers.

I see a lot of people posting on other platforms about decreases in 'engagement' in their fandoms, and it's most often from big-fandom folks lamenting that their last fic got less than a hundred kudos. And while I can definitely understand their particular perspective -- big fandoms are big, and the nature of the Internet has become such that everything feels like a numbers game and/or a competition -- I also kind of feel like everyone should spend a year or so in a fandom with less than half a dozen people in it.

Spending time with a Thing -- and creating for that Thing -- solely for the love of it, knowing that you're likely to get low double-digit hits, much less comments or kudos, is such a freeing experience... and the small handful of kudos and comments you do get in an environment like that -- just the idea that somebody else loves the Thing as much as you do, and took the time to read your silly fic about it! -- means the whole darn world.

I'm not exaggerating when I say a single kudo on one of my fics will sustain me for a full week... or when I say it felt like Christmas to see someone post a single 100-word drabble -- for a ship I don't even enjoy! -- after seven straight months of only my own work in the fandom tag. That delirious joy at finding out there's one or two other people out there thinking about your silly little fandom... that's a feeling that I think can easily get lost in the competitive numbers-game of big fandoms with big social media presences.

So, yea. This is a love not-quite-letter to those thriving in tiny, barely-existent spaces with only a couple of others, finding ways to sustain their own love and creativity for the Thing. We may not make as much noise as the bigger spaces, but we have our own kind of fun, and it's worth every otherwise-silent second.

Slipping this one in right under the wire, before the ball drops later tonight...

( The Fannish Year In Review )

And with that done... I shall return in 2026, for a new season of Snowflake!

So. Here we are. Again.

I haven't done this in a very long time. And, to be honest, I was never particularly good at it, even when I did.

But I miss this quiet, peaceful corner of the internet, and I miss the simplicity of this kind of blogging as a form of expression. Expression for its own sake, I should say, and for the simple act of speaking to oneself and sitting with oneself, with no goal or purpose other than giving a vent to the wayward thoughts, or answering questions no-one asked, or just gently existing through the keyboard and not expecting anything meaningful to come of it. So...

Scorched earth, so to speak. A new start with a new journal. A blank page (or canvas). 'So many possibilities'.

We shall see what, if anything, grows here.