Fandom Snowflake Challenge #4

Fandom Snowflake Challenge — January 7th

❄ Challenge #4 on snowflake_challenge.

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Goals!

I decided to skip around in which challenge I do when. So today is challenge four, ahha, which is ~goals~. I have many goals, but let's see if I can list out all of them, first. I'm working on only a couple of them at the moment, but I have some pie-in-the-sky ones I want to poke at during 2025.

Original:
• My primary novel. A grieving idiot summons something he Should Not and builds a found family while trying to fix his mistake. I'm in the final pre-query edits and procrastinating hard.
• New novel! A high fantasy wrapped around light magic, a jailbreak, and taking down a trafficking ring, featuring my favorite dynamic of powerful magic user + her loyal non-traditional family members.
• My portfolio project. A wiki containing all of the lore and background of an epic RPG, to illustrate that I can write an epic rpg, lol.
• A text-based escape room game. You, the player, wakes up from suspended animation to a too-helpful companion, a half-dismantled ship, and a mystery that, once solved, will hopefully allow you to escape with all your organs intact. For my portfolio, but also because I have a cool idea and I want to learn how to program in Twine. :)
• A screenplay. I wrote a fic that was ~tangentially related to the canon it was set in, using all OCs, and have been percolating porting the basic plot to a totally different genre. I just need a new solution to the central conflict, which is tricky.
• Sketch out new projects and graduate at least one to active project status: my untitled space opera, two time-travel novels, my narrative podcast concept, and a couple more in the veeerrry beginning stages.
  
  Fic:
• Batcryptid fic(s). I am slowly building up the Batfam with Gotham being a 'helpful' eldritch entity and ripping out each Bat's humanity, one by one, as I build the timeline from the ground up. I'm JUST about to introduce Clark, and after Clark is a longfic getting us to a resting point with Bruce, Alfred, and Gotham before I introduce baby Dickie.
• Batstargate fic. Jason PoV, with him as solo protag in the Stargate universe. Batfam post-reconciliation, but like...more about Jason undercover with the NID than batfam relationships.
• Several Other Bat Ideas (lol). I have an idea file with a handful of fusions and some two-cakes kind of exploration of tropes I like. (Hallucinations, Presumed Dead, Shapeshifters, etc.) If I manage to get through either of the previous two this year, I'll be tackling one or more of these.
• Finish Fire Safety. Did I post an 'Avengers take care of a dragon egg' fic in 2013 and never update the climactic chapter? I did!!! I've rewritten the damn thing twice and it's still not good enough. This is my WIP of the year if I decide to do a challenge later.
• Finish my 'Battle of Five Worldbuilding' boy's fic. This is a gen-rated 'boys go to college,' except the boys are from four different canons and injected into a fifth. The linking feature is that all the boys are the 'smart, sarcastic one,' from each canon. And now they're roommates, so I can compare and contrast the characters within the archetypes. I have to rewrite chapter two, because it's backwards.
• Finish my 'Battle of Five Worldbuilding' girl's fic. This is an...M-rated(? uncertain), crossover lesbian shipfic. Similar to the boy's fic, I yanked four ladies from their canons, but their linking feature is RedBlack women. As in...not-necessarily-evil, but they definitely have a dark and dangerous color scheme and are all highly competent, sharp, and goal-oriented.
• Work on Ghost Queen Wen Qing fic. What it says on the tin. I *really* wish I had an ending for this one, because the beginning is one of my favorite things I've written. Can't get any further, though, until I've figured out where I'm going with it, alas.
  
  Journal:
• 750 words a day, baby. (At, of course, the 750words site.) I've discovered that journalling keeps my mental health from tanking, so I'm dedicating myself to making sure I do it every day.
  
  Community:
• Continue to attend my Wednesday's Writer's Group. They're a good group of people and even if I'm not sharing anything, I do love to participate. :)
• Participate in GYWO discussions, say 'hi' to people, and generally just...be way more social this year in a writing respect.
• Snowflake Challenge (lol). Have I done precisely one (now two) challenges? Yes. That's in the spirit of the challenge, though, so I figure I'm okay.
  
  

All that said! I have my original novel edits, my Batcryptid project, my journalling, and my writer's group. The top one of each section are my priorities, and the rest are just gonna have to sort themselves out from there if/when I either finish the one above it or I'm choosing to let it rest for the day. Which...now that I've laid everything out...maybe I'll be able to get to some of the projects that are lower on the lists as the year goes by.

Fandom Snowflake Challenge #3

Fandom Snowflake Challenge — January 5th

❄ Challenge #3 on snowflake_challenge.

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A Fannish Opinion that has Changed Over Time

My opinions about fan things are usually pretty chill, and now that I'm older, I let them evolve on their own, so the ones I can really think about Changing (capital-letter changing) were both back when I first encountered online fandom in any sort of fannish community sense. I have a small one and a big one, both related to me first starting to write fic, and both kind of took me by surprise. :)

• Johnlock with a rule!63 Sherlock:
  
  I wrote a fic for BBC Sherlock based on a kinkmeme prompt that was basically a romance novel prompt. Since, at the time, I had been reading an exorbitant amount of Victorian-era romance novels, I decided to tackle it.
  
  The first half of the opinion change is starts with the fact that, at the time, I thought it would be easiest to gender-swap Sherlock. I think the swap went rather well, all things considered. The writing of the fic was a fun and interesting challenge to make sure that Sherlock was IC while having such a fundamental shift in background. Plus, I got to build her genderbent friends, who were minor characters in canon. Thing is: would I do the same genderbending thing now? Absolutely not. I would zero percent try to make Sherlock a girl in any future fics, if I was ever drawn to writing for the fandom for whatever bizarre reason. The prompt allowed for het, and I made it het to cleave closer to the formula I was using, but honestly, doing the same now strikes me as...hrm. I don't like to read made-het fics in any of the fandoms I've since encountered and enjoyed. I find them unnecessary and often a bit too self-inserty for my reading pleasure. So I'm in the strange position of looking at something I wrote and do enjoy rereading and knowing that I would never voluntarily read it if I found it in the wild. If I wrote it again, I'd honestly probably make gender a nonissue within the narrative, or just have an outright ABO world. A half-step more worldbuilding for a little less unnecessary het. (Even if it did turn out well, and it's a fun read, imho.)
  
  The second half of the opinion change, however, is what really sideswiped me. I absolutely no longer ship Johnlock. I just...don't. I had to force the characters together enough that I was like, 'Wow, I *barely* believe this, and I'm the one who made it plausible.' And if I was writing a romance novel where I'm making sure they fit together so they do feel like a reasonable couple, then canon is not giving me nearly enough to believe it anymore. Not when the characters are such assholes, by design. A good asshole character can make a wonderful ship partner, but now--especially in retrospect; poor BBC Sherlock fandom--these were not good asshole characters. They were just assholes and I don't want them near each other anymore. Give me a good old-fashioned Watson from an earlier canon.
  
  
• Fic, and me writing it:
  
  Okay, this one's hilarious, but when I first got obsessed with Doctor Who and went hunting More, I encountered fic, and had a whole crisis about 'writing in someone else's world.' I was drawn to do so, but also: why would I do that?! I wrote only rp and original fiction up until that point, and Pern (and McCafferey's attitudes towards fic) had sort of shaped my concepts of 'but you can't write the characters like the author writes them...' So I was sitting there, staring at the idea of trying to write someone else's characters. Wasn't that like...inherently wrong or something? (Lol)
  
  I ended up reading a lot of Marvel, actually, until my brain settled out into a: oh, these canons are basically fanfic anyways. Especially Marvel and Doctor Who. And then I felt 100% less concerned about writing someone else's characters, because I wasn't, was I? I was ingesting the characters and making them my own, to tell the kind of story I wanted to tell, that was in conversation with canon in a unique and interesting way. Fic was fun *because* of canon, because there was a whole substrate that I could reference and draw on and interpret and reflect. Delicious. I'm honestly drawn to these type of long-standing fic-like canons, because they're big enough to have been contributed to by many different authors. I honestly find it a little difficult to fic smaller canons, because I haven't seen the core of the character interpreted through different lenses--something I both love and find useful in my own writing endeavors.
  
  So eventually fic became its own Thing in my head. Which is also very funny, because in one of my writer's groups, a friend wrote fic of one of *my* stories. Which was. A Very Wild Experience. I had to become cool with a lot of things very fast. It also helped me realize some of the fundamental reasons that people tackle transformative works, especially fic, and settle into the idea that I really just wanted to write so much of it.

Fandom Snowflake Challenge #7

Fandom Snowflake Challenge — January 13th

❄ Challenge #7 on snowflake_challenge.

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Wishlist!

I had to go look at other people's wishlists to see what kind of thing people were asking for, because I've not done one of these casual fandom wishlists before. Only exchanges, lol, which are very different. So!

• Music recommendations, and a reason why you're recommending it. And what I mean is...
  • Your favorite song!
  • The new song you just heard on the radio that you had to go look up immediately.
  • A song that makes you think of a particular character, and who that character is.
  • A song that would TOTALLY be the theme song of your life.
  • The 14th random song in your library.
  • A song in a genre you literally never listen to, except for this one.
  • The song that flings you back to middle school/hs/a different period of your life.
  • Any other song that you think would be awesome for me to know about...
  • Basically, The Algorithm can only introduce me to so much new music at a time, and Boil The Frog is finicky. I love hearing about why a song is significant, too. That's the best part (beyond introducing me to new music.)
• Scifi and Fantasy book recs! I have finished roughly zero published books since 2020 and I'm woefully behind in knowing what's out there. What's something you read recently and loved? (Fic and translated cnovels have been my go-tos for a bit.) I'm currently reading Translation State, but that's all I've got, lol. I am up to date on Martha Wells, Anne Leckie, and Jason Pargin and that's...basically it, so even if it's literally everywhere and how could I have missed it--? I probably missed it. :D
• TIME TRAVEL RECS!!! What books or movies or TV shows have you watched that feature Time Travel that you would rec? I've...watched a bunch of stuff, but I'm always hunting more.
• Fic recs for your favorite fics in small fandoms. I eat through a LOT of fic, but small fandoms don't often get recs, and they contain some of my absolute favorite fics that I never would have been able to find except through a rec.
• Lastly, a VERY pie-in-the-sky request: doodles/fanworks of any of my fics. XD