30 stories about being or turning 30
Dec. 24th, 2017 08:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraSo I finished the 30Fic project. 30 stories, finished before I was out of my 30s. :)
I haven't posted about fic much, in the past couple years, except for Yuletide. But I started this project on LJ and I wanted to wrap it up here, and also do some self-indulgent poking at numbers and discussion of choices I made and that sort of thing.
I'm going to say this again at the end, but a giant thank-you to everyone who was interested in my stories, or happy to see me writing again, back at the very beginning of the project. To the people who commented on the first three,ccommack, snarkyshark2, Michael, eclectic_boy, emsariel, ruthling, uncleamos, belecrivain, and sofer: this whole thing is your fault for encouraging me.
The AO3 page for the series is here.
Way more about it behind the cut:
98400 words for the whole series, (if you leave off the bonus story) which sort of reminds me of when my fanfic novel was 43 words shy of 50k, like, what, I couldn't write another 1600 words somewhere? But in fact the median word count is only 1799, so 1600 words is in fact a significant chunk of words, in this project. 13 of the stories are flash-length (under 1500 words). My overall average word count for all my AO3 works is around 3700, but I think the median is right around that same 1700 range. I guess what I really want here are the stats for everything that isn't a 30fic, but I don't want to do the calculation, so let's just say the length distribution of these stories isn't particularly unusual for me in general.
The 30fics comprise just about a quarter of the number of fanfic stories I've written, and about a fifth of the word count.
Shortest: James T. Kirk Is Eventually 30 is only 160 words.
Longest: A Duel With Fate, about Obi-Wan during Phantom Menace, is longer at 20742 words than the 18 shortest stories put together, and is almost twice as long as the next-longest.
Best Kudos/Hits Ratio: I try not to focus too much on reader statistics, but sometimes there's interesting stuff there. Six of the stories (as of right now) have a greater than 10% ratio:
Autumn in Prydain, about Eilonwy
The Coil, about Will Stanton
A Birthday Holiday, about Neville Longbottom
Dust, Shadow, Mallorn, Tower, and Sea, about Sam and Radagast and Elanor the Fair
A Bird Could Love A Fish, about Roxanne from Megamind
Lyra's Thirtieth Birthday, about Lyra from His Dark Materials
Three of these are recent (Eilonwy, Will, and Roxanne) and will probably settle into lower ratios once they've been around for longer. The Neville, Lyra and LOTR stories on the other hand have been around for ten years, so go them.
Worst Kudos/Hits: Thirty Attacks Zack has a ratio around 1% and quite frankly deserves it. Sparks Do Their Best Work Before Thirty about Agatha Heterodyne comes in second but has a pretty high hit count so I think it just got a bunch of people who weren't kudos-ers, or else repeat readers.
The Things We Did And Didn't Do, about Bitty and Jack from the comic Check Please!, has by far the most total kudos, which is probably because people found it from reading my other stories in the fandom. It was the first Check Please story I wrote, but it turned out not to be the last, and my involvement in Check Please fandom has been this giant fandom-life changing thing and now I'm on tumblr and twitter and I have hockey-fan internet friends and a 30000-hit story and it's been wild, basically.
Summer's Lease, about Aang from Avatar: the Last Airbender, doesn't stand out in hits or kudos or anything, but it was the first ATLA story I wrote, and having written it made me brave enough to join an ATLA fic exchange, and having done *that* made me brave enough to try Yuletide, which has been hugely important to me. (And to my word count: 5 of my 10 longest stories are Yuletide stories. 3 are Check Please stories, and 2 are 30fic stories.)
My personal top three: really hard to pick, because I'm still kind of in the flush of just having finished the Obi-Wan and Eilonwy stories and I'm always extra-into the most recent thing I've written. Of characters on the original list, Nita Callahan, Justin Timberlake, Will Stanton, and Obi-Wan sat on the list the longest waiting to be written about. The Justin and Nita stories because I had to really work to figure out what story I wanted to tell, the Obi-Wan and Will stories because I had told them to myself so much that it was a different kind of work to actually get them written down. The Nita and Will stories are also, of all of them, the most personal. I didn't know until very close to the end that I wanted to write about Eilonwy at all, and then someone asked if I was going to write about Prydain and I realized I had things to say. And also my very first completed fanfiction story ever was a Prydain story so there was something nice about coming back to Prydain to finish this project.
I'm very fond of the LOTR story, which is sort of a thematic continuation of Gull, which is still the best 173 words I've ever written. The last section of Twenty, Thirty, Forty, about Ari Mendoza from Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, wrestles with the question of what we should do personally/societally with people who have done terrible things, and is probably the most serious story in the sense of addressing a real-world difficult topic.
But I'm going to go with Jason Fox Can't Be Thirty as the cleverest, Thirty Is A Labyrinth, about Sarah, as the most tightly written, and the Nita story, In The Service Of Life, as the sweetest, the happiest 30 for the character closest to my heart.
15 of them are about a female character and 15 are about a male character and 0 are about nonbinary or agender characters, which I blame on there not being many nonbinary characters in my media consumption, especially not my historic media consumption as of ten years ago, when I made a list of 24 characters I thought I could write about. (Fun fact: originally I was doing a dice-rolling thing to pick who I would work on next, with a +/- 1 option if I really didn't like who I got that day.)
Of those 24, the only two I didn't eventually write a story about are Skids from the comic Boy Meets Boy, and Buffy. I had always intended to write a Buffy-centric companion story to my Dawn story, about Buffy as a wheelchair-using superhero, and I did actually work on one, but it never came together for me. I liked the visual of her fighting with the axe while also using the chair (and doing crazy tricks with jumping/flipping/swinging from her arms) more than I ever had an actual plot. As for Skids, I like to say that I never really leave fandoms, but in fact I didn't feel that strongly about Skids in 2007 and I definitely don't in 2017. That was a really important early fandom for me, but it's a former fandom.
Other also-rans! Pepper Potts got added to the list but I stole the conceit of that idea ("Tony Stark is Iron Man. Pepper Potts is Tony Stark.") for a much stronger story about JARVIS instead. I want (and plan) to write about Meg Murry and Deryn Sharp as adults, but older adults than 30. The Emily Starr story I have in mind doesn't really fit thematically with the rest of the series and would have been an awkward shoehorning. The Ianto Jones plotbunny I think had something to do with improving earbud battery life so that Jack would have something to listen to if he got stuck somewhere for a long time?? Jacky Faber would have been breastfeeding her baby and also foiling the real-life plan to rescue Napoleon from exile by submarine in 1820, right around when she should be 30. That was just begging to be exploited but meh, Jacky Faber.
Other rejected ideas and suggestions: Temeraire, Alanna or someone from the Alanna books, Little Dee, someone from Dollhouse, someone from Lois and Clark, someone from Peter Wimsey, someone from Order of the Stick or Peanuts or the Simpsons.
One of the last two stories was almost an Emergence story but I also had this Megamind plotbunny and as much as I mostly don't worry about whether anyone's going to like my stuff, Megamind is a fandom I've been enjoying for the past year or so and Emergence is a book nobody's ever heard of. I'm not immune to the idea of it being nice to have readers.
I wrote the first 15 in the first 6 weeks, a few more later that spring, a couple more in the fall a year later, three more in 2014, one in 2016, and the last six this year, because I wanted to finish before I turned 40. I feel pretty sure that even if I had decided to give up on the project, I would have kept writing - I didn't write any 30fic stories between October 2009 and July 2014, but I did lots of other writing during that time - but I wouldn't have written anything after 2003 if I hadn't started it in the first place.
So thank you, to anyone who bothered to read all the way down here, to anyone who's read any of the stories and left a kudos or a comment here or anything else. I love my writing hobby, I'm so happy to have it in my life, and I got it back because I wrote one little story and brainstormed one list.
I haven't posted about fic much, in the past couple years, except for Yuletide. But I started this project on LJ and I wanted to wrap it up here, and also do some self-indulgent poking at numbers and discussion of choices I made and that sort of thing.
I'm going to say this again at the end, but a giant thank-you to everyone who was interested in my stories, or happy to see me writing again, back at the very beginning of the project. To the people who commented on the first three,
ccommack, snarkyshark2, Michael, eclectic_boy, emsariel, ruthling, uncleamos, belecrivain, and sofer: this whole thing is your fault for encouraging me.The AO3 page for the series is here.
Way more about it behind the cut:
98400 words for the whole series, (if you leave off the bonus story) which sort of reminds me of when my fanfic novel was 43 words shy of 50k, like, what, I couldn't write another 1600 words somewhere? But in fact the median word count is only 1799, so 1600 words is in fact a significant chunk of words, in this project. 13 of the stories are flash-length (under 1500 words). My overall average word count for all my AO3 works is around 3700, but I think the median is right around that same 1700 range. I guess what I really want here are the stats for everything that isn't a 30fic, but I don't want to do the calculation, so let's just say the length distribution of these stories isn't particularly unusual for me in general.
The 30fics comprise just about a quarter of the number of fanfic stories I've written, and about a fifth of the word count.
Shortest: James T. Kirk Is Eventually 30 is only 160 words.
Longest: A Duel With Fate, about Obi-Wan during Phantom Menace, is longer at 20742 words than the 18 shortest stories put together, and is almost twice as long as the next-longest.
Best Kudos/Hits Ratio: I try not to focus too much on reader statistics, but sometimes there's interesting stuff there. Six of the stories (as of right now) have a greater than 10% ratio:
Autumn in Prydain, about Eilonwy
The Coil, about Will Stanton
A Birthday Holiday, about Neville Longbottom
Dust, Shadow, Mallorn, Tower, and Sea, about Sam and Radagast and Elanor the Fair
A Bird Could Love A Fish, about Roxanne from Megamind
Lyra's Thirtieth Birthday, about Lyra from His Dark Materials
Three of these are recent (Eilonwy, Will, and Roxanne) and will probably settle into lower ratios once they've been around for longer. The Neville, Lyra and LOTR stories on the other hand have been around for ten years, so go them.
Worst Kudos/Hits: Thirty Attacks Zack has a ratio around 1% and quite frankly deserves it. Sparks Do Their Best Work Before Thirty about Agatha Heterodyne comes in second but has a pretty high hit count so I think it just got a bunch of people who weren't kudos-ers, or else repeat readers.
The Things We Did And Didn't Do, about Bitty and Jack from the comic Check Please!, has by far the most total kudos, which is probably because people found it from reading my other stories in the fandom. It was the first Check Please story I wrote, but it turned out not to be the last, and my involvement in Check Please fandom has been this giant fandom-life changing thing and now I'm on tumblr and twitter and I have hockey-fan internet friends and a 30000-hit story and it's been wild, basically.
Summer's Lease, about Aang from Avatar: the Last Airbender, doesn't stand out in hits or kudos or anything, but it was the first ATLA story I wrote, and having written it made me brave enough to join an ATLA fic exchange, and having done *that* made me brave enough to try Yuletide, which has been hugely important to me. (And to my word count: 5 of my 10 longest stories are Yuletide stories. 3 are Check Please stories, and 2 are 30fic stories.)
My personal top three: really hard to pick, because I'm still kind of in the flush of just having finished the Obi-Wan and Eilonwy stories and I'm always extra-into the most recent thing I've written. Of characters on the original list, Nita Callahan, Justin Timberlake, Will Stanton, and Obi-Wan sat on the list the longest waiting to be written about. The Justin and Nita stories because I had to really work to figure out what story I wanted to tell, the Obi-Wan and Will stories because I had told them to myself so much that it was a different kind of work to actually get them written down. The Nita and Will stories are also, of all of them, the most personal. I didn't know until very close to the end that I wanted to write about Eilonwy at all, and then someone asked if I was going to write about Prydain and I realized I had things to say. And also my very first completed fanfiction story ever was a Prydain story so there was something nice about coming back to Prydain to finish this project.
I'm very fond of the LOTR story, which is sort of a thematic continuation of Gull, which is still the best 173 words I've ever written. The last section of Twenty, Thirty, Forty, about Ari Mendoza from Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, wrestles with the question of what we should do personally/societally with people who have done terrible things, and is probably the most serious story in the sense of addressing a real-world difficult topic.
But I'm going to go with Jason Fox Can't Be Thirty as the cleverest, Thirty Is A Labyrinth, about Sarah, as the most tightly written, and the Nita story, In The Service Of Life, as the sweetest, the happiest 30 for the character closest to my heart.
15 of them are about a female character and 15 are about a male character and 0 are about nonbinary or agender characters, which I blame on there not being many nonbinary characters in my media consumption, especially not my historic media consumption as of ten years ago, when I made a list of 24 characters I thought I could write about. (Fun fact: originally I was doing a dice-rolling thing to pick who I would work on next, with a +/- 1 option if I really didn't like who I got that day.)
Of those 24, the only two I didn't eventually write a story about are Skids from the comic Boy Meets Boy, and Buffy. I had always intended to write a Buffy-centric companion story to my Dawn story, about Buffy as a wheelchair-using superhero, and I did actually work on one, but it never came together for me. I liked the visual of her fighting with the axe while also using the chair (and doing crazy tricks with jumping/flipping/swinging from her arms) more than I ever had an actual plot. As for Skids, I like to say that I never really leave fandoms, but in fact I didn't feel that strongly about Skids in 2007 and I definitely don't in 2017. That was a really important early fandom for me, but it's a former fandom.
Other also-rans! Pepper Potts got added to the list but I stole the conceit of that idea ("Tony Stark is Iron Man. Pepper Potts is Tony Stark.") for a much stronger story about JARVIS instead. I want (and plan) to write about Meg Murry and Deryn Sharp as adults, but older adults than 30. The Emily Starr story I have in mind doesn't really fit thematically with the rest of the series and would have been an awkward shoehorning. The Ianto Jones plotbunny I think had something to do with improving earbud battery life so that Jack would have something to listen to if he got stuck somewhere for a long time?? Jacky Faber would have been breastfeeding her baby and also foiling the real-life plan to rescue Napoleon from exile by submarine in 1820, right around when she should be 30. That was just begging to be exploited but meh, Jacky Faber.
Other rejected ideas and suggestions: Temeraire, Alanna or someone from the Alanna books, Little Dee, someone from Dollhouse, someone from Lois and Clark, someone from Peter Wimsey, someone from Order of the Stick or Peanuts or the Simpsons.
One of the last two stories was almost an Emergence story but I also had this Megamind plotbunny and as much as I mostly don't worry about whether anyone's going to like my stuff, Megamind is a fandom I've been enjoying for the past year or so and Emergence is a book nobody's ever heard of. I'm not immune to the idea of it being nice to have readers.
I wrote the first 15 in the first 6 weeks, a few more later that spring, a couple more in the fall a year later, three more in 2014, one in 2016, and the last six this year, because I wanted to finish before I turned 40. I feel pretty sure that even if I had decided to give up on the project, I would have kept writing - I didn't write any 30fic stories between October 2009 and July 2014, but I did lots of other writing during that time - but I wouldn't have written anything after 2003 if I hadn't started it in the first place.
So thank you, to anyone who bothered to read all the way down here, to anyone who's read any of the stories and left a kudos or a comment here or anything else. I love my writing hobby, I'm so happy to have it in my life, and I got it back because I wrote one little story and brainstormed one list.
