30 Days of Fanfic meme, 29 and 30

[pensnest]

Day 29: What is your current project or projects?

Well. I was hoping to finish the next Chronicles story but seem to have found no way to get into it. I might record 'Trials' and see if that helps. At present I've just started on another Adam/Lance story, this time an AU in which Lance used to be in a show called Synchronicity and is now a TV producer. Heh.

Day 30: Do you have a favorite fic you've written? What makes it your favorite? And don't forget to give us a link!

It'd be a lot easier to answer this question if I hadn't written quite so many stories. I mean, if there were a dozen, I could probably pick out a favourite... maybe...

Mostly, my favourites are the 'important' stories, the long ones which were written for a challenge of some kind and properly beta'd and researched.

Of my Trek stories, the only one which was actually beta read is The Things that Juliana Didn't Say, and I'm quite proud of it. It's a tricky job to reconcile the mess that is the canon background for Data, Lore and the Soongs, but it turned out well.

I think I'll pick one per year for popslash, since there are so many on my Index page. From 2005 I think it has to be Thirteen Years and Counting, written for synecdochic's Reunion Challenge, and the longest story I'd written to that point. Of course I have considerable affection for my first ever popslash story, Merchandising even though it was not American beta'd, etc, etc. I don't think I've managed to write anything funnier since.

The 2006 story is Prone, written for my first Dragon Challenge. I had to research tattoos! I seriously considered getting a tattoo so that I would know how it felt, but perhaps that would have been going too far for my art. It was the year Lance came out (about a month after the challenge), and for a while I felt bad about the characterisation of Reichen (aka 'The Android'), but then they broke up and I felt better about it again.

2007 gives me a hard decision, because my Dragon Challenge story vies with my MTYG story... I think it's going to have to be A Tale of Dreams and Asses, even though I wish, so very much, that I'd found a better title for it. Another reunion story, and I have a particular affection for the way I did the subtitles for this piece. I like there to be something in the form that is orderly, and that kind of thing does come up quite often in my longer stories. I find that SeSa stories generally turn out really well—I'd probably put nearly all of mine at the top of my personal story rating—because the personalisation for your particular recipient leads to richer, more realistic detail than just writing 'a story'. I do remember having to be quite stern with Chris in this one, as the story would have liked to be Trickyfish, and wasn't. And Joey's dream still makes me grin.

I did my first Big Bang story in 2008, but despite the intense love I still have for that (my first Backstreet opus of major length) I think my favourite is The White Room, which was very much a response to all the consent issue complaints I'd seen at fanficrants and elsewhere. I remember writing it—an intense experience! The story had me in its grip, and flowed incredibly easily. Any time I got stuck I just went off to make coffee or potter for half an hour, and then came back and wrote more. Also, I was very pleased with the world that... sorta created itself for every scene. Somebody asked me what the war was about, and I don't really know, but I figure that at grunt level, nobody really knows what the war is about, just that they have to keep fighting it.

2009 is actually easy, since that's the year I wrote Bouquet, for the RPF Big Bang challenge. I fell in love with Adam Lambert as a character, and with Adam/Lance as a pairing, and have kept writing them - in addition, this is another of my stories with fun things done in the structure, with the flower subheads and the variety of POVs and the reflections of the song Flower playing through it. It also counts as my favourite of the Glambert stories I've done, so that's economical.

I'm tempted to put another Adam/Lance down for favourite of 2010, but actually there is a little bit of a story called The First Step which pretty much wrote itself once I put together a prompt and a news item, and which is the one I would show Lance Bass if ever I were in a position to show him fanfic! I'm inexplicably fond of it.

Sorry if that's cheating, but seriously - there are more than 160 stories in my popslash index, and though quite a few of them are throwaway squibs there are a lot that I'm extremely fond of. Pick one? I can't!