beer_good_foamy

First of all, YAY!

Big thanks, and congratulations to all the other winners!

Second, here's the 2011 roundup:

Fic:
Adult content: Buffy turns 30. Buffy/BYOP.
Refraction: How Anne decorates the shelter, and why. Gen.
One, But A Lion: Egypt, 48 BC. A Slayer and her watcher in a time of change. Gen.
Pro Bono: When Lilah comes to make Faith an offer, Faith thinks about gators. Gen.
Buffy Summers in "The Volatile Vampire Venture!": Find out what happens when vampires stop sucking and start blowing. ...Up. Spike/Buffy, Dawn/Vi if you squint.
By Wise Council Shall You Make Your War: It's Bob the Vampire Slayer! Blackadder crossover, pre-series. Gen.
Expertise. Buffy and Willow try to solve the biggest threat to the potentials in s7. Gen.
A Little Peace And Quiet: Two people who didn't get to go to the apocalypse try not to remember. Dawn/Dana.
Ms Summers Goes To Washington: Buffy tries to get federal funding. West Wing crossover.
Upon The Edge Of No Escape: Lilah and Faith both want Angel dead. If Faith didn't, would she have come this far? Lilah/Faith.
Gonna Find Out: Yes, there's a Santa Claus. And he really needs to know the kids' wishes. Gen.

Drabbles:
TGIF. Spike/Buffy, post-series.
By His Own Petard. Twangel, Chao-Ahn, comicsverse.
If It's A Lie, Then We Fight On That Lie. Holtz/Justine.
And That's Terrible. Willow/Tara.
Cross-Cultural Exchange. Buffy and OC Slayers discussing what works against vampires, post-series.
I Know This Because Tyler Knows This. Buffy, Willow and Faith, s7.
Teacher's Edition. Willow/Jenny-ish, s2.
Vindication. Drusilla, Doctor Who crossover.
Six microfics. Stephen King's Dark Tower, Dollhouse, BtVS, AtS, Twin Peaks, Firefly.
Like, No Business I Know. Snyder and the gang, "The Puppet Show".
Killing Pigs Is Hard. Spike, Andrew, Angry Birds crossover.
After Work. Buffy/Faith-ish, s3.
And You Should See The Pumpkins. Buffybot.

Meta:
Best one-shot vampire in BtVS?
30 days of Buffy in one day
Thoughts on the s2 West Wing finale.
Entropy in season 6 - a bad thing?
SjornJossed in translation - on "Selfless" and languages
Chapter And 'Verse: On constructing your own contexts

Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you'd predicted?
Definitely more, especially considering that back in spring, I basically thought I was done.

What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January 2010?
Dawn/Dana was a bit of a surprise, as was the West Wing crossover. I would have expected to write more non-Buffyverse, and it turns out I wrote almost exclusively Buffyverse.

What's your favourite story of the year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you happiest?
Definitely Buffy Summers in "The Volatile Vampire Venture!" It's silly, but I love that I managed to break through writer's block and get it done, and that I managed to make it work (I hope) despite the silly premise.

Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?
One or two. Upon The Edge Of No Escape especially. Not sure if it paid off as I intended. Also, the serious comicsverse fic I was trying to write for the Nertz To You Joss ficathon, which I ended up chickening out on and learned to never touch those things again.

Do you have any fanfic or profic goals for the New Year?
Well, I'm hoping to do something in

femslash_minis and

twistedshorts. I have a few crossover ideas I want to get done. And hopefully finish this story I'm working on. Oh, and I mentioned something about a DW-only comment ficathon, more to come on that I hope.

From my past year of writing, what was...

My Best Story: Objectively, probably Ms Summers Goes To Washington - I love it when a crossover comes together and gives both fandoms their due, and I was really happy with how easy it felt to write the WW characters even though I'd never written them before.

Story Most Underappreciated by the Universe: Upon The Edge Of No Escape, possibly for good reason; that story really disturbed me, and I'm not entirely sure it did what it set out to do, but I'm still happy with it for what it is.

Most fun:

snickfic's Crackficathon is singularly responsible for the two funnest fics I wrote all year, I think: The Blackadder crossover and the West Wing crossover. But basically, most of what I managed to write this year fell into either Big Dumb Fun or Dark Creepy Serious.

Most disappointing: I'm not entirely disappointed with anything, but I still think One, But A Lion could use a few rewrites - her interaction with the Watcher, who really gets off a little too easily; some more myth stuff; and the ending. The ending should be: Written records of her end here.

Most sexy: Well, Upon The Edge... is the most explicit. I think the ending of A Little Peace And Quiet is more sensual, though.

Hardest to Write: I spent way too much time on Volatile Vampire Venture considering how cracky it is. I knew where I wanted to go with it, but I just couldn't get it to balance.

Where did the titles come from: There's unusually few song titles - Upon The Edge Of No Escape is from Joy Division's "She's Lost Control" (very deliberately). If it's a lie, then we fight on that lie is a quote from The Wire to the effect that once you're at war, you're at war, and Why no longer matters. One, But A Lion is from Aesop's fables: the vixen brags that she has nine cubs and the lioness only one, and the lioness responds that "you have nine, but they're foxes; I have one, but a lion." (Incidentally, Unus sed Leo used to be the motto of the Swedish submarine fleet.) Buffy Summers In "The Volatile Vampire Venture!" (yes, that's the full title) is intended to sound a bit like a Middleman or Batman episode because, well, that's really what it is. And And That's Terrible...