tangeriner | Jan. 17th, 2022

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner featuring a snow-covered green bench in a snowy park. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

In your own space, celebrate a personal win from the past year: it can be a list of fanworks you're especially proud of, a gift of your time to the community, a quality or skill you cultivated in yourself, something you generally feel went well. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

2021 from a creating fanworks POV for me was bad. Badbadbad. As productive as I was the year before, I was unproductive in 2021. I had so many ideas and wrote almost none of them. I skipped 95% of the exchanges I wanted to do. I dropped out of

getyourwordsout. I made some nice progress on my Marvel Trumps Hate 2019 story, but it was still nowhere close to done.

I also did that thing rarepair writers cannot do. That thing where you look at your stats and bemoan how much work writing can be and think to yourself "why am I doing this?" Consciously, I know all this and have made peace with all this, but 2021 was not the year to let that resolve waver. Thankfully the answer, for me, always has been: cuz I want my favourite characters to smooch (...among other things). And I'm usually more than happy to do it myself. Because kisses.

All this to say, once it became obvious nothing else was really gonna happen, I really wanted

marvel_bang to the one (big) thing I pulled off. I'm lucky that I usually go tandem for this thing, and my artist friend was also up for attempting to complete something. But man, I struggled, and I procrastinated, and I struggled some more. Then, eventually, as I ran out of runway, I just had to sit down and bang out Lose Your Head (NSFW link) and hope for the best. It took me six days to write the first 10k words and one day to write the last. I had no sense of pacing in the story. The actual words were a mess. I worried it was too depressing and there was too much hurt.

But you know what? It worked out. After a week of letting it sit, I reread it and it turned out I actually kinda really loved it? It hit all the buttons I wanted it to and it was precisely the story I wanted to read.

nafs volunteered to beta and got it back amazingly quickly. The art by blithe turned out as lovely as it always does. The response to it was great.

I will consider that a win. 🥳