fel dreams

So since my productivity this morning was entirely sidelined by my coworker bringing her (obvious to all of us, including her) faking-it ill son to work, who could not be quiet if his life depended on it, I guess I'm going to do this instead of actually write any fic.

I... did more than I thought I did in 2018 (certainly more than 2017, with all of one fic that it feels like no one read or cared about (let's ignore the 70k novel I wrote)), though the vast majority of it was when I started doing the Meet Ugly stuff near the end of the year. There were also the various awkward attempts to jump start any sort of interest in my fandom offerings (30 days of steve/loki basically); one finished and very, very late commission (Changes) which was as much me processing the grief of not being able to write as it was finishing something owed; and an angry fix-it that I didn't finish post-Infinity War (Promises)(and which I took the rough premise of and converted into the 2019 fic Tangerines are sweet enough). The vast, vast majority of 2018 was just... not writing, and I guess in order to review my 2018 output we need to talk about just why that was, because there were a lot of things that finally came to a head in 2018 that made it so I had zero interest in trying to write.

Through when I joined the Marvel fandom sometime around 2012 (based off that being when I published my first fic to AO3, though I know I was publishing a few things on fanfiction.net before I got my AO3 account), I followed some very prolific and well-liked authors. I even talked to several from time to time, and because I joined when I did, my 'baseline' for what was normal feedback levels was extraordinarily skewed. I saw people interacting with these authors daily, and I interacted with them, and I was lucky enough my work resonated with others and they would interact with me. This became, over time, more and more rare--at least for me, and in my head a lot of that was tied to the fact my output (despite, I think, increasing in quality enormously from when I started writing for the fandom in 2012) had slowed down.

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It is easy, I think, to fall in love with characters. It is easy to think everyone should view a character the same way you do, that everyone should interpret things that happen the same way you do. It's so easy, and it's so easy to identify so strongly with certain characters that sometimes we lose the forest for the trees, and take everything that happens to that character--and, by proxy, everything other people say about that character--as a personal attack on ourselves.


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