nubianamy | Recent Entries

(crossposted from Tumblr, because I still almost never post either place)
Here it is, May 15, when I celebrate the day I started writing Glee fanfiction. I can't believe it's been ten years of absurdly prolific story-making.

This year, during the pandemic, even while spending ten months recovering from a virus, teaching from home, and struggling to focus on life in general, I somehow managed to put almost 500k on AO3. (That does not count the two collaborative stories we started writing in December 2020, neither of which have been published anywhere yet, and together which total over 300k. Good grief.) I passed the 4 million word mark earlier this year.

I finished the Puckurt theater series There All The Honour Lies. It was so meaningful to dig into all the source material, but even more, after eight years, to finally give them their happy ending. 

I did NaNo in November and also in April this year, which boosted my output, but the big commitment this year is Get Your Words Out. I jumped in with both feet with a pledge of 350k words. The community is full of long-time fanfic writers and it's so nice to have their support, and the daily wordcount spreadsheet provided to participants has really helped me stay on target. 

It's been a year of collaboration. I have felt so lucky to have weathered the summer of the pandemic with other writers on Discord. I met brain twin and cowriter 

beshrew-my-very-heart
 and for that I feel grateful every day, even if we don't always have time to write together. It's amazing to share my enthusiasm for this weird, flawed fandom with someone else who gets it. Infinity reverses, my friend.

This was the year I finally decided to dip my toe in the Hawaii 5-0 McDanno bay, and wow, is the water warm. I wrote one long story for the 2020 Big Bang and one short story just for fun. It's been a while since I tried a new fandom, but they made me feel very welcome! I'm looking forward to participating in the Big Bang again this summer. 

That wasn't the only new (well, new to me) fandom I wrote for this year. While re-re-rewatching The West Wing, I began a series of vignettes following Leo, Abbey, and Jed's relationship through each episode. It's very intimidating to write anything at all for such an illustrious and dedicated group of readers, but I have really enjoyed it. 

I also discovered Glee is not as dead a fandom as I thought it was.  In particular, fans still love Dave Karofsky as much as ever, and I've had a blast writing all kinds of Dave-centric short stories. I am proud of one in particular, which I wrote across the two days of vote-tallying of the November 2020 US election. I also wrote a story for the Prom King zine, celebrating Dave's character over 10 years. 

And, of course, to the five people who are still reading the Donutverse, I can't tell you how much I appreciate you.  Not only does it sustain me, but it provides my therapist a lot of amusement. I've been revising the whole series, continuing to write the season 2 story, and done a whole bunch of plotting for future stories with nefarious collaborators. What do Peter Pan, a leather bar in New York City, and the CIA have to do with the Donutverse? Stay tuned. 

Here's to another year! 

Other ficversary posts: 2013 | 2015 and again and again | 2016 | 2019 | 2020

 
This year, during the pandemic, even while spending ten months recovering from a virus, teaching from home, and struggling to focus on life in general, I somehow managed to put almost 500k on AO3. (That does not count the two collaborative stories we started writing in December 2020, neither of which have been published anywhere yet, and together which total over 300k. Good grief.) I passed the 4 million word mark earlier this year. 
 

 
I finished the Puckurt theater series There All The Honour Lies. It was so meaningful to dig into all the source material, but even more, after eight years, to finally give them their happy ending. 
 

 
I did NaNo in November and also in April this year, which boosted my output, but the big commitment this year is Get Your Words Out. I jumped in with both feet with a pledge of 350k words. The community is full of long-time fanfic writers and it's so nice to have their support, and the daily wordcount spreadsheet provided to participants has really helped me stay on target. 
 

 
It's been a year of collaboration. I have felt so lucky to have weathered the summer of the pandemic with other writers on Discord. I met brain twin and cowriter beshrew-my-very-heart
 and for that I feel grateful every day, even if we don't always have time to write together. It's amazing to share my enthusiasm for this weird, flawed fandom with someone else who gets it. Infinity reverses, my friend.

 
This was the year I finally decided to dip my toe in the Hawaii 5-0 McDanno bay, and wow, is the water warm. I wrote one long story for the 2020 Big Bang and one short story just for fun. It's been a while since I tried a new fandom, but they made me feel very welcome! I'm looking forward to participating in the Big Bang again this summer. 
 

 
That wasn't the only new (well, new to me) fandom I wrote for this year. While re-re-rewatching The West Wing, I began a series of vignettes following Leo, Abbey, and Jed's relationship through each episode. It's very intimidating to write anything at all for such an illustrious and dedicated group of readers, but I have really enjoyed it. 
 

 
I also discovered Glee is not as dead a fandom as I thought it was.  In particular, fans still love Dave Karofsky as much as ever, and I've had a blast writing all kinds of Dave-centric short stories. I am proud of one in particular, which I wrote across the two days of vote-tallying of the November 2020 US election. I also wrote a story for the Prom King zine, celebrating Dave's character over 10 years. 
 

 
And, of course, to the five people who are still reading the Donutverse, I can't tell you how much I appreciate you.  Not only does it sustain me, but it provides my therapist a lot of amusement. I've been revising the whole series, continuing to write the season 2 story, and done a whole bunch of plotting for future stories with nefarious collaborators. What do Peter Pan, a leather bar in New York City, and the CIA have to do with the Donutverse? Stay tuned. 
 

 
Here's to another year! 
 

 
Other ficversary posts: 2013 | 2015 and again and again | 2016 | 2019 | 2020

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Fanfic Masterpost

This space is a supplementary link to all my fanfic, which is posted on AO3; historically I also posted on FFNet, but not all my work is crossposted. Fandoms include Glee (the Donutverse), Teen Wolf, The West Wing, Hawaii 5-O, Star Wars, and a handful of movies. Mostly queer romance, many polyam, some kink.

I am occasionally active on Tumblr and on Discord.

I also have a handful of podfic, currently hosted on Dropbox, including Fasten You to Me (Teen Wolf, Sterek), Blue Rubber Band (Glee, Puckurt). Much of the rest of it went missing when Tindeck went down, so if you have a file, I'd love to get a copy.

Current Mood: accomplished

Having a large back catalog of fic means I wake up each morning to a kudos post from AO3. Most of my stuff doesn't get read anymore (for so many reasons, but mostly because the fandom jumped the shark long ago) but there are a few things I get kudos on regularly, if not daily. Every now and then, my stand-alone pieces get read, and these are notable days. I'm proud of myself for venturing into new fandoms with these stories, because it represents a ton of research to get familiar with them enough to feel willing to put myself out there. One of these stories is the backstory I developed for Finn, then known as FN-2187, for my plotted-but-mostly-not-written Finn/Poe story.

After watching Episode VII The Force Awakens and falling in love with this pairing, I wanted to write a response fic, but I also wanted it to be canon compliant. That meant I would have to do some reading about the characters and their backstories. Wow, is there a lot of source material in the Star Wars universe! There are actual canon novels about Finn and Poe and Rey's history, and the most useful one for me was Before the Awakening. It provided just enough information about Poe's family, as well as Finn's fire-team and the structure of stormtroopers' lives. Also, because TFA was still only available in theaters, I read the novelization of the movie and took lots of notes on their interactions.

Rereading Finn's backstory a few years after writing it, I'd forgotten a lot of the details, but I'm still really proud of this story. It was fascinating to attempt to write a romance around the trappings of a society where people seldom touch, where emotions and physical responses are managed with chemistry, and where individualism is strongly discouraged. I think the following story I wrote from Poe's point of view was a more engaging, better-crafted story, but I'm more proud of this one because it was such a stretch for me.

Current Mood: pensive
Current Location: bed
Current Music: silence

Yesterday (really today, because I haven't gone to bed yet) was the first day of Get Your Words Out. I spent some of the day doing other things, but most of it was split between writing, investigating the rules and parameters of GYWO, and checking out the Discord server.

I appreciate Discord for so many things, but one thing it does not do well is thread conversations, which makes it really hard to track what people are saying when there are more than three or four people in a channel at a time. I hope the mods will recognize this deficiency and support "couches," a freeform concept permitting time-limited conversations about writing. Even so, today I learned a couple of ways to summarize a character's role in a story, some tools on Scrivener I didn't know about yet, and some additional writing tools which I may or may not need.

I wish I had an original plot to work on that was as compelling as fanfiction, but at the same time I am kind of glad I don't.

I haven't done my end of 2020 writing summary post yet, but I'll get around to that eventually. This is a year of "when I'm ready"s. I'll just say it's been so fun making writing a community experience again, I haven't had time to miss writing any of my own stories.

Current Location: my couch
Current Music: silence

I write about fannish stuff on Tumblr. Before that, I used to write in a Livejournal. Before that, I had a series of hand-coded blogs (before they were called that) connected to other online journal writers via webrings. Before that, I wrote long posts in online forums like AOL and Compuserve and Q-Link. Before that, I wrote messages on local dialup bulletin boards.

This is an account I have never used. It took the place of my Livejournal when I closed the account, but I kind of miss having a place to type longform text posts about personal or genre-specific topics. I don't really have an audience here, but that's okay.

This coming year, I'm participating in Get Your Words Out, a year-long writing challenge. I'll still be posting about my writing on Tumblr, but I think I'm going to start doing that here more.

Current Mood: pensive
Current Location: my couch
Current Music: silence

Characters and OCs in the Donutverse



Dr. Carl Howell	Toby Grey	Adam Lambert
Irene Tibideaux	Darius Mitchell
	Jacob

Also check out the Donutverse Adobe Spark page for photos, links, and related tidbits.

AO3 is managed by the OTW (the Organization of Transformative Works). I pay them money. You should too. You know why?

Because back in 2007, we had no archive of our own. We pretty much only had Fanfiction.Net, which purged a great deal of explicit fanfic back in 2002 (and might very well do it again any time), and Livejournal.com, which booted a number of journals in 2007 following a targeted attack by a religious organization. Although AO3 is far from perfect, it's run by fans, for fans, and has legal language to back up the rights of fans to post transformative works.

Having said that, I also still post on FFNet, and I've never had a story taken down there (although I have friends who have). Here's a partial explanation of why.

You can read more about OTW's history at the Fanlore wiki, or this article from 2015 in FanSlashFic Magazine.
nubianamy's OTW Member(ship)