Ao3 Stats Meme (one year later)

I decided to give this another go one year from when I first did it, mostly out of my own curiosity. If you’re interested in comparing my stats from last year, here’s the first time I did this. The numbers have changed a lot, bumping the fics around quite a bit

Your 3 fanfics with the most kudos:

1. An Accidental Incubus (Supernatural) – 953 kudos

2. Your Favorite Hello (Supernatural) – 860 kudos

3. No Righteous Path (Supernatural) – 727 kudos

Your oldest fanfic (Ao3):

The Sacred Lake (A Room With A View) – 21 July 2010

Your 3 fanfics with the most comments:

1. No Righteous Path (Supernatural) – 1,155 comments

2. Our Home Below (Supernatural) – 767 comments

3. Burn Down the Sky (Mass Effect) – 673 comments

Your latest fanfic:

Public Sex for the SPN Kink Bingo. My latest non-drabble fic is Roses Gold (Supernatural).

Your proudest fanfic:

Gosh, I don’t know. Probably Burn Down the Sky because I wrote it in exactly a year, and that year (because of life) was the worst year I’ve ever had. If I had to pick a short fic, it would be Rituals for the End of the World (Supernatural). It’s the only fic of mine that I can reread and actually like. (This has not changed from last year.)

Your longest fanfic:

Burn Down the Sky, which clocked in at 116,081 words. Until May 2017, it was my only fic that had broken 100K. However, now I also have No Righteous Path, which is close to BDtS clocking in at 105,735 words.

Your 3 fanfics with the most hits:

1. Burn Down the Sky – 15,441 hits (still #1, and +2,429 hits from last year)

2. No Righteous Path – 12,411 hits

3. An Accidental Incubus – 12,030 hits

Your 3 fanfics with the most bookmarks:

1. Your Favorite Hello (Supernatural) – 206 bookmarks

2.

An Accidental Incubus – 191 bookmarks (+99 from last year) 

3. No Righteous Path – 169 bookmarks

Your favorite character to write in fanfic:

Gabriel from Supernatural has lately been one of my favorite characters to write. It also seems like a lot of people enjoy the way I write him and that makes me so happy, because despite him seeming to be a careless trickster, he’s actually incredibly complex, but super difficult to write.

Bonus round: a fic you love that isn’t listed above:

Roses Gold (Supernatural). It’s a steampunk AU, still a WIP, and way out of my wheelhouse, but I’m having a great time writing it.

Bonus bonus round: the fic with the lowest kudos:

Better than Happier (Mass Effect) – 8 kudos. It’s a drabble based off of Tiny Whiskey, Guns, and Moneyfeaturing my OC Ianto Shepard and @joasakura‘s OC Vanya Shepard in a mobster AU we dreamed up between them. Needless to say, it falls distinctly into rarepair territory. (This is unchanged from last year).

4, 8, and 9 for the fic writers meme, please?

#4: How many fic ideas are you nurturing right now? Care to share one of them?

I actually have a few, for once! 😀 A few of them I can’t share because they’re reserved for a few Big Bangs, but I’ve been noodling around with post-Mass Effect Andromeda canon fics and maybe a few AU’s. I need to actually finish the game properly to be able to put more ideas into them, but I’ve got some that don’t focus on romance, and a couple that do. My Ianto ended up with Gil, if you’re interested to know. 😀

#8: Share a snippet from one of your favorite dialogue scenes you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.

“Would you like me to pray with you?” a deep and calming voice asked, hushed in the empty room.

Kaidan turned his bloodshot eyes to the isle and saw a tall, dark-skinned man dressed in nondescript chapel robes. “I don’t really…” he cleared his sawdust throat. “But my friend, Ashley is religious, so I thought I’d… um… would you like… pray for her?”

The tall, lithe man, sat in the pew next to Kaidan and said, “My name is Thane. And yours?”

“Kaidan.”

“What would you like me to pray for, Kaidan?”

Kaidan swallowed several times to fight back the tears, but his voice was still broken when he said, “that she’s still alive. They made me leave when they were working on her, and there’s no news and I-”

A gentle hand on his arm stopped his tearful ranting. “Close your eyes, listen to my words, and find your calm.”

Kaidan did as he was told, wiping his wet cheeks as the chaplain began to speak in a hypnotic tone. “Lord, before you now is not a man of God, but a man of prayer. He seeks healing and life for his friend, Ashley. He prays that her time is not finished on Earth. That she may return to her friends and family for awhile longer before meeting your eternal embrace. The man before you may not seek your love or your salvation, but because he seeks the salvation of another before him, despite his beliefs, that is just as holy. Please hear his prayer through me and take care of your daughter, Ashley.”

This one actually came to me easier than I thought it would because I LOVE writing dialogue a lot. But, I liked this scene from Burn Down the Sky so much because it was a way for me to explain my religious proclivities in a story. I’ve been put down a lot for being queer and religious, and it’s hard to explain how you feel about God and love and tolerance to people who don’t want to listen, so I found it pretty important to me to be able to put my feelings out there in a story.

#9: Which fic has been the hardest to write?

That’s another one that I can easily say was Burn Down the Sky. To date, it’s my longest (116K) and most popular (15K hits) fic. But it took an entire year to write, almost to the day. A lot of stuff happened when I was writing it. I got divorced, lost my dad, lost my job, had a huge amount of turmoil. But the story was always there waiting to be written. And a lot of readers were there to share it. It’s got more of me in it than anything I’ve ever written, and since I’d never written anything that long before, it was so freaking difficult to do. In comparison, my second longest fic (almost finished at 94K right now) I started 2 months ago. So that should give you an idea of how hard it was to write.

16 and 30? *steals a cat in the background*

#16: If you only could write one pairing for the rest of your life, which pairing would it be?

I don’t like this question at all. As of today, I’d have to go with Destiel because that’s what I’ve been writing the most of and feel most drawn to. But that’s not a forever answer. Just a today answer.

#30: Do you accept prompts?

I do! Sometimes I ask for the them, and sometimes I just get them randomly. Either is fine. I don’t always get to them in a timely manner, but I don’t mind getting them at all. 

STOP STEALING MY CAT! 😀

Ask me one of the 40 questions for fic writers!

2, 3 and 20 for the same thing ? :D

#2: Is there a trope you’ve yet to try your hand at, but really want to?

Yes, indeed! I’ve never written d/s before, but I’m delving into it soon!

#3: Is there a trope you wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole?

Incest and especially twincest. I have a twin, so I just can’t. I can’t even read it when I love the author writing it. I just leave it for the people who like it and stay away myself.

#20: Describe your perfect writing conditions.

These days, honestly, my perfect writing conditions are just quiet with nothing else hanging over my head. It’s so rare. It’s pretty obvious when I get those conditions because I can knock out a whole chapter and a half in a day if I can get some uninterrupted quiet time.

However, my wishful thinking writing conditions are in comfy clothes, a cup of coffee, and either music, or a TV show marathon on in the background that I’ve seen a thousand times.

7 for the fic writers meme?

#7: Share a snippet from one of your favorite pieces of prose you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.

The sound of his mirth rumbles through Cas and into Dean. It’s a joyous sound, incongruous to the setting. Almost startling him out of his laser focus on Cas’s body.

That sound really shouldn’t be here. Maybe his imagination is still good enough to think they’re somewhere else. Somewhere they should have been. He’s getting depressed, but Cas’s mouth is on him again. It’s sucking out the air, thoughts, everything. He’s so grateful. Blessed. Happy. He tangles his fingers into Cas’s hair, pulling him closer. Cas’s fingers close around Dean’s cock, stroking once up and massaging over the tip. “Ah, fuck, you can still work miracles,” Dean gasps. Happiness. He hopes it’s fleeting as much as he’s enjoying it now. It can’t sustain the life he lives. He knows that. Happiness can only get him killed faster, but in this illusion of privacy, it’s delicious. He’s high on it.

This is from my Endverse oneshot, Rituals for the End of the World. I loved this moment, and in fact writing this whole oneshot, because it’s one of the few, and maybe only, times where I can honestly say, “this came out exactly as I’d planned. The right words were in the right place the whole time.” And that’s a big deal for me, seeing as I’m not much of a prose person. I’m much more comfortable with dialogue.

AND THE OTHER (in honor of you):

Kaidan held his breath until he felt close to blacking out. For a moment, the sounds and screaming and shouting of nurses and doctors faded into a dull, pounding roar, like the ocean he remembered visiting in high school. He should have gone back some time. It had been so peaceful. Blacking out. His vision tunneled, the edges the same color as the tag he was staring at. Slowly… the soldier on the bed lifted his arm, dangling the tag off of his wrist. He opened his mouth and Kaidan’s lips parted, too. Help me. Now. Kaidan was sure the man hadn’t been able to speak. But he wouldn’t have heard, anyway. It was all fading to blackness. Was that even what the soldier had said? His face was fierce.

I think about this fic I wrote for you all the time. It’s another case of the words and ideas just being there how I pictured them and how they should have been. If any of you are wondering, this is from War, After (Feels Like Home) that I wrote for @ltleflrt after stealing her Mass Effect OC and fucking him up good.

Ask me one of the 40 questions for fic writers!

I’ve told you this, but let’s make it public. Sometimes you write the most beautiful sentences. Perfectly constructed, pulling all my emotions out of me like rainbow silk scarves from a magician’s sleeve, GORGEOUS sentences. They’re so beautiful that I get angry! I grind my teeth and mentally shake my fist at you because I’m jealous of your talent :)

After you told me that to my face, and I was shocked to my very soul hearing it, I basically just made it my mission in life to have one sentence in every fic that I was sure would piss you off. Every time. I’m like, “okay, multi-chapter fic, we just need one sentence in the entire fic.” And I never try to write it, but I always seem to recognize it the second I re-read it, and go, “oh, yeah. That’s the one. That’s the one that’s gonna make Ltleflrt so mad.” It just cheers me up so much. 😀

Go ahead! Tell me what you remember me for as a writer!

I think what I like best about your writing is how easy it is to read. Everything just carries me away with the story, and it’s only afterwards that I look back and appreciate the craft of the writing and how well done that is. Your pacing is excellent, and you balance your stories very well. There’s always something in there that feels real, too. Excellent verisimilitude. <3

This is another compliment that goes straight to my core because I try extremely hard to keep it simple. To convey the most complex things in the simplest way. I admire more than anything, writers who can just carry you along with prose where you sort of float along with it rather than getting dragged under by complex prose. So the fact that I’ve accomplished that, even for just you, I’m so so so happy to hear it! THANK YOU! That means the world to me!

All y’all ask me about what you remember me for as a writer!

I am constantly amazed at how you find these amazing emotional beats in your stories. You’re freaking amazing. I mean, I still, STILL think about “Bang, Zoom” and I start feeling my heart clench up. You bastard. I love you.

I appreciate you saying this because I often plan oneshots and my shorter fics around an idea of, “I wonder how so-and-so would feel about this?” That’s how I ended up with Bang Zoom. I thought, “how would Vanya feel about Ianto being an astronaut?” And the first thing that came to mind was them standing there the night before launch saying goodbye across the road and Vanya wearing a horrible shirt because he says, “I can’t be pretty, so I have to be bold.” The entire fic revolved around that. 😀

And I’m never sure that I get everything across when I’m writing, so it means more than I can even say to hear that you think there’s a definite emotional impact there. Thank you so much! ILU2

All y’all tell me what you remember about me as a writer!

What I’m Working On

I was tagged by the nutritious and delicious @ltleflrt

1. No Righteous Path – my Destiel silver fox a/b/o fic. Which is now famous thanks to being dragged on YouTube! I’m so proud!

2. Our Home Above – my continuing Sabriel a/b/o fic. I burned out on it, but I am going to finish it eventually. The timeline isn’t working out the way I wanted, so I’m rearranging the outline.

3. A DCJ fic that I’ve put on hold after dropping out of the DCJBB. It just didn’t come together fast enough.

4. A handful of other AU’s, mostly Destiel at this point, and one Sabriel that I’ll continue on after finishing my current WIPs.