Fics I wrote in April 2023
Apr. 30th, 2023 09:01 pmTotal: 25 new fics or updates! Most of them are TNG or Gargoyles, with three notable exceptions -- "The Old Man", my post-Lawrence of Arabia multichap; "And Thou No Breath At All", my Thrawn oneshot; and "float", my Haikyuu! multichap. There are other exceptions, these are just the two that I like the most, lmao.
I think my most popular fic this month was either Noli Me Tangere, which gets regular comments from Riker/Troi shippers, or "Mood Indigo". "Cat Puberty" did well, but my audience there was mostly Data/Geordi shippers, and Data/Geordi shippers ime skew young and don't leave comments or engage with fics/have conversations the way other TNG fans do. Honestly, I'm not very fond of Data/Geordi -- I think it's a cute idea, but it doesn't go any deeper than just "a cute idea".
My least popular fic by order of kudos was "Mother", for the TV show "Evil", which is sitting pretty at zero kudos! XD "Evil" fics NEVER get much traction, and this one is about Sister Andrea (side character) AND was posted during the show's off-season, so I knew it was doomed. But it was fun as hell to write. I love the idea of this no-nonsense 76-year-old nun getting pregnant with a demonic fetus.
Most fucked-up fic is definitely "And Thou No Breath At All" -- it's got everything. Gore, child murder, child suicide, necrophilia, parasites, castration, dubcon/noncon, probably some stuff I'm forgetting. But (and of course I'm biased) I feel like it came out plotty, with some fun post-Empire worldbuilding, and I wish more people had read it. Fic with the most research ... it's a three-way tie between "float" (since I've never been to Japan), "The Old Man" and "Odysseus to Telemachus" -- it's for "Odysseus" that I read all those gulag texts this month, and all those torture texts a month or two back.
And if I had to pick a favorite: it's my Gargoyles oneshots! They're all part of a series, so I feel okay claiming all of them as my fave XD The writing is less beautiful than "float", less meaningful than my TNG fics or "The Old Man", but so much fun to write. I love them. They're like little Xanatos-centric episodes all centered around his search for immortality, with lots of humor and a touch of tragedy here and there -- Alexander the Great's death in the sunny streets of Cairo's City of the Dead; the doomed gay lovers of "Every Exquisite Thing", one of them eternally youthful and increasingly evil, the other getting older and uglier but always loved by the younger one; the cancer-riddled scientist of "Inoperable" essentially committing suicide, which ofc brings up Xanatos' memories of his mother, who died of cancer too.
...And there's no tragedy in "Ens Causa Sui" -- that one was just fun to write. I don't think "The Fisher King" has any tragedy either. But yeah, I love these little fics, and I think other people like them too! Xanatos tests his immortality schemes on flatworms in these fics, all of them named Bucephalus, and in Fic #2 he successfully turns Bucephalus VII immortal, so that particular flatworm becomes a recurring character, and I got some fanart for him, which was really cute. "Gargoyles" is not a high-traffic fandom, and some of these fics only have 3 kudos, but they still get lots of comments, fanart, discussion, etc.