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Name	Fandom	Wordcount
The Dragon and the Damselfly	Original Work	10,806
Constant as the Day Will Dawn	Noblesse	3,798
A Primal Point of View	Dr. Stone	3,797
Prove and Witness	Étoile	3,906
		22,307

This year went a lot better than the previous. I wrote 22k words over 4 works, even managing to pick up a pinch hit! I really liked having four different fandoms to write in. One weird thing is that my 3 shorter works all ended at very similar lengths (within about 100 words of each other). Maybe I am honing in on my standard exchange fic length??

The Dragon and the Damselfly [OW, Woman Transmigrated as the Villainess of a Novel/That Novel's Original Female Lead] - It was fun to get a chance to play around with transmigration tropes myself! A lot of things from the recip's likes and prompts influenced the direction that the story went. I thought since there was a dragon and a damsel in this story, it would be fun to play on that in the title and include both "dragonfly" and "damselfly", but it sounded kind of clunky. On the other hand, I'm not so sure the new title makes thematic sense!

Constant as the Day Will Dawn [Noblesse, Frankenstein/Raizel] - Yay, spa day! Seemed appropriate for a Korean manhwa. It's a bit weird that the first section is very introspecty and the second section is all immersion (so to speak) in the spa adventure. If I had to do it again, I would have probably rewritten the first section to be more present in the action too. Like the moment of Raizel's awakening.

A Primal Point of View [Dr. Stone, Senku/Tsukasa] - This is a case where one word in my recipient's likes list (bodyswap) sent me off in a wild direction... Honestly these two are so good for this trope, and I only managed to explore the smallest corner of it. Since the main core of their conflict came from their very different perspectives on things, I thought it would be fun to force them to see from each others' point of view. Literally. Next I really wanted them to experience their new bodies in a life-or-death problem-solving situation, so I added a random landslide (to be fair, in canon there had just been a bunch of gunpowder explosions in the mountains, so... maybe?). But the end result felt a bit like you could obviously feel the constituent pieces that made up the story. Season 1 conflict + bodyswap + landslide = ? In other words, the tags basically wrote the fic lol.

Prove and Witness [Étoile, Tobias/Gabin] - This is more of a ship manifesto than a fic, hahaha. I rewatched through their scenes in canon (not so much screentime, but skipping to them triggered so many Amazon ads...) and condensed down everything I thought and felt about these characters, and this was what came out. I LOVE outsider pov and I was fortunate that there was a perfect character to latch on to for this, who only showed up once and never again. I created his character tag for AO3!

I left 73 comments, which is just over 5% of the collection. That is more comments than last time I tracked this stat, but a lower percentage of the collection. FIAB is getting big!

I received an amazing bounty of gifts: one for Alice in Borderland that asks the very reasonable question, "What if the hedonism and corruption at The Beach extended to taking slaves?" and several for Noblesse, including them playing a tabletop RPG, and a lovely mercyfic-y retelling of one of mine. As you can tell, it was a very good round of FIAB from the gifts perspective too. There was no mystery this year about who my authors were :)

I don't remember what else I usually write for these round-up posts, so here is a bulleted list of some random recs!

Flip My Switch [art, Undertale, Mettaton]
kiss and fly [art, DCU, Clark/Bruce]
new experiences with every loop [Yamanote Line - Railway Service] - cute perspective from an anthropomorphized real life train line.
let me tell you something of eternal love [Animorphs, Aftran 942 & Cassie] - my childhood faves!
a light that never goes out [BtVS, ensemble] - thoughtful conversations and connections leading up to Buffy's funeral.
Death and the Maiden [Discworld, Death & Ysabell] - Death is a surprisingly good father?
Hibiscus [OW, Crime Family Head Who Only Simulates Emotion/Woman from a Rival Clan Who Teaches Him How to Feel (F/M)] - creative and sensual piece of prose.
True Hearts Reunited [OW, Penniless Regency Lady/Her Widowed Female Friend from Childhood] - regency diary entries revisiting an old friendship that once was everything.