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Snowflake Challenge promotional banner with image of white ice crystals/snowflakes on a dark green background. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

Challenge #8

In your own space, celebrate a personal win from the past year: it can be a list of fanworks you're especially proud of, a gift of your time to the community, a quality or skill you cultivated in yourself, something you generally feel went well. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

I'm proud of the amount I've written over the last two years! (Over 300k! You can check out my year-in-review posts here, if you're interested.) It's been a long time since I've been able to be creative at all, so it's astonishing to look back and see the fruits of my labor. At the same time, it feels like a dormant part of me is starting to wake up, and long overdue.

While I still feel a little like I'm skating around the edge of exchanges, at least I'm taking pride in commenting widely in the ones I do participate in. For

ficinabox, I set a goal of commenting on 10% of the collection, and indeed managed to comment on 55/546 works. Part of was realizing how antsy it made me, to wait for comments on an exchange fic that I tailored to someone else, so I tried to redirect that nervous energy into commenting on other works.

It's helpful that I enjoy reading original works, and also that I enjoy commenting. When I start reading something with the intent to comment, I typically open a second window, and copy over my favorite snippets as I go. Not only do I like to share these with the author as a sort of liveblog, going back over them after I finish reading can help me to structure the comment I want to leave. A lot of times, I find that they speak to a broader theme/characterization/aspect of the story that I liked, and I can phrase that in my own words while using the author's to give a concrete example.