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Hooray, another great FIAB! Reveals didn't happen at the greatest time for me (hence also the lateness of this entry and the unrespondedness of many comments), but I still managed to enjoy some of the collection and comment on 61 works. (With the massive number of works produced, that's still only about 6% of the collection!) I left some recs here, including the three gifts I received, all of which I was absolutely thrilled with!

I don't remember if I did anything different in sign-ups or if the mods/circumstances were just good to me, but I ended up with only 4 assignments this time, which was much more manageable than many little things. In all I wrote 19k words in 4 different fandoms, all of different media types. (Actually, checking my records again, I wrote 19k last year as well - it just felt a lot harder broken up into 7 chunks!) After my experiments last year, I decided to stick with normal prose this time, and am happy with that decision.

( Details behind the cut!  )

FFFX has finally revealed! Here is what I wrote this time around.

( Below the cut! )

I thought the 2-week anonymous period was long, but it turned out to be just enough time to hit my usual comment goal of 10% of the collection.

I also thought the half-year writing period was long, but it— actually, yeah, it was really difficult for me to handle! This time around, I promised I wouldn’t start writing my assignment until 2023, but it still wound up being way harder than it should have been, maybe because I’d brainstormed the idea so long ago.

By contrast, I picked up a half-length pinch hit close to the deadline, and the ease of writing was like night and day. I basically churned the entire thing out in the short time it took to get beta feedback for my assignment. (The lower wordcount minimum probably helped.)

If I’ve learned my lesson properly, I won’t do this exchange again, but overall I’m pleased I got the opportunity to create the stories I did.

My assignment turned out much better than I thought it would at the end of draft 1, which was a major relief. While writing, I got really into this Josh Ritter song (as evident from the title), and listened to it on repeat. The poetic lyrics and meditative atmosphere ended up significantly impacting my story: the tone, the way that it slipped in and out of dreams, the weightiness of the past.

The more I listened to it, the more beautiful I found the imagery. Floating on dark and perilous waters, stars "directionless and drifting" overhead, drowned sailors and ancient ships rusting below the waves. Throughout the verses, there’s the sense of how easy it would be to give in and sink right down with them, anchored by the past—a struggle that manifests in my protagonist, Tobias. Then there’s this chorus, "only a change of time", which to me can have two meanings.

Either that the only thing that has changed is time; everything else will go on just as awfully it has before, and there’s no use fighting it. (In Tobias’s case: that his second "time" being married will be no better than the first.)

Alternatively, it’s only a change of time that can heal the past, nothing else. It requires patience, but it’s also inevitable. In the song, the narrator is still cutting forward, despite the "white caps of memory" impeding the way—because barely visible in the distance is the shoreline: some unknown land, person, or future, some reprieve from the dark ocean of the past.

I'm lumping these together because they ended up overlapping, and by completely avoidable unfortunate circumstance, I spent two weeks trying to juggle both simultaneously.

Eyeshield 21 Prompt Bingo actually started in April, but after a lot of big plans and daydreaming (and very few fills), my output sort of petered off partway through. (It didn't help that the bingo squares that I managed were nowhere close to making a bingo.) Then suddenly, before I knew it, there was only one week left - which also coincided with the first week of Battleship! I plotted out a multichapter fic, hitting 1-2 prompts per chapter, that would indirectly take me to bingo by the end, and tried my best to speedwrite it!

Battleship was a super unique exchange where participants were divided into two teams, each with their own battleship board. To fire on the enemy team's board, we had to create fanworks containing tags assigned to each square. It was so cool to see a social and strategic take on exchanges, and chat was very lively. Having the prompts to create for, and a sense of deadline-inspired urgency, was very motivating (not unlike Prompt Bingo, actually)!

Anyway, rather than describing how it all played out, here's a hasty chart/timeline I made.

( How it went! )

( What I wrote! )

Moral of the story? Prompts on grids + deadlines = good for my productivity, I guess. 

It was my first time signing up for this exchange, and my second time pinch-hitting. I love freeform exchanges and I love gen, but the timing never worked out in the past. For some reason, I found myself feeling very uncharacteristically chill over the entire process. Not sure if because 1) I've finally done enough exchanges to be over the anxiety, 2) real-life busy-ness prevented me from having enough mental energy to stress over it, or 3) having a short fic in the collection in a popular fandom meant I got some early feedback and could rest assured that I was an ok writer after all. If the latter, I'll have to remember this strategy for the future! 

The fic I wrote for my assignment was The Supreme Art of War, an original work for the pairing "Disabled Male Veteran of Magical War & Traumatized Child He Accidentally Acquires". I still remember being so delighted to discover how very specific original works pairings can get in the exchange scene, but it's also become my downfall. When I look at a tag like this, I feel like there is so much to unpack, and I can't resist writing a ton. How is the first character disabled? Was it from birth or from circumstance? If he's a veteran, what's the war? Is it ongoing? Is it done? And so on. I ended up writing almost 6k words for a 1.5k minimum, but at least I think I managed to pack in several of my recipient's freeform requests: Person Used to Being Treated Like a Weapon Gets Treated Like a Human Instead, Awkward Conversations, Hurt/Comfort - Hurt character initially mistrustful of comforter, Emotional discussions over firelight. Maybe even Found Family and Cross-Generational Trauma? I also saw one of their other pairing requests had something to do with witches and familiars, which mildly inspired some of the worldbuilding here. 

I also snagged an exciting pinch hit and wrote Girl Out of Time. The recipient has great taste in fandoms, but Arcane: League of Legends was the only one I've seen recently enough to write about, and even then I still had to do some light canon review. I'd never considered writing in this fandom before, and have hardly ever read in it, but the prompts were great. (So great that someone else wrote basically the same premise as me in the same exchange, haha.) The entire story came out in one sitting, and was much closer to the wordcount minimum, but I feel like I was able to honor the various time travel freeforms in my recipient's request (Time Travel - Character changes the past to prevent traumatic events and succeeds, Time Travel - Character saves their younger self from trauma, Time Travel - Character meets their child self, Time Travel - Peggy Sue (which I had to look up!), Time Travel Fix-It), as well as working in some dreams/nightmares + mentally unstable narrator that I hope landed right. Their likes also mentioned "elaborate descriptions of sights and smells", which inspired me to put in more detailed descriptions than I normally would, and I'm happy with how that turned out.