ktula

Whew, so. 2018 was a year, let me tell you what. It's been my best year so far, creatively speaking. I really feel as though I hit my stride this year, and I feel much less conflicted about balancing everything.

My wordcount goal for the year was 250,000 words, and my actual wordcount was 416,503 (actually just over 420k because my spreadsheet is out, but I'm not bothering to go back and correct it). I did 20k+ every single month except for December, and 50k+ in January, February, and November. About 28.5% of my wordcount will (eventually) be available for purchase, 9% was blog posts/breakdowns of my writing, and the remainder was all fic.

I put seven fics out on ao3 in 2018:

reconnaissance - this was my birthday present to me! If you've read Foxtrot, reconnaissance is a Mitaka-POV look at one of Kylo Ren's performances. If you haven't read Foxtrot, reconnaissance is a Mitaka-POV thirst-fest over Kylo Ren, and his (nearly literal -- it's actually a staff) sword-swallowing abilities. It makes references to the events of Foxtrot, but said events are presented without context, so it won't be a spoiler if you haven't read the fic.

Blood Like Starlight - the very first installment in the kylux vampire au that I'm delighted to be writing with splinteredstar ! This one introduces everyone to vampire!Kylo (the pretentious fuck) and human!Hux (very long-suffering, very much Over This Shit). There's a lot of bootlicking in this one.

Next to Godliness - the second installment in the kylux vampire au with splinteredstar ! It's a sexy, sexy oral hygiene fic. (What? Hux knows exactly what Ren has been eating, and it's repulsive.) Also features Kylo's dramatics over Hux having not written while he was away--and Hux's sheer confusion that he was expected to, for some reason.

Dollars to Donuts - this is the big one. Weighing in at just over 180k, this fake relationship/coffeeshop-college modern kylux AU took up the majority of my year. I started drafting it in 2017, finished it up in the first quarter of the year, and then took from March - August to post the thing. It was a massive undertaking, and there were times I thought I'd never be done the thing, but honestly, it's some of my best work. I was extremely lucky that it was very, very well received, and I'll be grateful for that forever, because it gave me a huge creative boost, both personally and professionally.

what lies beneath - this one is a kink fill for a lingerie!kylux prompt. I completely skipped any hint of feminization in this one, and went straight for a pre-TFA classic kylux dynamic with added class tension instead, as I'd been reading The Little Stranger. It's a fic about who we are versus who we pretend to be, and includes one Force-projected boner, some very, very expensive underwear, and the written version of a looping gif.

Gilded Collar - the third installment in the kylux vampire au with splinteredstar ! This one is a petplay one, and starts digging more into monster!Ren, and also hints at how fucked Ren is after working for Snoke for this long. It's one of my favourite ones in this series--partly because of how it exists on its own merits, but mostly because of the super fucking awesome stuff that it sets up for future installments in the series.

Reach Out and Touch Faith - and, finally, the 2018 project that stretches into 2019, my collaboration with forautumn ! It's a canonverse/canon-divergence kylux longfic--basically a pre-TFA fic written from a post-TLJ lens. Of all the writing I've done this year, I think that RO&TF represents my best technical work, and it's really comforting because I can see the direct line from lessons I was trying to teach myself during DtD--and lessons which I immediately turned around and was able to use in RO&TF.

I have an additional 10k or so of fics that were drafted during the year but aren't yet completed, and will become part of my 2019 roundup.

I think that's about it for this year's post--if you have any questions, or anything--about the works, about my process, about my tracking, or even just about my day, please feel free to ask below!!

I'll get a 2019 planning post up once I've, you know, done some 2019 planning.