It only took until the early hours of May 8th, but it’s finally done.
Oh. Thank. God.
So, let’s recap, since it’s been a bit since I really discussed what the heck Febuwhump is. Febuwhump is a writing challenge that’s hosted on Tumblr. There’s a set amount of prompts, one per day, as well as ten alternative prompts for when you just can’t think of something. The challenge runs from February 1st through the 28th, with final posting supposed to be going up in the first few days of March.
And yet, I didn’t finish until May.
So what happened?
A couple of things, actually. One reason is that I just got burned out. I was trying to write longer and longer stories, and I just couldn’t finish in a day. So then I was trying to write ahead, and also post consistently on this blog, and stream on Twitch, plus do my normal duties here at home. It just became too much, and something had to give. So, I took a step back and took a breath.
Another thing is that I gave myself several unrealistic deadlines, then didn’t live up to them. The first was obviously March 1st, which I blew by. Then, I aimed for March 28th, so one month late. But by that point, I was knee deep in the 9-1-1 fandom and just burned out with The Old Guard. So, I figured April was a good goal, and aimed to be finished by midmonth. My goal was to have everything completed, then I was going to send it to be put into book form at an independent book printer (since this is fanfiction, and I wasn’t actually publishing it). I wanted to give my mom a copy of all the stories on paper, as she has trouble navigating Archive of Our Own.
And that didn’t work out as well, because I got stuck with three prompts left. Actually, it was only one prompt, which was the finale of The Immortal Genius, but that’s a gripe for another day. When I finally pushed through that barrier (almost five thousand words later), I just had two fics left, and those because love letters to the TOG community, as I decided to set back fully from the fandom until we get more sequel information.
That’s a topic for another day.
To get back to the story, I posted the last story on the afternoon of May 8th, and immediately set to work printing every story in a logical manner, before carefully putting them in a three ring binder and presenting it to Mom for Mother’s Day the next morning. (Yes, there were tears). And that almost didn’t happen, but that’s because my printer decided it wanted to take a ten to fifteen minute nap between every twenty pages. But I got it done and finished and now I can breathe.
So, let’s hit some statistics, because I honestly haven’t looked beyond just a quick glance at my nightly “You’ve Got Kudos!” email from AO3.
AO3 allows you to sort your top five fics in a few different ways. I’ll go through a couple of them, and then give a couple things I noticed on my own.
In terms of Hits, the top five stories (of 28 total) were “Poisoned” with 705, “Identity Reveal” with 588, “Who Are You?” with 577, “Hallucinations” with 555, and “Memory Loss” with 526 total hits. Fun fact, only “Hallucinations” is not a fic in the Immortal Genius series.
In terms of Kudos, the top five stories (of 28 total) were “Identity Reveal” with 73, “Who Are You?” with 71, “Burned” with 62, “Hallucinations” with 60, and “Gunpoint” with 58.
In terms of Bookmarks, the top five stories (of 28 total) were “Poisoned”, “I Didn’t Mean It” and “Recovery” all with 6, and “Who Are You?” and “Identity Reveal” with 5.
In terms of word count, the longest fic was “Recovery” at 4,825 words, which was the finale of the Immortal Genius series. The shortest was “Take Me Instead” at 269, which was an introspective look at Booker’s mindset during the beginning events of The Old Guard. I lost my train of thought on that one real fast, so it wasn’t a successful one.
The fics that I’m the most proud of, for a variety of reasons, were “Impaled” (because I went for comedy, and it made me laugh), “Mind Control” (because I wanted to see if a different explanation for Booker’s choices though TOG could have been different if he didn’t know he was doing the damn thing), “Buried Alive” (because at that point, the fandom had buried everyone but Copley, and it was his damn turn). “Betrayal” and “I Can’t Lose You Too” (where I delve into Nile’s relationship with her brother, and upon meeting him again, has to walk away. It’s heartbreaking.), and honestly “I Can’t Lose You Too” (which had me in tears as I got into the meat of the idea. It deals with death, and saying goodbye, and I was legitimately sobbing as I finished).
I’ll only mention it here (I have a whole post planned later), but I also really enjoyed where The Genius Immortal took me. What was initually just supposed to be a few short stories became ten, and I’m not done yet. Also, I managed to cross in 9-1-1 right towards the end, which means that sometime soon I need to sit down and get to plotting.
But yeah. Here’s a few more fun stats, because why not. I received 8504 hits across all twenty eight fics. More were on the first twenty, then it dwindled, which makes sense, as it was getting pretty saturated with Febuwhump stories on AO3. I had 59 bookmarks in total, as well as had 21 different comment threads across the stories. Some stories received a lot of comments, most did not. I’m totally cool with it.
Oh, and the total word count? 30,373 words. Here’s a quick fun fact. I joined AO3 in 2012 and ported over a bunch of fics that year, as well as all of my 1sentence challenge posts from LiveJournal. Most of what was posted was pre-2012. That year I “wrote” 17,056 words. Every year since? If I published anything on AO3, it never was more than about two thousand words total. In four months, I’ve almost doubled my AO3 word count. Four. Months.
And for the record? I just did that math while writing this post. My phone is on the calculator app on my lap. And I’m still kinda in shock.
So. Yeah. That just happened.
What’s Next? You might be asking?
Well, I’m taking a short break from writing. I got my second vaccine shot on Tuesday (edit note: this was mostly pre-written on May 9th, but edited to go up on Thursday, because I ended up feeling like getting hit by a truck), and I’m just taking a couple days to myself. I’m finishing my clean up of Lego City Undercover, and planning my run for Persona 5 Royal on stream either tomorrow or next week (I may push back, not sure). I’m about to start a good book that I’ve been sitting on (Good Girls, Bad Blood by Holly Jackson, sequel to one of my favorite books of 2020, A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder). And honestly? Taking a breath has been a good idea.
I’ll jump back into writing soon. And who knows? Maybe I’ll finally get back to a couple of my passion projects I’ve been sitting on.
Maybe.
Don’t count on it. 🙂
Until next time!
