my 2022 in fic
Jan. 2nd, 2023 10:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitA meme, snagged from petra but somewhat modified, original post here.
How many words have you written this year?
Counting only fic posted to AO3, 75,424. There's also another thousand words or so of ficlets posted only on DW, plus a couple of unfinished things, a deleted scene from "Also Known As Blackbeard," etc.
How many works did you publish this year?
17
What work are you most proud of (regardless of kudos/hits)?
Also Known As Blackbeard. It's my longest story ever (by far), and finishing it gave me a much-needed renewal of confidence in my writing.
What work of yours has the most hits?
AKA Blackbeard, with 979 hits. Given the size of the fandom, I feel like this is actually very few hits. *sigh*
What work of yours got more feedback than you expected?
Cleaving, I guess. It's a quickly written, very dark little Izzy story, and I expected it to sink without a trace but it got 4 whole comments!
Favorite title you used.
"Cleaving," because of the double meaning. I'm bad at titles so that felt like an achievement.
If you use song lyrics, which artist’s songs did you pull from the most?
I don't really use song lyrics that way.
Pairing you wrote the most for this year?
Ed/Stede, though in most of the fics they were not the focus.
Favorite pairing you wrote for this year?
Ed/Stede. I really do love them. But they're so much the focus of the fandom that I don't know if I'll write much more that's primarily about them. (I do have one fic in the works--maybe. I'm dissatisfied with it so far, and anyway other canonical pairings are also very important in it.)
What work was the quickest to write?
There are a bunch of little ficlets that I wrote in a few hours or less.
What work took you the longest to write?
"Also Known As Blackbeard" took about three months. Which isn't really bad, for writing and editing and editing and editing 50,000+ words. I did nothing for three months but work my job and write.
How many WIP’s do you have in your docs for next year?
I've got an Izzy fic I'm just starting, but I like the idea and feel of it so far. Also the Ed/Stede fic that I'm not super happy with, but I still might finish. The problem with the Ed/Stede fic is that the resolution requires it to be a kind of sequel to "Also Known As Blackbeard," and I don't really want that story to have a sequel. But I really like other aspects of it: it's about marriage and matelotage and love and law and property and stuff, and what marriage means and is for. If I finish it, in its own way it will probably disappoint the hardcore Ed/Stede shippers as much as "Also Known As Blackbeard" (in which Ed and Stede don't even meet until 20,000 words in) did.
What’s your longest work of the year?
AKA Blackbeard, as already mentioned.
What’s your shortest work of the year?
White Wedding (Uncle fandom, Andy & Val, 200 words). It's also my only non-OFMD (but OFMD-adjacent due to Con O'Neill) story.
What’s your most common “Additional Tags” tag?
Probably some variation on "Izzy-typical issues." It would be "Underage" except that I decided to go Choose Not to Warn (with actual warnings in author's notes) for most of those, because I decided that I wasn't damn well going to attach that tags to fics with brief, non-explicit underage content.
Your favorite character to write this year?
Ed. He became so specific to me in writing AKA Blackbeard, with such a strong presence and voice, that I'm not sure I can write a different version of him now.
The character that gave you the most trouble writing this year?
Izzy. He refuses self-knowledge so stubbornly, damn him. So naturally I had to write a fic from his POV in which he gets his heart's desire (which he can't admit to wanting) in the worst possible way, and can't acknowledge that his heart is now broken. Mule-headed little bastard.
What’s one pairing you want to explore next year?
The thing is, while I love the other OFMD canon pairings in canon, I don't have any particular urge to explore them in fic. Oluwande/Jim is great, but Jim as a nonbinary AFAB masc-presenting character scrapes right up against my own issues as a trans man (very short version: I keep wanting to write them as a trans man, but they're not, and literally in this sentence I had to go back and delete the pronoun "him" which I had accidentally used), and I'm not sure I could write them properly at length. And while I'm glad Lucius/Pete exists, and I enjoy their onscreen relationship, I don't actually like Pete very much as a person. I'm more interested in Lucius/Fang, though I like it in the context of an ongoing (and primary) Lucius/Pete relationship. I might go there, I guess, but mostly my urge is to explore the characters who didn't get much development in S1. I'm very fond of Frenchie and I've written a few ficlets about him, but I'd like to try something longer.
Which work of yours have you reread the most?
AKA Blackbeard, which I re-read several times in the first few weeks after posting it. I habitually re-read my own fic, because I do write the kind of things I want to read, and sometimes nobody else is doing that.
How many kudos in total did you get this year?
442.
Which work has the most comments?
AKA Blackbeard, with 19 (not counting my replies to comments).
Did you do any collaborative works this year?
No. I don't really co-write. Some kind soul podficced a couple of my ficlets, though.
Did you write any gifts this year?
Nope. I tried! But the exchange turned out not to be a good fit for me so I withdrew.
Did you receive any gifts this year?
Nope.
What’s your most common category?
Gen, somewhat to my surprise. Although in a way, I would categorize every single one of my fics this year as "gen, possibly with some sex and love in it," because I don't think there were any where the love story was the main focus.
It's interesting how much both fandom and my own views have shifted over the last (oh dear) 20 years. Back in the day, you had to call it slash if there was so much as the hint of male/male or female/female desire, and gen was only for stories with absolutely no sex or romance at all. Fandom has matured in some ways, I guess: not only that queer desires no longer belong to a special category, but that generally speaking, it's been accepted that stories that are primarily about something else can still include (non-explicit) sex, dating, romance without being somehow tainted by those things.
I realize that the fandom purity police are still very much a thing, but I'm also not 100% convinced that it really used to be better. A lot of the same ground was fought over back then, I think, just with different terminology attached.
What do you listen to while writing?
I don't. I used to, a bit, but these days I seem to focus better without music.
Favorite work you wrote this year?
I love "Also Known As Blackbeard" so much. I love the deep deep character development I did, and the creation of a whole extracanonical backstory and family life for Ed, and dealing (pretty successfully, I think) with telling a story that takes place over 40 years and has complex intersecting connections between characters, and that finishes with a feeling of being complete and rounded but not too patly "solved."
Favorite line/passage you wrote this year?
It's hard to pick just one, but I'm very fond of this bit from AKA Blackbeard:
Biggest surprise while writing this year?
My sudden interest in writing trans characters. It used to be something I couldn't even contemplate, because just thinking about it hurt. But that was before I was out except online, when I thought I'd never ever be able to transition in real life. I'm in a better place now, and I find I myself able and even, within certain limits, eager to explore trans characters a bit. Though I have to admit that it helps that OFMD is a canon with enough hints of magic in it that I can, in some stories at least, imagine magic-aided physical transitions.
Anyway, this year I've written trans!Izzy (twice, in connected stories), trans!Jackie, and canonically nonbinary Jim. Plus a cis character who contemplates whether he might be trans and decides he's not, and a character who does genderfuckery like a god/dess.
Leitmotif of the year:
Sad middle-aged men, but that's been my leitmotif since before I was even properly middle-aged myself. The new and interesting thing in my fic this year, I think, is the possibility of change. Both of my two long stories, "Also Known As Blackbeard" and "Sea Change," are about people who have fucked up big time but who try to make amends, form connections, and be better.
Truest story of this year:
For a certain value of truth, All That May Become a Man, which is trans!Izzy and the curse--literal in this instance--of toxic masculinity. Some trans men affirm their male identities by joining the patriarchy with a will; we all struggle with it to some degree, because it's very hard in a patriarchal culture to say "I am not a woman" without the stated or unstated corollary "because women are X, Y, and Z negative things and I am NOT THAT."
The story title comes from a passage in Macbeth in which Macbeth asserts to Lady M. that no, it is possible to be too much of a man--in which case you become a beast.
Story of mine most underappreciated by the universe, in my opinion:
Sea Change. I get it, Buttons is a weirdo and people aren't necessarily very interested in him. He's also not sexually appealing in any conventional sense, so most people don't want to read about him having sex and romantic relationships (even though those weren't the focus of the story and there's no really explicit sex scenes). But come on, the story has witchcraft and queerness and a man in love with the sea, and witchcraft is queerness, and all we queers better hang together or the British Navy will surely hang us all separately.
Most fun story to write:
"White Wedding," because it's light and silly with just an edge of seriousness.
Story with the single sexiest moment:
I'm very fond of the whole loooooong Ed/Stede sex scene in "Also Known As Blackbeard," because writing sex isn't easy for me and I think I did a good job. If I have to pick just one moment, probably Ed struggling to lie still so that Stede can explore him. It's not how Ed usually approaches sex, because it's important to him to be Good In Bed, to give pleasure. But he can tell it's what Stede needs, even if he doesn't fully understand why.
Most "Holy crap, that's wrong, even for you" story:
The bit in Cleaving where
Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters:
"Also Known As Blackbeard" deepened and shifted my own sense of Ed a lot, of course, but also of Jack and Izzy. For both of them, I had to answer the question "why does Ed keep this guy around?" Part of the answer is loneliness, part of it's history, but there are aspects of these men's personalities that Ed genuinely likes (Jack's sense of fun, though he mostly likes what it used to be, and Izzy's intelligence, intensity, and tendency to be a challenge).
I don't think my sense of Stede developed as much, though the story did clarify my ideas of what Ed sees in him. (Foremost: a playmate, someone who will meet him halfway in joyful, whimsical creativity. But who also gets him at a much deeper level.)
Hardest story to write:
"Also Known As Blackbeard." It's a lot of words, and editing a long story is exponentially harder than a short one. Plus, a lot of the emotional territory is tough, and tough in a sustained way. Ed is desperately lonely throughout almost all of the story, depressed for a lot of it, permanently emotionally marked by racism and childhood abuse, full of largely unexpressed rage and capable of doing bad bad bad stuff. He's getting better at the end, and I definitely see the ending as a happy one, but he's always going to be something of a wounded person.
Ed is also hard to write from a craft perspective. He's a highly intelligent man who is illiterate.* He's travelled the world, but most of his life has been spent on a ship or in port cities, so there are huge gaps in his understanding of ordinary life on land. In writing him, I had to convey complex thoughts in the language that would be available to someone who's never read a book. He's got no literary context for his ideas, no pop culture references, nothing but his own thoughts as he can work them out by himself (because he also, until Stede, doesn't have anyone to really talk to).
(*There's some fannish controversy about this. My take is that (a) it's the most likely explanation for what we see in canon, and (b) Ed's illiteracy says nothing about his intelligence, only about his completely unremarkable lack of access to education in a culture and time when most people were in the same position. Saying he's illiterate is not an insult. In "Also Known As Blackbeard" I wrote him as functionally, but not totally, illiterate. He can decipher written language, given enough time, but he doesn't read with any ease. It's one reason he ends up kind of dependent on Izzy, who can read, for some of the day-to-day running of his ship.)
Biggest disappointment:
The fandom did not sink to its collective knees in adoration of "Also Known As Blackbeard," as I hoped and frankly half-expected.
Biggest surprise:
I wrote some het! In Strictly Metaphorical, which is tagged multi because it also contains Jackie/Jim UST, but is mostly het.
Story I haven't yet written, but intend to:
"Intend" is such a strong word. I very much intend to finish the story of Why Izzy Is Like That, but beyond that I've just got questions and vague ideas. And a terrible fear that eventually I will have to write a life story for every single one of these people. (Time before S2 permitting, which it probably won't.)
I'm especially interested in Frenchie, and also Stede. I've written a fair amount about Stede from the outside, but very little in his point of view. In some ways he's more challenging than Ed, because he can seem (and be) quite shallow, but he's shallow in a complex way. He wants things to be lovely and fun, and despite a whole lot of unexamined privilege that blinkers him and can make him thoughtless, he wants it for other people too. And of course it's obvious that his shallowness (by which I mean, essentially, his valuing of things that it's not culturally acceptable for men to value, like clothes and soup tureens and theater and not being a bully) is a refuge from a lot of deep-seated pain. Something I want to think about more with Stede is how angry he is. Part of what draws him to Ed, and to the pirate life, is the opportunity to express that anger. There could, if one were so inclined (and I'm not sure I am) be a rather painful story in there, with Stede's need to get his anger out conflicting deeply with Ed's need to be softer and gentler.
So . . . who knows what I'll end up writing? The stories I enjoy most tend to take me a bit by surprise.
ETA: I should mention that I have an informal goal of writing the least popular fic for every character and pairing in OFMD. This is a joke, but not entirely.
petra but somewhat modified, original post here.How many words have you written this year?
Counting only fic posted to AO3, 75,424. There's also another thousand words or so of ficlets posted only on DW, plus a couple of unfinished things, a deleted scene from "Also Known As Blackbeard," etc.
How many works did you publish this year?
17
What work are you most proud of (regardless of kudos/hits)?
Also Known As Blackbeard. It's my longest story ever (by far), and finishing it gave me a much-needed renewal of confidence in my writing.
What work of yours has the most hits?
AKA Blackbeard, with 979 hits. Given the size of the fandom, I feel like this is actually very few hits. *sigh*
What work of yours got more feedback than you expected?
Cleaving, I guess. It's a quickly written, very dark little Izzy story, and I expected it to sink without a trace but it got 4 whole comments!
Favorite title you used.
"Cleaving," because of the double meaning. I'm bad at titles so that felt like an achievement.
If you use song lyrics, which artist’s songs did you pull from the most?
I don't really use song lyrics that way.
Pairing you wrote the most for this year?
Ed/Stede, though in most of the fics they were not the focus.
Favorite pairing you wrote for this year?
Ed/Stede. I really do love them. But they're so much the focus of the fandom that I don't know if I'll write much more that's primarily about them. (I do have one fic in the works--maybe. I'm dissatisfied with it so far, and anyway other canonical pairings are also very important in it.)
What work was the quickest to write?
There are a bunch of little ficlets that I wrote in a few hours or less.
What work took you the longest to write?
"Also Known As Blackbeard" took about three months. Which isn't really bad, for writing and editing and editing and editing 50,000+ words. I did nothing for three months but work my job and write.
How many WIP’s do you have in your docs for next year?
I've got an Izzy fic I'm just starting, but I like the idea and feel of it so far. Also the Ed/Stede fic that I'm not super happy with, but I still might finish. The problem with the Ed/Stede fic is that the resolution requires it to be a kind of sequel to "Also Known As Blackbeard," and I don't really want that story to have a sequel. But I really like other aspects of it: it's about marriage and matelotage and love and law and property and stuff, and what marriage means and is for. If I finish it, in its own way it will probably disappoint the hardcore Ed/Stede shippers as much as "Also Known As Blackbeard" (in which Ed and Stede don't even meet until 20,000 words in) did.
What’s your longest work of the year?
AKA Blackbeard, as already mentioned.
What’s your shortest work of the year?
White Wedding (Uncle fandom, Andy & Val, 200 words). It's also my only non-OFMD (but OFMD-adjacent due to Con O'Neill) story.
What’s your most common “Additional Tags” tag?
Probably some variation on "Izzy-typical issues." It would be "Underage" except that I decided to go Choose Not to Warn (with actual warnings in author's notes) for most of those, because I decided that I wasn't damn well going to attach that tags to fics with brief, non-explicit underage content.
Your favorite character to write this year?
Ed. He became so specific to me in writing AKA Blackbeard, with such a strong presence and voice, that I'm not sure I can write a different version of him now.
The character that gave you the most trouble writing this year?
Izzy. He refuses self-knowledge so stubbornly, damn him. So naturally I had to write a fic from his POV in which he gets his heart's desire (which he can't admit to wanting) in the worst possible way, and can't acknowledge that his heart is now broken. Mule-headed little bastard.
What’s one pairing you want to explore next year?
The thing is, while I love the other OFMD canon pairings in canon, I don't have any particular urge to explore them in fic. Oluwande/Jim is great, but Jim as a nonbinary AFAB masc-presenting character scrapes right up against my own issues as a trans man (very short version: I keep wanting to write them as a trans man, but they're not, and literally in this sentence I had to go back and delete the pronoun "him" which I had accidentally used), and I'm not sure I could write them properly at length. And while I'm glad Lucius/Pete exists, and I enjoy their onscreen relationship, I don't actually like Pete very much as a person. I'm more interested in Lucius/Fang, though I like it in the context of an ongoing (and primary) Lucius/Pete relationship. I might go there, I guess, but mostly my urge is to explore the characters who didn't get much development in S1. I'm very fond of Frenchie and I've written a few ficlets about him, but I'd like to try something longer.
Which work of yours have you reread the most?
AKA Blackbeard, which I re-read several times in the first few weeks after posting it. I habitually re-read my own fic, because I do write the kind of things I want to read, and sometimes nobody else is doing that.
How many kudos in total did you get this year?
442.
Which work has the most comments?
AKA Blackbeard, with 19 (not counting my replies to comments).
Did you do any collaborative works this year?
No. I don't really co-write. Some kind soul podficced a couple of my ficlets, though.
Did you write any gifts this year?
Nope. I tried! But the exchange turned out not to be a good fit for me so I withdrew.
Did you receive any gifts this year?
Nope.
What’s your most common category?
Gen, somewhat to my surprise. Although in a way, I would categorize every single one of my fics this year as "gen, possibly with some sex and love in it," because I don't think there were any where the love story was the main focus.
It's interesting how much both fandom and my own views have shifted over the last (oh dear) 20 years. Back in the day, you had to call it slash if there was so much as the hint of male/male or female/female desire, and gen was only for stories with absolutely no sex or romance at all. Fandom has matured in some ways, I guess: not only that queer desires no longer belong to a special category, but that generally speaking, it's been accepted that stories that are primarily about something else can still include (non-explicit) sex, dating, romance without being somehow tainted by those things.
I realize that the fandom purity police are still very much a thing, but I'm also not 100% convinced that it really used to be better. A lot of the same ground was fought over back then, I think, just with different terminology attached.
What do you listen to while writing?
I don't. I used to, a bit, but these days I seem to focus better without music.
Favorite work you wrote this year?
I love "Also Known As Blackbeard" so much. I love the deep deep character development I did, and the creation of a whole extracanonical backstory and family life for Ed, and dealing (pretty successfully, I think) with telling a story that takes place over 40 years and has complex intersecting connections between characters, and that finishes with a feeling of being complete and rounded but not too patly "solved."
Favorite line/passage you wrote this year?
It's hard to pick just one, but I'm very fond of this bit from AKA Blackbeard:
It would be great if Izzy could be drunk like this all the time. You could talk to him then. You could just sit and breathe with him, too. You could . . . he could, maybe. It was in the air, soft and faint, a possibility. If he touched Izzy now, they could. Maybe. It was different from the other maybe Ed felt sometimes, when they'd been sparring and he won. When Izzy's hair tumbled down into his face and there was a half-scared wildness in his eyes, like he was drunk on surrender. Like he'd surrender everything, if Ed just reached out and took it.
But you couldn't keep a man drunk all the time. The next day would always come. And you couldn't divide him into pieces and only keep the parts you wanted.
Biggest surprise while writing this year?
My sudden interest in writing trans characters. It used to be something I couldn't even contemplate, because just thinking about it hurt. But that was before I was out except online, when I thought I'd never ever be able to transition in real life. I'm in a better place now, and I find I myself able and even, within certain limits, eager to explore trans characters a bit. Though I have to admit that it helps that OFMD is a canon with enough hints of magic in it that I can, in some stories at least, imagine magic-aided physical transitions.
Anyway, this year I've written trans!Izzy (twice, in connected stories), trans!Jackie, and canonically nonbinary Jim. Plus a cis character who contemplates whether he might be trans and decides he's not, and a character who does genderfuckery like a god/dess.
Leitmotif of the year:
Sad middle-aged men, but that's been my leitmotif since before I was even properly middle-aged myself. The new and interesting thing in my fic this year, I think, is the possibility of change. Both of my two long stories, "Also Known As Blackbeard" and "Sea Change," are about people who have fucked up big time but who try to make amends, form connections, and be better.
Truest story of this year:
For a certain value of truth, All That May Become a Man, which is trans!Izzy and the curse--literal in this instance--of toxic masculinity. Some trans men affirm their male identities by joining the patriarchy with a will; we all struggle with it to some degree, because it's very hard in a patriarchal culture to say "I am not a woman" without the stated or unstated corollary "because women are X, Y, and Z negative things and I am NOT THAT."
The story title comes from a passage in Macbeth in which Macbeth asserts to Lady M. that no, it is possible to be too much of a man--in which case you become a beast.
Story of mine most underappreciated by the universe, in my opinion:
Sea Change. I get it, Buttons is a weirdo and people aren't necessarily very interested in him. He's also not sexually appealing in any conventional sense, so most people don't want to read about him having sex and romantic relationships (even though those weren't the focus of the story and there's no really explicit sex scenes). But come on, the story has witchcraft and queerness and a man in love with the sea, and witchcraft is queerness, and all we queers better hang together or the British Navy will surely hang us all separately.
Most fun story to write:
"White Wedding," because it's light and silly with just an edge of seriousness.
Story with the single sexiest moment:
I'm very fond of the whole loooooong Ed/Stede sex scene in "Also Known As Blackbeard," because writing sex isn't easy for me and I think I did a good job. If I have to pick just one moment, probably Ed struggling to lie still so that Stede can explore him. It's not how Ed usually approaches sex, because it's important to him to be Good In Bed, to give pleasure. But he can tell it's what Stede needs, even if he doesn't fully understand why.
Most "Holy crap, that's wrong, even for you" story:
The bit in Cleaving where
(Spoilery, in the sense that it should come as a bit of a shock to someone reading the story for the first time; also, violence):
Ed beats Izzy with a belt and Izzy is unbearably turned on by it. Just before this bit, Izzy thinks of himself as Ed's whipping boy, and as soon as I wrote that line some part of my brain said, "Maybe Ed should actually . . . oh dear, he really should, but oh dear." I hadn't planned on that, just on Ed gradually cutting off pieces of Izzy's body until even Izzy couldn't stand it any more. But Ed using Izzy's desire like that, turning it against him, is so much worse.Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters:
"Also Known As Blackbeard" deepened and shifted my own sense of Ed a lot, of course, but also of Jack and Izzy. For both of them, I had to answer the question "why does Ed keep this guy around?" Part of the answer is loneliness, part of it's history, but there are aspects of these men's personalities that Ed genuinely likes (Jack's sense of fun, though he mostly likes what it used to be, and Izzy's intelligence, intensity, and tendency to be a challenge).
I don't think my sense of Stede developed as much, though the story did clarify my ideas of what Ed sees in him. (Foremost: a playmate, someone who will meet him halfway in joyful, whimsical creativity. But who also gets him at a much deeper level.)
Hardest story to write:
"Also Known As Blackbeard." It's a lot of words, and editing a long story is exponentially harder than a short one. Plus, a lot of the emotional territory is tough, and tough in a sustained way. Ed is desperately lonely throughout almost all of the story, depressed for a lot of it, permanently emotionally marked by racism and childhood abuse, full of largely unexpressed rage and capable of doing bad bad bad stuff. He's getting better at the end, and I definitely see the ending as a happy one, but he's always going to be something of a wounded person.
Ed is also hard to write from a craft perspective. He's a highly intelligent man who is illiterate.* He's travelled the world, but most of his life has been spent on a ship or in port cities, so there are huge gaps in his understanding of ordinary life on land. In writing him, I had to convey complex thoughts in the language that would be available to someone who's never read a book. He's got no literary context for his ideas, no pop culture references, nothing but his own thoughts as he can work them out by himself (because he also, until Stede, doesn't have anyone to really talk to).
(*There's some fannish controversy about this. My take is that (a) it's the most likely explanation for what we see in canon, and (b) Ed's illiteracy says nothing about his intelligence, only about his completely unremarkable lack of access to education in a culture and time when most people were in the same position. Saying he's illiterate is not an insult. In "Also Known As Blackbeard" I wrote him as functionally, but not totally, illiterate. He can decipher written language, given enough time, but he doesn't read with any ease. It's one reason he ends up kind of dependent on Izzy, who can read, for some of the day-to-day running of his ship.)
Biggest disappointment:
The fandom did not sink to its collective knees in adoration of "Also Known As Blackbeard," as I hoped and frankly half-expected.
Biggest surprise:
I wrote some het! In Strictly Metaphorical, which is tagged multi because it also contains Jackie/Jim UST, but is mostly het.
Story I haven't yet written, but intend to:
"Intend" is such a strong word. I very much intend to finish the story of Why Izzy Is Like That, but beyond that I've just got questions and vague ideas. And a terrible fear that eventually I will have to write a life story for every single one of these people. (Time before S2 permitting, which it probably won't.)
I'm especially interested in Frenchie, and also Stede. I've written a fair amount about Stede from the outside, but very little in his point of view. In some ways he's more challenging than Ed, because he can seem (and be) quite shallow, but he's shallow in a complex way. He wants things to be lovely and fun, and despite a whole lot of unexamined privilege that blinkers him and can make him thoughtless, he wants it for other people too. And of course it's obvious that his shallowness (by which I mean, essentially, his valuing of things that it's not culturally acceptable for men to value, like clothes and soup tureens and theater and not being a bully) is a refuge from a lot of deep-seated pain. Something I want to think about more with Stede is how angry he is. Part of what draws him to Ed, and to the pirate life, is the opportunity to express that anger. There could, if one were so inclined (and I'm not sure I am) be a rather painful story in there, with Stede's need to get his anger out conflicting deeply with Ed's need to be softer and gentler.
So . . . who knows what I'll end up writing? The stories I enjoy most tend to take me a bit by surprise.
ETA: I should mention that I have an informal goal of writing the least popular fic for every character and pairing in OFMD. This is a joke, but not entirely.
