Snowflake day 2

[obstinatecondolement]

Challenge #2

In your own space, set yourself some goals for the coming year. They can be fannish or not, public or private. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

I've just reviewed the fandom goals that I posted for 2023 for day 12 of last week's Snowflake Challenge, and I did better on them than I expected to! I had a full success with 5/11, a qualified success with 8/11 (I gave myself a few cheats on three of them to make up lost ground), and made some progress on all of my goals, even the ones I consider failures overall.

Looking at what was easy, what I was just about able to pull out of the bag, and what I thought was going to be easy but then didn't manage, I'm going to make the following adjustments for my goals this year:

• Participate in three fandom exchanges.
• Create one treat for an exchange.
• Create three pinch hits.
• Beta read three fics.
• Bind three books (none of which have to be a new typeset, or my own typeset).
• Typeset three fics (they do not have to be the same ones I bind).
• Record, edit, and post at least one podfic a month (one Mulligan is allowed if I miss a month and then make it up by posting two in another month).
• Finish my podfic of Wedding is Destiny; and Hanging Likewise by sqbr.
• Complete and post two fanvids.
• Health and other circumstances permitting, attend two in-person conventions.
• Comment on at least one fanwork a week.
• Update Dreamwidth at least once a month.
• Write whatever self indulgent niche fic I want to without worrying about whether anyone else will care about it.

The last one is more qualitative, because I don't want to set a hard target of "Write one fic no one cares about a month" or something, but I do want to get more comfortable with just pursuing ideas that I am interested by and want to write without being worried about Alienating People Who Subscribed To My AO3 Profile For [X Fandom] or that no one will read it, or whatever.

In general, I've tried to (slightly) scale up the goals that I succeeded on last year, and scale down the ones that I didn't, or make them less specific so there's a wider scope for success. Most of my goals are less specific than they were last year, actually, but I think that this is good because it means I might try more things. I've also dropped a couple of goals that I think are sort of done, or that I'm doing okay on without tracking them/setting a goal for them.

Comments

[freevistas]

I'm really new to writing fanfiction, but I feel like I can sort of relate to that last goal...I hope you're able to do a little of that super-nichey writing this year and have fun doing it. :)

[obstinatecondolement]

Thank you! I hope so too. I find that pretty consistently the fic I've written that I am most happy with is the stuff that was basically just some hopelessly niche fic for minor character, or a rarepair, or rare fandom that ends up getting less than 50 hits on AO3, and more often fewer than 10, but that I had to get out of my head and down on the page so badly that it broke through the fear of no one caring. Once some time has passed, I really don't care about the stats anymore and I'm just enchanted by this fic I wrote specifically because I desperately wanted to.

Like, this is an amateur hobby I do For Fun! I don't have to write "to market" because a) by definition, there can never be a monetisable market for fic and b) if I do not write fan fiction primarly out of love and enthusiasm then literally what is the point?

Chasing the external validation high never produces lasting satisfaction for me, and at any rate, I am not the kind of person who can put up with writing passionless paint-by-numbers fic for big ships in massive fandoms that I don't care about, so I might as well stop cutting myself off from writing stuff that I really want to because it won't have wide appeal to focus on the stuff I like that I think is the Most Likely To Perform Well. How things are received is or how popular they are is not what I'm doing this for in the first place, so imo I should just stop worrying about stats.

[freevistas]

Wow, yeah, I feel like I want to save this so I can refer to it whenever I start questioning my motivation...

[obstinatecondolement]

I'm glad it was motivating!

I worried that I was just rambling and being self congratulatory about how above Wanting Feedback I am. Which I 1000% am not, even if I'm trying to make it less of a priority, haha. I actually have a site skin that I toggle on and off on AO3 that hides my inbox, link to my statistics page, and the number of kudos and comments on the metadata of works on AO3 for when I start getting unproductively focused on that sort of thing.

My initial plan with it was to just toggle it off once a week to answer any comments and then turn it off again, so that I wasn't getting hit with random highs and lows in my mood from seeing that I had new comments/not getting any comments from X amount of time after I'd posted something, but I haven't needed to do that as much anymore and now I just turn it on if I notice I'm getting upset by my hobby that I do for fun because I'm losing the imaginary game of People Saying Flattering Things To Me. I've turned off emails about comments too, which has also helped a good bit, but I've left the kudos notification email on, because I'm generally a lot more chill about kudos and that's more of an unqualifiedly nice thing to have in my inbox.

I believe the skin I use was adapted from one vriddy made? Or I cobbled together a Frankenstein's monster of vriddy's site skin and another/others I found on AO3 itself and/or the r/ao3 subreddit. I can't quite remember my process, but I'm happy to send whoever is interested in using it the CSS code.

[freevistas]

Hm, I like the idea of a skin that hides all of that! Not sure I need something like that because I haven't actually received any comments yet...but maybe in the future.

As a newcomer to this world, it does seem like it can get kind of tricky to balance the desire to do your own thing/pursue perhaps idiosyncratic passions with the desire to be part of a community, as well as the desire to win the Flattery game. I can imagine the scales tipping between those things pretty frequently. Hope you find a good balance!

[obstinatecondolement]

If you ever feel like you'd like to use the site skin feel free to hmu in future! But also don't let me scare you, haha, comments on AO3 aren't inherently a gateway drug to neuroses or anything. I think it's just worth making sure you're keeping an eye on if you're having fun and if certain things are stressful with hobbies, because sometimes we (the royal we meaning "we human beings" here) can embue them with a heaviness that is not really a great use of our time and energy.

I think my best advice to someone starting out is to just do whatever you want whenever you want and don't get too caught up in doing things "right." And also to pay no attention to unsolicited advice ;) It's exciting that you're starting to write fic! I hope you have a lot of fun.

[vriddy]

The skin in question hides numbers but not the comments themselves, for what it's worth :D The link is here in case you're ever curious, though see what works for you :D Best of luck finding the right balance for yourself, too!

[vriddy]

I need to tattoo your last paragraph into my eyelids for every time I forget XD (T_T)

Best of luck with your goals and with remembering that :) Really feels like it's something I have to re-learn over and over.

[obstinatecondolement]

Yeah, I think with stuff like this it's like gardening or doing the dishes. You will have to do it again, but that's okay, just keep helping it along.

[amado1]

This is nice, I love seeing your list for the year. It always lights a fire under my ass to get more involved too

[obstinatecondolement]

I'm glad! I know that resolutions aren't for everyone, but I always like making them. I think I see it less as a "I must do X, Y, and Z, and I must do them perfectly, and if I don't I'm a failure" these days so much as "I will try to do a mix of things that will be very easy and that will challenge me in a way that is achievable, and depending on how I do with these things I'll reassess how I should set my next set of goals" which is a bit less high-stakes and unforgiving than how I think a lot of people perceive the practice. I used to set less acheivable/realistic goals, which did get me down, but I think I've refined how I do things in a way that is helpful for me at this point in the game.

[kingstoken]

Those sound like a lot of nice goals, the exchange mods are going to love you!

[obstinatecondolement]

Thank you! Starting late 2022 with Yuletide and through 2023 I wrote a few pinch hits for most of the exchanges I did (and I recorded some treats for ITPE), and I have found that having made a few things in the collection saves me from getting too high strung about If They'll Like It, because all my eggs aren't in the one basket. And having modded a bit on a much smaller scale, I sympathise a lot with mods of big exchanges getting everything to run smoothly. I have also defaulted a number of times in my day for one reason or another, so I am trying to pay the people who pinch hit my assignments forward a bit, haha.

[tellshannon815]

Good luck! I have quite a few niche ones myself and determined to keep those going!

[obstinatecondolement]

I believe in you! You are your own most important reader ❤ Also, I honestly think that fic written by people who are really passionate about the story is better, in my subjective opinion, even if it is not 100% my usual thing, compared with something stuffed to the gills with tropes I like and characters I love if it reads to me like it was phoned in without much enthusiasm. I can never tell for sure what is a passion project vs what was phoned in, of course, so this is not a very rigorously scientific hypothesis, but I do certainly think that the stuff I was absolutely bursting to write is my best work.

[delphi]

Great goals all around, but I particularly loved: I do want to get more comfortable with just pursuing ideas that I am interested by and want to write without being worried about Alienating People Who Subscribed To My AO3 Profile For [X Fandom] or that no one will read it, or whatever. Hear, hear!

[obstinatecondolement]

Yeah, literally though! This is not my job and people can unsubscribe if they don't want to get notified of my new stuff anymore: subscriptions are for readers, not for my ego. And I don't want to be too timid to have fun with my hobby that I do for fun because I'm focusing on statistics and treating it like an influencer gig or something. It is not and will never be that, and that's good actually!

[delphi]

Exactly! It's creative expression, not work or some kind of marketing plan. It makes me really happy as a reader when people are out there writing what interests and excites them, even when it's not something I personally vibe with. It's what makes fandom so great.

[obstinatecondolement]

Yeah, it feels like the gig culture grindset "make your hobbies into a side hustle" thing has now fully infiltrated completely unmonetisable hobbies where people are trying to optimise posting times and write to "market" and it's like... maybe I should try not to do that, because it's not the point and it's making things less fun. Obviously people have always wanted clout and social capital in fan spaces that, assuming you weren't grifting, didn't translate into real-world prestige or income,* but I think it's gotten really noticeably worse in the last 10 or so years.

And, again, I am not built for making fanworks that I do not on any level care about, so why try to compete with stuff that is just inevitably going to be more read/commented on/kudosed/praised because it's for a big fandom or a bigger ship or has the right constellation of tropes or got recced by the right people? It doesn't matter! I'm doing all of this for fun in my spare time! If other people like it then that's nice, but I don't want the lack of a nice optional extra to be, itself, a painful experience that diminishes the fun of writing stuff I like.

*Or at least didn't do so in a direct or obvious way. Some people did and do incidentally gain skills and connections in fandom that they then used to get career opportunities and improve their circumstances in a more concrete way than the rosy glow of people liking their fan fiction, but I think that it wasn't usually what people who were clout chasing were trying to do and they more likely just wanted the admiration and praise.

[delphi]

Very true. It feels like there was a collision between the worst practical needs of living in a gig economy and the worst parts of being online in an ad revenue algorithm-driven age. Nothing beats real creative leisure time and the chance to work on and share things that interest and excite you.

I'm working on something right now where I'm thinking, "Almost no one is going to click on this, and most of the people who do are going to click away because it's a combination of very specific interests and a very specific format," but I'm having so much fun writing it, and if anything, being beholden to no one is making a much more freeing experience.

[svgurl]

Write whatever self indulgent niche fic I want to without worrying about whether anyone else will care about it.
I like this one and your approach to goals in general. The way that you adjusted accordingly is smart. Good luck! :D

[obstinatecondolement]

Thank you! I have lots of experience with doing things the wrong way, or in a way that's been unhelpful to me, so I think I have managed to get insight from that into how to do things in a way that's more effective for me, haha.

[peaked]

Hell yeah to writing self-indulgent niche fic! I think no matter what you do, you risk losing subscribers (even when posting non-niche fic) so I say YOLO! What's the point of doing it if you're not having fun? Also, it's super cool you bind books!

Good luck with your goals!

[obstinatecondolement]

Yeah, it's so true! And also, like, the number of subscribers you have to your AO3 profile doesn't really matter at all? Subscribing is for the benefit of people who want to be notified of stuff they might like, not for the creator. It is also not visible to anyone other than the person who owns the profile and there is not "algorithm" that boosts people with a lot of subscribers, so it is literally not something I need to worry about. If people want the email, go ahead and subscribe. If they don't want it anymore, go ahead and unsubscribe. It's not about me and it's really not any of my business.

Re: fanbinding, thank you! I think as of yet it's maybe more accurate to say I have bound "book" singular, haha. I bound a Back to the Future fic, which was inspired by this Tumblr post, where Marty is a trans guy and Doc Brown at first is sad when he's born, because he thinks that they altered the timeline so that Marty was never born, but then is delighted when he comes out for renegadepublishing's Tiny Books Bang last year. I've also made a few typesets of other fics, but I haven't gotten around binding anything else yet. It is a fun hobby though! And if you are interested, the Discord server associated with renegadepublishing is a great resource, and there are a lot of good videos on YouTube (I especially recommend DAS Bookbinding).

Pics of my bind under the spoiler cut, if you're interested in seeing it

Thanks for wishing me luck! Hopefully I can build on last year's successes, but if not I can always rejig things next year.

[rigormorphis]

Write whatever self indulgent niche fic I want to without worrying about whether anyone else will care about it.

Yesssssss. I want to do this too, and definitely need to get better about writing what makes me happy and not worrying whether anyone will look at it. (Maybe they won't! It'll still be a thing that makes me happy!)

[obstinatecondolement]

Yeah, like, maybe they won't! And that would be fine! I obviously do care about sharing my work with others and what they think about it, otherwise I'd just leave it on the harddrive, but ultimately if absolutely no one else read it then that's really not the worst thing that could happen to me, all things considered. No one is beating me with sticks by being indifferent to my niche fic, lol.