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

[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.