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

[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.