This won’t be short, but you wouldn’t expect that from me, would you? 🤣
I’ve been on Tumblr for just a bit over a year because I needed to get off my family’s back after my three decades long Sandman brain-rot got worse again due to the Netflix series. I hovered around a handful of followers for months until things exploded (I still don’t know why tbh, I think it was one particular meta that kicked things off a bit), and I somehow ended up with hundreds of followers, which might not be much to some, but it’s a lot for me.
So to all of you I’d like to say: Thank you for being here. I don’t always manage to stay on top of things because my notifs are a mess and I lose track, plus I have a rather busy life and can often only write in batches and then queue, but each of you is appreciated, even if I accidentally forget to get back to you or if we aren’t mutuals.
I’ve made such lovely connections over the last year—my interest in The Sandman definitely does not align with the main focus that shan’t be named, and I’m glad that you folks are out there. You probably know who you are.
Now to the obligatory “your posts wrapped” thing—and I’m only doing it because I need to make a point (of course I do 🤣).
News and art
My by far most successful posts have been casting/shooting news and pretty pictures (two examples are linked). And I’m grateful for all the reblogs and likes of those, but apart from curating them, they’re not really me. They’re someone else’s work.
Meta analysis
Then you have my metas, which make up the bulk of the other posts that are doing quite well (you can find all of them in my pinned post).
Even if it wasn’t my most “successful” one (what does that even mean?), this one meant the most to me:
Send me asks about everything Sandman-related!
I know one of the biggest points of contention in the Sandman fandom (especially between sho
I love writing metas, whether they cover literary concepts, psychology, music or art because I’m a permanently brain-frazzled multi-hyphenate who has to talk about everything that won’t leave her alone.
I also love when you’re sending me asks btw. For the latter, I hope they pick up again in 2024 because they really nosedived since I switched off anonymous asks (which I won’t change, soz) after some people just thought it’s good sport to be an arse about my not being here to pray at the altar of the ship. I guess we have briefly covered the ugly side of Tumblr, too, then.
Writing
But what I'm most proud of when I think of all the things I've done in 2023 is my fiction and poetry. And that's both a happy and slightly sad thing to address.
My 31 Haikus for Sandtober started as a bit of fun, but they’ve developed a life of their own, and people seemingly liked them. The post also contains a bit of my fan-art:
Glass sphere on satin,
City of wonders. Beauty
Preserved in its prime.
30. Sand
Endless grains of sand
Shaping the dreams of the worl
I still intend to turn them into a hardcover at some point, but I won’t be able to create all the artwork myself, so if you’re a fan-artist and want to know what I’m thinking of, please get in touch (I’ll still talk about this in more detail at some point though).
The other thing I’m incredibly proud of is “The Light of Stars”.
Here is the promised master post, which sends you directly to the chapters on Ao3.
Your comments, likes and reblogs/shares are super-apprec
I started it as a NaNoWriMo project in 2022 (I always use NaNo to do something that is less stressful than my professional writing projects), wrote it in a bit more than a month—and then did nothing with near 80,000 words until June 2023.
And then I thought “Fuck it,” and published it on Ao3. It’s a canon x OC fic, and this is where it gets a bit sad. Because for most of us writers, these are never the posts that get most engagement (the ratio is really something like 100 : 1 — 500 for a shitpost, 5 for an average writing post).
On Ao3, it gradually picked up because I published chapter after chapter, and I think I can say that it’s done fairly well over there in terms of engagement for an OC fic, and above all how people engage with it. Because it’s a bit deeper despite being romance, it deals with heavy topics like grief, and I’m so glad to have touched a few people’s hearts with it, and that it was meaningful to them. So much so that you all convinced me to write a sequel.
But here’s the thing: The general engagement with writing, especially non-explicit, non-ship, non-readerY/N on Tumblr is very, very low.
Writers who write canon x OC are still struggling to be heard through the noise (it’s not just me, I’ve had many conversations about this, so I’ll just say: I’ll speak for many of us). There are basically hardly any events for us to participate in (most of us only ever do so if we shift to canon one-shots, poetry or metas. If we don’t: Again, no one cares), and fandom often actively chooses to ignore us because “all OCs are self-inserts, ew.” Which is patently not true, and I could go on a long rant now why many canon x canon fics are very obvious self-inserts, which I won’t.
But even if all OCs were self-inserts, even if all characters were—so what? All writing is to a degree based on self-insertion because it comes from our brains—it’s not a bad thing. But apparently, it becomes a bad thing if the character is an OC, heaven knows why.
So if I had one wish (I’m allowed one, right?) for 2024, it would be that people engage more with OC fics and include them more in community events. That fandom, which prides itself in community, includes writers who don’t write for (the main) ship/s a bit more, especially if they don’t write smut (which I personally even do professionally, but I don’t want to have to do it in fanfic just to get engagement). I’m not holding my breath because I know that’s not where fandom’s oft single-minded focus lies, but a girl can dream, right?
And with that, I want to get to my proudest accomplishments of them all:
Being the curator queen of the sparkle realms:
People, times are stressful and I need fun, so I took on the honourable task (and I was only too gladly egged on) of curating Sandman sparkl
Being one (arguably the main) instigator of the maddest crack ship that has ever graced (?) the face of the earth, spawned the most unhinged discussion (much truth in it though 🤣) and even NSFW fanart. I promise I’ll write that fic about Murphy and his Cool Hat:
I just had a sharp look at that panel again. On second glance, I doubt he’s fully satiated. The way that fabric falls is a bit… suspicious.
