Write the thing

The current snowflake_challenge prompt is: Talk about a current fannish project that you are creating or enjoying.



I have one current fandom-adjacent project, which involves transcribing ten+ years of newspaper book reviews — which I currently only have in printed format, and which were published before the specific newspaper had an online edition — onto dolorosa12, my longform reviews blog. The oldest of these reviews is now over twenty years old, and the most recent were published around 2012-13, so they're an interesting (to me) cultural artefact of both my own teenage thinking, and of a world in which both publishing and journalism were very, very different. The transcription is pretty slow going at the moment because the earlier reviews really do just exist on paper, so I have to retype them word by word, but as it progresses I should speed up as the post-2007 reviews exist as Word files that to which I still have access.

This project is, as I say, fandom-adjacent rather than fully fannish, but I don't have anything on the go when it comes to the latter. I've been idly thinking that instead of fruitlessly requesting the same two fandoms, characters and prompts every year since I first started participating in Yuletide, I should accept the inevitable (that no one will write those things but me) and just try to write the fic of my heart, but I haven't made much of a start on that. And I have a long list of ideas that have been in my head for years (in some cases, decades) that I really just should commit to writing, except that I find it really hard to do this kind of thing without a prompt and a hard deadline. (My own prompts, and my own deadlines don't count.) As you can see from the above reviewing project, it's been more than ten years since I've been a paid journalist, and yet it never really leaves me — I need a brief, and a deadline, and then I can write, and without those things, I'm adrift!