SCP Foundation

2018 will be over in a week, so it seems like as good a time as any for everyone to reflect on how the year went for them with regards to this whole collaborative writing project. Being critical of one's self is easy, so try and find something you can be proud of!

Did you achieve your writing goals or find any new ones? Did you finish a big project or start another? Learn something new and interesting about your interests or specialties? I've found it can be hard to judge progress as an author without taking a step back and looking at a larger body of work, so why not say how it went?

I'm still gathering my thoughts, but I'm interested in seeing all of yours.

2018 was great for me, both irl and in the writing scene. All of my written works¹ were posted in 2018 alone. It was also the year where the gears in my head started turning, and I finally learned how to consistently write good works. I might have severe imposter syndrome, but I'd say I have certainly accomplished my goals.

This year has given me a spike of confidence to actually join this site (but not enough to post anything!) and actually contribute as a memeber instead of a lurker. I’ve met some great people here and I look forward to becoming more comfortable around here. Here’s to another 365 days!

My year started horribly but now everything is great in my offline life. It was a steady upward climb. Wiki-wise, I'm happy with what I wrote this year and I hope to write more than that next year. But I'm certainly going to be on this site for a long time and it'll still be here, so I'll take it easy.

Did you achieve your writing goals or find any new ones? Did you finish a big project or start another?

Definitely still have goals out of my reach for personal writing… I've got a list of ideas that I want to try writing up when I have the motivation. But I did finally get that co-authoring how-to essay up, and one part of the 3-4 piece series on how I critique in the forums. Also a bunch of co-authored works that are doing pretty well, which is always nice.

Learn something new and interesting about your interests or specialties?

I've taken up Magic: the Gathering again, thanks to my coworkers and MTG: Arena. Also going to my FRIENDLY LOCAL GAME STORE ♪ with some bros and searching the bulk boxes for cards I could use for a Pauper deck. Also birds. I like cards with birds. I have a couple pages in my binder of just birds.

…did you mean about the site? Uhh… I like writing quirky, atypical containment procedures and completely harmless Keter stuff. I think this year was the first time I tried writing Keter class articles.

I graduated from college, and immediately set out failing to find any jobs and get anything published off-site, because people don't want to hire/publish unknown authors who only have a bachelor's.

I managed to get pretty much everything written this year that I wanted to— my 001 proposal (and also my 100th article), the sequel to Black Autumn, a couple off off-the-cuff SCPs I'm proud of, and my Christmas tale. Plus, Night Mind read one of my things and liked it, so that's pretty much kept me riding high for the past 24 hours.

Writing wise not too much happened for me this year, but I did have the pleasure of being a part of the winning Doomcon team and mine and tretter's SCP-4002 did pretty well.

Lots of other SCP stuff happened for me this year though. I went from a junior staffer all the way to a Moderator captaining two different staff teams, which has been a ton of work but very rewarding.

On a personal note, I graduated college, got my TEFL certification, briefly moved to Shenzhen to work as an English teacher, moved back after getting screwed by my company, and have spent the last few months doing odd jobs while looking for something more permanent. Fingers crossed for a full time position somewhere nice soon.

Pretty rough one, tbh.

Got through a busy year IRL, and managed to impress a lot of people. Don’t want to say more on that front.

This year for SCP: I went from a pretty average author to a pretty good author. I helped write a doomcon canon, a killer 4000, and some other good works. Pretty good year writing wise I’d say.

This has been a mixed bag for me. For starters I've been more productive this year than any of my other years spent on this wiki, more than doubling my article count from 2016 and 2017 combined. I've also started working on the space opera canon of my dreams, I'm now closer to getting the Church of the Second Hytoth fully established than ever before, and SCP-1548 surpassed SCP-2417 in terms of votes, making it the highest rated article I've worked on. I've also had a fair share of successes this year, namely SCP-4131 and SCP-4990 and I've finally begun branching outside of my comfort zone with more emotional and character-driven pieces.

However, the year had a rough start. My articles posted at the start of the year generally received little attention, and the articles of mine I rewrote during that time experienced the same thing. I entered a partially depressive writing slump during this time, which lasted up until I posted SCP-3840 and started having more of an upward climb. My mental health completely crashed during the 4K contest, though. I had extremely (and likely unrealistically) high hopes with how much attention my entry would receive (I'd heard so much before about how thousands contest entries received attention boosts, and could often cement themselves as classics). Instead it received middling attention and mixed reviews, while articles by virtually everyone I knew gained massive popularity. This sent me into a unconfident, depressive spiral that lasted for a month, probably one of the worst depressive bout I've ever experienced. Things have improved for me since then, but depression issues have noticeably worsened over the past months.

On a less wiki related note: at the end of this August I started Hormone Replacement Therapy. It's hard for me to express just how incredible of a moment that was. Progress from it may have largely stalled over the past few months, and gender dysphoria may worsening, but it will always be the highlight of this year. With enough time it's going to turn me into the person I've always wished I could be.

Hopefully next year will fare better.