I finally finished my last auction fanfic. I had only offered one for FandomTrumpsHate but the mods asked if people were willing to write for the second highest bidder. In a moment of insanity I agreed!

https://archiveofourown.org/works/26597737

The problem was that it was, to me, a new fandom. I had, admittedly, offered to write anything! So, I had to binge watch the first season of the show (Star Trek Discovery) and then find a friend who already knew it to hold my hand through plotting and writing. It was also a het pairing which is not something I write frequently. Plus, it was a canon romance so I had to be doubly careful. However, I managed to twist canon to give the characters an extra mission on another planet and had fun creating aliens for interaction.

I’m glad, on the whole, that I offered to write for the auctions. They were both very good causes. Fandom For Australia was for charities with a focus on the aftermath of the fires, and FandomTrumpsHate was for a variety of charities including justice for migrant children, gay rights, and other causes I support.

I did contribute a small amount to various charities anyway, but thought that writing and having my bidders contribute was a way to make extra for them!

I might offer again but I think I would be careful only to offer fandoms I’m already familiar with. All three requests were very specific and required a lot of research and careful watching of episodes. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy it – I did – but it was very time consuming, and to add to that, it was hard to find beta readers/proof readers who were also familiar with the fandoms because of course my friends and usual readers tend to share my tastes!

So, to recap:

*A story in Star Trek Picard for Fandom For Australia. I ended up loving the show as much as my giftee does but again it meant a lot of time catching up! And the pair she wanted spent all of ten minutes together on screen plus it had to be an ‘everybody lives; nobody dies’ story to make sense of the request.

*A story in SGA for FandomTrumpsHate, with a rare alien/human pairing. That was hard but once I’d got my head round it the idea was fun to explore.

*A story in Star Trek Discovery, also for FandomTrumpsHate. Canon het romance but one which is in some ways doomed so working out a plot was hard. Also, needed binge watching.

My stories are on AO3 and are all getting kudos which is nice. The SGA giftee is thrilled with their fic, which is good. I haven’t heard from the other two yet. I hope they’re equally pleased.

The graphic for this post was made by me in Photoshop and Paint using two promotion photographs of the main characters in my Discovery story, on a background of stones by James Coleman (free download on Unsplash).