I'm stealing bookplayer's Year in Review questions. This is mostly for my own benefit.

Fic total:

29 stories and about 90,000 words, depending how you count.

Overall impressions:

It's much more fun to write when you can immediately find out how many people read your story and how many of them liked it, read their comments, and even get to know some of them. If you guys hadn't read, liked, and commented, I wouldn't still be here.

It's also much more informative. For the first few months I broke my stories up into short chapters and watched the view count on each chapter to find out where people stopped reading.  (Half of readers stop somewhere on the first page, no matter how short or long it is. 90% or more of those who go on to the second page will finish the story.  The critical area appears to be the first 500 words. Grammar doesn't matter.)

And I scan the other stories on the site, and see how popular they are, and learn what readers like. Writers have never known this stuff before. Nobody knows how many or what kind of stories editors reject or how many people read each of the different stories published in a magazine, and while we have sales figures for books, they're so distorted by the different amount of marketing power put behind each book as to be meaningless (unless you know the marketing budgets as well!)

I've told this to other writers, but most scoff. I went from being afraid my family would see my fanfic, to telling them how to find it, to asking them to read it, to no avail. People outside fandom won't touch it, with few exceptions.

TL;DR: Fanfic is my secret weapon in my competition with the other writers of the world. Not because I keep it secret, but because they won't listen.

Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you'd predicted?

I didn't mean to write fanfic at all. I still don't. I meant to write television scripts. Somehow one pony story became two, became three, and so on.  I was surprised that I could write 70,000 words of final draft in half a year of weekends when I was trying not to write.

What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January?

My Little Pony. Shipping. A bit of Lunestia. (Don't ask. It's bad.)

What's your own favorite story of the year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you happiest?

The stories that make me happiest are the ones that make me saddest. Is that twisted? I guess favorite story goes to The Detective and the Magician. But favorite moment goes to this exchange from A Carrot for Miss Fluttershy:

DERPY HOOVES hurries on-stage, followed by a COLT and a FILLY.

                                       FILLY AND COLT

          Derpy derpy derpy!

Big Mac gives the colt and filly one look and they hurry off.

                                       SCOOTALOO

          Were they teasing you because you're a pegasus?

                                       DERPY

          Naw.

                       (her ears flick down)

          They always do that.

                       (to Big MacIntosh)

          Why're you sitting in the street?

                                       SWEETIE BELLE

          He's mad because Farmer Seed won't sell him a carrot for

          Fluttershy because she's a pegasus!

Scootaloo pushes with her helmet against Big Mac's side, trying and failing to budge him.

                                       SWEETIE BELLE (CONT'D)

          It's so romantic!

                                       DERPY

          You're just gonna sit there?

                                       BIG MACINTOSH

          A pony can sit.

                                       DERPY

          Because Hay Seed won't sell carrots to pegasus ponies?

                                       BIG MACINTOSH

         Eeyup.

                                       DERPY

                       (beat)

          Will that help?

                                       BIG MACINTOSH

          Nope.

After a long pause, Derpy sits down beside Big MacIntosh.

I still like that story, though no one else did. Literally. It has zero likes. Equestria Daily Pre-Reader #12 said (paraphrased), "We give stories three strikes before rejecting them completely. But this one is so bad, I'm giving you all three strikes right now."

Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?

I tried writing comedy. I thought I'd hate it and be awful at it. It was fun!

Story of mine most under-appreciated by the universe, in my opinion:

Severus Spike.  Wow, a lot of people disliked it. Apparently there's an unwritten rule against rewriting scenes from one fandom with characters from another. I can only imagine what they'd think of Borges'  "Pierre Menard". I found exploring the parallels and differences interesting.

Most fun story to write:

The Saga of Dark Demon King Ravenblood Nightblade, Interior Design Alicorn

Also the fastest, at 15-20 hours per chapter.

Story with the single sexiest moment:

If I tried writing a sexy scene, it would probably come out like this.

Most "Holy crap, that's wrong, even for you" story:

Twilight Sparkle and the Quest for Anatomical Accuracy.

Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters:

Detective & Magician, because I disliked Trixie.  Burning Man Brony, because the structure forced me to portray all the Mane 6 positively, even the ones I don't like. (Not telling.)

Story I learned the most from:

Fallout: Equestria taught me you can write stories that are both interesting and exciting.

How to Do a Sonic Rainboom gave me a revelation about relating plot and character.

Being a developmental editor for A Canterlot Carol was an education in the connection between plot and theme.

Mortality Report taught me that I need to align the surface associations between what is present, what is happening, and what the characters are feeling, with the deep thematic causal relations between these things (which I failed to do, confusing hundreds of readers).

The Snowpony has the style I wish I could write with.

I don't yet know what I learned from So Be It. It disturbed me a lot. Hopefully I'll yet learn something from it.

Hardest story to write:

The ones that died on the operating-room table (The Real Reason, Moving On, Second-Best Pony), and the ones I rewrote repeatedly and almost gave up on (Mortality Report, Burning Man Brony, Twenty Minutes). Detective & Magician wasn't as intensely painful in any one place, but it took an absurd amount of time. I still can't believe it's only 14,000 words. It felt like writing a novel.

Biggest disappointment:

Trying and trying and revising again and again and still not getting a fresh, poetic style, which some despicable nameless people seem to produce as easily as pissing.

Equestria Daily refusing to read Friends, With Occasional Magic ("Avoid people from the fandom"),  Burning Man Brony ("No brony-in-Equestria"), or Twenty Minutes ("No featuring of Fallout: Equestria stories").  Fimfiction not allowing me to publish "A Carrot for Miss Fluttershy" ("No scripts").  Not being able to get "Friends, With Occasional Magic" moved to my Bad Horse account.

Biggest surprise:

Mortality Report and Twenty Minutes. People hated the first, second, and third versions of each of those.

Most Unintentionally Telling Story:

The Saga of Dark Demon King Ravenblood Nightblade, Interior Design Alicorn was, unintentionally, an allegory.

Fanfic Resolutions:

1. Stop writing fan-fiction.

2. Write more fan-fiction.