#but eh i was focusing on AO3 metrics like this

[not-poignant]

When you look at how well a story is doing, what do you tend to look the most at? Like kudos, comments, hits, etc?

For me personally I tend to look mainly at kudos and comments. After that, I look at public bookmarks and the number of regular commenters (i.e. people who feel inspired enough to comment on most of the chapters, instead of just one), and new commenters - i.e. usernames I don’t recognise. In this I might also include bookmark comments (even though they’re not for authors). And then after that, I look at overall engagement - like is that excitement or engagement filtering over to Tumblr, are people sending me asks about the story, do they seem interested, overall, in the world and sharing that with others (the major drop off on all of these in The Ice Plague is the reason why I got very depressed about it at the end last year - but last year was the worst I’d done overall, in every metric, ever - even including the first year I made a single AO3 account so, lol, welp).

I never look at hits, I don’t actually care about hits very much, though I know other authors look at them acutely. A lot of hits are from bots etc. and aren’t going to necessarily be a person actually pressing kudos, or opening the comment form. I’ve never really cared about hits.

But it’s complicated. Like if I’m in a small fandom, then 20 kudos means a lot. If I’m in a huge huge fandom with a massive reader base, then 100 kudos means I’m probably not actually getting a lot of interest in my story or I’m writing unpopular tropes and tags. If I’ve written a multi-chaptered story that’s been going for over 6 months and it has less than 250 kudos, then that’s not doing as well as a single chapter story that has 100 kudos in a single day (see: The Ice Plague 3 vs. Passiflora), despite the discrepancy in kudos.

I mean all kudos definitely mean a lot! Every kudos is important, but there’s ways of reading the nature of those metrics which imho, for me, kind of guides what to focus on and where to put my focus (to a point, I still completely shoot off into the wilderness to do lengthy fics in dead fandoms like The Beast that Chose Its Own Bridle). 

I’m also often looking at the kudos-to-public-bookmark ratio. A ratio of 4/1 (4 kudos for every 1 public bookmark) is very good for my fiction. Stuck on the Puzzle is one of the best ever, with a ratio of 3/1, and The Ice Plague 3 is one of the worst, with a ratio of 8/1 (that’s not super uncommon for the last book of a series, but by comparison, Into Shadows We Fall (the last part of a series) has a ratio of 5.8/1). Public bookmarks let you know how many registered AO3 users are happy to let other people know that they read your story (this is less common with straight up kink and porn and PWP) if they use a public bookmark system.

And then factoring into that, I have to look at how many kudos are from guests, because obviously guests can’t bookmark your fic publically or privately, nor can they subscribe to your works or your author name. But guest kudos are a really great metric for indicating how many long-time readers, or readers who are searching for your work via tags or fandom, or hearing about you by word of mouth etc. are out there.

I don’t actually pay a huge amount of attention to these metrics overall, honestly. It’s why it came as such a shock to realise that 2020 was the worst year for me in terms of AO3 performance literally ever. I had a suspicion things weren’t great, but I thought I was like, being paranoid or over-inflating my fears due to insecurities, and it turned out not only was I wrong and things were bad, but they were worse than I ever could have imagined across both of my accounts, for various reasons.

If I’d been paying more attention, perhaps it wouldn’t have hit me like a ton of bricks.

I usually pay attention to metrics most on the first few days a story releases and then I sort of...stop paying as much attention and just go through phases where I check out the kudos/bookmarks etc. on a lot of stories at the same time.

That being said, some stories will surprise you. Like Falling Falling Stars is not doing great on kudos or even bookmarks (comparatively speaking, for the length of time it’s been going, the amount of chapters it has, and the tags it uses), but it’s probably one of the best stories I’ve ever had since SAL for engagement. Like the people who do give that story a chance tend to be among the most engaged readers I’ve ever met, and that’s been really humbling and incredible.

So the rules don’t always apply in every situation. I probably would’ve quit writing if it wasn’t for FFS, lol, and the few folks who are incredibly loyal to The Ice Plague.

[fencer-x]

Belated end-of-year fic meme

So, it’s already 2020, but I couldn’t technically post this meme until Erised reveals went up, so I’m posting it now! These are just some comments and discussions about the writing that I did this year. High word count, low fic output--that’s pretty normal for me!

GENERAL STATS

List of Fics Posted:

Fandom: Harry Potter Every New Beginning (141k, explicit; Eighth Year fic + time traveling) Pensieve For Your Thoughts (22k, explicit; pinch hit for HD Erised 2010, Eighth Year fic w/a fair bit of dubious consent going on)

Fandom: Promare spend some time with me (i really like your company) (73k, explicit [to be on the safe side]; canon re-write)

Total number: 3 Total word count: 236,239

Ship/character breakdown: Ship breakdown: [Harry Potter] Drarry, Hermione/Ron, Pansy/Parvati, and little tiny hints of other ships; [Promare] GaloLio, background implied Gueira/Meis

Characters that had the main focus: I'm happy to report I wrote from Draco's POV for the first time! My HP fics so far have all been Harry POV, so it was actually fun writing from Draco's POV, though I think most of my fics work better from Harry POV. Promare fic was from Lio's POV mostly because that's what the fic called for, and it was interesting--not sure if I'd go for that POV on the usual (update since I drafted this post: I think, strangely enough, I prefer Lio’s POV, as I’m well into fic #2 from his perspective). Promare fics focused, also, on Mad Burnish, which I really enjoyed writing (I'm much more of a Mad Burnish fan than Burning Rescue, so perhaps that's why XD)

Details

Best/worst title?

Best title: This is gonna be very subjective. I'm actually happy with all three of the titles?? I think Every New Beginning, though; because it's only after you finish the fic that you realize it's a (SPOILER ALERT) spoiler for the entire story. I like that little detail :D

Worst title: maybe spend some time with me (i really like your company)? I actually like the title, but it's a little bit OF a cop-out, just lifitng a line from lyrics, and it's difficult to google XD (update since I drafted this post: YOU FOOL, YOU’RE DOING IT AGAIN FOR YOUR NEW FIC NOW, WHY??? YOU CAN’T TRACK THAT)

Best/worst first line?

Best: I am far less comfortable with opening lines than closing ones. But I guess my favorite of these three is, /Kray Foresight liked to think himself a patient man./ The others are kind of generic, and it was interesting writing this bit from Kray's POV. Not a fun headspace.

Worst: /In retrospect, he should never have trusted a book that came from Pansy./ Not a terrible opener. Not an amazing one. In my defense, I was pressed for time when I wrote it, and I probably would've stewed over it a little longer to pick something with a bit more hook, but it did the job.

Best/worst last line?

Best: I'm satisfied with all of them, but I liked the entire epilogue of ENB, so the final line is probably my favorite: /He devoured his breakfast in record time, then Banished his tray and dishes back to the kitchen before tossing aside the duvet and padding into the bathroom to deliver his complaints about the turkey bacon to the chef in person./

Worst: It was tough finding a place to end the Promare fic that felt satisfying, so probably this one: /The distant whir of chopper blades whistling through the air grew louder and louder, and Lio leaned in to press his lips against Galo’s, lingering as long as he possibly could before whispering, “…Why don’t you start by teaching me how to ride a motorcycle?”/

General questions:

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

More! Because if I'd gone by my original plan, I'd have completed precisely one (1) fic this year in Every New Beginning. I was well into drafting my next fic after that when I tripped headlong into the Promare fandom, and I was eager to get that fic out before fandom died down, so I poured myself into it. Then the Erised fic was a pinch-hit, so I wasn't expecting to write it at all.

What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted last year?

Well. Promare didn't exist last year, so 8D I also probably wouldn't have predicted I'd write any Pansy/Parvati and find it cute.

What’s your favorite story this year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you the happiest.

SSTWM, I think! I've had SO much fun with Promare so far, and getting to explore a slight twist on the canon, building out the Burnish society and delving into relationships I wished I'd seen explored further in the canon was really satisfying. I'm glad I wrote it.

Okay, NOW your most popular story.

...And it's also my most popular story this year, too, by pretty much every metric AO3 can give me: hits, kudos, and bookmarks (ENB has more comments, but it's also been out rather a lot longer). The Promare fandom is hot hot hot right now (no pun intended), so I expect that contributed.

Story most underappreciated by the universe?

Probably my pinch-hit right now, if only because I wasn't able to show it off when it got posted because of the Erised rules. It's also a one-shot, whereas ENB is a multi-chapter monster.

Story that could have been better?

Wish I'd had a bit more time to play with my Erised submission, but them's the breaks with pinch-hitting! I'm satisfied with how it came out, but me being me, I love writing longfic and would've wanted to make something more of it.

Sexiest story?

Pensieve For Your Thoughts, very much so :D

Saddest story?

Every New Beginning, definitely. It's not a sad fic, per se, but it's quite sad in places, and the overall plot is not a happy one. It has a happy ending, but you'll want to read the tags carefully before checking it out.

Most fun?

SSTWM, getting to flesh out the Burnish colony--LOTS of fun. Gueira and Galo's rivalry in particular was a hoot XD

Story with single sweetest moment?

I think this bit from SSTWM:

“But maybe I can do something a little more my style?”

“Your style?” Lio repeated, dubious, and Thymos brought a hand up, resting it just over his heart. Lio tried not to let his eye linger on the spangling of scars covering his bare arm—was he not freezing, nearly naked as he was?

“When I was recovering in the hospital after the fire Kray rescued me from, he used to come and visit me. Sometimes he’d bring food, or toys, or games—but this one time he brought me a book. It was about firefighters—firefighters from all over the globe, way back before the Great World Blaze, even. That’s where I learned about the ones from that Asian country, see. But there was this one chapter about firefighters from this huge city—looked a lot like Promepolis, actually—and it was so huge, there used to be thousands of these firefighters who worked day and night to keep it safe. And when someone wanted to join their ranks, they had to get up in front of all their peers and speak an oath.”

Lio held his breath, though he wasn’t quite sure why, and tuned every nerve in his body to Thymos in that moment.

Thymos closed his eyes, his hand still splayed over his heart. “‘I promise concern for others, and a willingness to help all those in need. I promise courage: Courage to face and conquer my fears. Courage to share and endure the ordeal of those who need me. I promise strength of heart to bear whatever burdens might be placed upon me, and strength of body to deliver to safety all those placed within my care. I promise the wisdom to lead, the compassion to comfort, and the love to serve unselfishly whenever I am called.’” He opened his eyes, fixing Lio in place. “I promise. All of it.”

Lio’s heart was thudding mercilessly in his chest, and he worried that if he opened his mouth to speak, it might just leap right out. He swallowed thickly to keep it in place and then rasped, “...Grand words for a glorified member of a bucket brigade.”

“Was hoping you’d be impressed I remembered it, after all these years.”

“I am,” Lio said, taking great pains to ensure his sincerity came through.

Hardest story to write?

Pensieve For Your Thoughts; I dislike anything resembling noncon, and while I'm satisfied with what I did, if I'd had more time, I would've found a workaround so the consent wasn't nearly as dubious. I think my recipient liked it, though, so all's well! I also find writing porn difficult, and that story was like 70% porn XD Why I did that to myself, we'll never know.

Easiest/most fun story to write?

Every New Beginning, especially all the bits of Harry and Draco getting closer; I love writing their banter, LOVE IT. I wish I could write a story that's nothing but banter. Someone pay me to do that please.

Did any stories shift your perceptions of the characters?

I love Lio, but we don't get too much characterization in the film; it was therefore kind of eye-opening writing from his POV. Of course no fan's characterization is going to be quite the same as what the creators might have imagined, but I still enjoyed what came out of it.

Most overdue story?

Eh, two of them weren't on any sort of deadline whatsoever, and I'm pretty sure I got my Erised piece in before the deadline! So we were good this year :)

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

I used NaNoWriMo as a 'goal' for finishing my Promare fic--I not only finished the fic, I also completed 50k of it during November, so I technically beat NaNoWriMo too! I learned that if I really want to hit a goal and feel like I have to, I have the complete and total capacity to do that. It's just a matter of will for me.

What are your fic writing goals for next year?

To finish my next Drarry fic, aka the one that was supposed to come after Every New Beginning but got pushed to the back-burner by the sudden insistent arrival of Promare in my life. I also want to write for Erised PROPERLY this year and organize a Promare fanwork event around the one-year anniversary :D

[paragonrobits]

Choice In Family

Karkat, Terezi, and Dave have a thoughtful nature on the families you get stuck with and the families you chose. While drowning in grub-babies.

Also on Ao3 and FFnet~

“Y'know, it's weird how none of us really get to choose the way our families get us,” Terezi said, claws deftly working needles. She was pretty much skilled at anything she'd ever turned her paws to; a Pyrope trait, to excel at any task they felt obliged to try and they would always master it in record time. Only the Amporas took it to bigger extremes. Terezi, after much painstaking instruction from Rose, had gotten good at needlework.

Dave had to raise an eyebrow at that; barely noticeable under his shades, but she definitely knew. “Really, now,” he said with an affected lack of any tone at all that, despite his best efforts, accentuated the wariness. Any talks about family could go down very bad roads that neither he, nor Dirk or Hal, wished to be addressed these days. “That really that weird, Teez? Nobody really gets to pick your family.”

This got a gruff snort from the the floor. Terezi paused in her weaving of fabric to turn her head towards Karkat, laying down on the ground in a pile of grubs. Infant trolls, perhaps less than a few months old each, all almost the same age down to a few seconds from crawling out of the slurry. They mostly looked alike; similar patterns of horns – mostly not very long, fairly thin but strong – and came in several shades of the castes. A couple were the recently emerged shade of lime, and they looked the most like Karkat. A few were teal, at least two were bright cherry red, and some of the outlying oddities were shades that didn't match up to either one of them. Dave expected jades, olives or even violets to start cropping up. It was like every time he turned his back, new grubs were showing up and squeaking for attention.

“That's just goddamn bullshit, Strider,” Karkat said archly, doing his best to look dignified with multiple grubs crawling over his body like throw pillows made of wiggle, and failing miserably. One was curled up smugly against his chest, and another was hopefully biting his hair. What it was hoping for, it was anyone's guess. “You know it and I know it and Terezi knows it, this damn little child right here on my head knows it and she doesn't know anything. Besides she should know hair is not edible in the slightest, you stop that you bad baby!” The grub yawned in disinterest, curling up into a ball and rolling against his side. “'You can't choose your family', don't be dense. We sure as hell did, didn't we?”

A thoughtful pause filled the room.

“Suppose we did,” Terezi said, a bit cheered up by the thought. “But... I dunno. Dumb thought, I guess. I just thought it was weird that with both our species, with all the differences in how we raise babies and educate them and live our lives, we still have that in common. Not much choice with who you get stuck with.”

“...Yeah. It sucks,” Dave said, very cautiously. “Like,  a metric shit-ton. That was a real measurement on Earth. Totally was. I am not bullshitting you here, I can almost definitely promise you, we came up with that one to calculate how much tonnage could be taken up when an elephant just squatted down on innocent bands of wandering accountants and were just being complete bastards about it so they-”

Karkat's noise wrinkled. “Knock it off, jackass, you'll spoil the kids taste for swearing!”

“Eh,” Terezi said. “We could do with a bit less fuckin' cursing in this household, ya hear me?” She paused to sniff at her needlework. It was a grub-shaped bundle of cloth, suitable to hold a grub like a little sweater, complete with straps to tie around an adult troll's body, and stretchy enough to accommodate them as the grubs matured until they reached pupation age. It might also make a good bag for some bread.

Bit of a shame that Terezi's taste in fabric still resembled a zebra made out of plaid and neon lighting that had been fed into an anvil factory, backwards. Dave recoiled in horror from the bright colors.

“I like it,” Karkat said loyally. “It's pretty.”

Terezi smirked, smugly.

“Okay,” Dave said, getting back on track. “But I think I get what Terezi was talking about. Human kids were adopted or born into existing families. Troll kids got culled by their... their loogies.”

“Lusii, you insensitive jackass!” Karkat hollered. Some of the grubs hissed supportively. One of them yawned in Dave's general direction.

“He's doing that on purpose, Kar, don't feed the small squishy's thirst for aggravation,” Terezi said, doing more knitting.

“Yeah, those things,” Dave said, unbothered. “Either way, you get saddled with caretakers that may or may not... uh.” He paused, and it was a very delicate pause. Like one of those old fancy, expensive egg-things on old Earth, but this could crack at any moment, and give birth to crawling horrors he did not wish to see again.

Terezi's arm, seemingly moving on automatic, reached out and grasped his forearm reassuringly. She was so much bigger than him, the swell of her hip alone towering over him even while she was sitting and he was standing up, that her palm engulfed his entire arm. Yet her cool touch was reassuring; Dave visibly calmed down. He breathed in, out, and she gave him another gentle squeeze.

“May not be right to be around a kid,” Terezi said gently, picking up the thread in his head. It was the sort of thread that was probably on fire and burning to the touch.

“Yeah,” Dave said mournfully. “Like that.” He stared at the ground, resolving to go forward, and plunged through with it. “Hell, look at Vriska. Her mom was... messed up. And Gamzee's goat-dad thing was barely ever round, way Karkat tells it.” Karkat nodded, gazing with concern at Dave and gauging if he was Okay. And Feferi basically had to run a whole gamut with Eridan to keep her mom from waking up and ending the world... before she actually did, I mean. Lot of stress to put on a kid.”

Terezi shrugged. “That's the way it was on Alternia. A lot of coldbloods had to do more caretaking than their lusii were able to give in return. And warmblood lusii had... other issues, a lot.” She said this in the calm way of someone who, in her youth, had thought about this a lot and plotted to dismantle the entire system that demanded it be like this. “I've been looking into Beforus. Their culling system; they still had lusii, but they also had some trolls that cared for wigglers. Bit like your and Kanaya's ancestors, Karkat.”

Karkat considered this; the idea of a troll caring for wigglers was a revolutionary one but getting more commonplace. “You mean like the way they were on Alternia... or the ones we actually met?”

There was another pause. “That sounds potentially, uh, super squicky,” Dave said, sticking his tongue out. “Like... her being in that kind of a caretaker relationship while they're both hate-flirting with each other 24/7? That's... that's messed up, man.”

Karkat and Terezi looked at each other and shrugged. They did not question this, even if they didn't really understand Dave's problems; some things just did not translate well. “The point,” Terezi said firmly, carefully edging away from the subject. “Is that what we're planning here... I dunno. Might work better than just turning kids loose with lusii and leaving them to fend for themselves.” She didn't need to emphasize that Alternia was a profoundly unnatural state of being, a world of perpetual warfare and misery orchestrated to make their specific generation strong enough to win SGRUB. Strength, in her opinion, was overrated. If you wanted to see trolls as they really were, without jackass cherubs and their puppet minions constantly bringing out the very worst of them and making that the standard for social behavior and government models... you needed to examine Beforus. That was trolls as they would have been.

“Yeah, I'm just gonna pretend I know what you're getting at, nod a lot and accept the life you've laid out for us,” Karkat said, laying back on the ground and lifting a grub with a grumpiness that Terezi grinned at, knowing full well that this was Vantas cheerfulness.

“You do that, Kar,” she said, mouth wide and toothy.

“If it becomes common place, you could end up with the same... uh, issues on Earth,” Dave said warily.

“See? That's why you're here,” Terezi said. “Telling me about these things so I know what to avoid when I draft the legal stuff for it.”

Dave contemplated the possibility that Bro had wound up being the man he was for just that exact purpose, to make Dave the kind of guy who would be wary of potentially destructive guardians, and he thought he was better off not thinking about that. Terezi winced at this thought, and Dave quickly changed the subject. “I, uh...” he looked at the grubs, and got some inspiration, as well as a legitimate question.

It was blatantly obvious whose grubs they were, or at least the primary donors of the slurry that produced them. Karkat and Terezi were doing their very best to add numbers to overall troll population, and do their part in repopulating their species. Dave privately suspected that they were trying to set some sort of record; outdo whoever the troll equivalent of Genghis Khan or whoever would have had a huge amount of direct descendants. “I thought you needed the Mother Grub or whatever to get troll babies,” he said. “These guys, I know damn well they didn't come from that spawning pool. Where the heck have they been coming from?”

Terezi coughed, looking embarrassed or caught in the act of some culturally damning act of Things Man Was Not Meant To Do. Karkat looked carefully at the ceiling, not looking at Dave. “We, um.” Terezi coughed again, and focused on the knitting. “We found a way. Took a lot of work. A lot of work.”

“That's an innuendo, isn't it.”

“Not in front of the kids,” Terezi said mildly.