Truths of writing

[mme_hardy]

I got reminded on Thursday evening that I was overdue for a fic exchange and answered blankly that I hadn't signed up for it.

Turned out I had. Thanks, Lyrica!! I promised the fic for Saturday, cobbled together a start Friday, padded it out and polished the next day, and put that puppy up on AO3, supported by lots of handholding and beta from othercat . This fic was not so much finished as abandoned (h/t Marianne Moore).

It currently has 125 hits and 20 kudos. I have never had a ratio this good on a fic so early in its life. Stuff I have slaved over, admiring every line, has gone down into the darkness, but this little throwaway has found love. It's in a juggernaut fandom, Homestuck, but I've written Homestuck fics before.

Everybody always says that how excited you are about a piece of writing and how excited the audience is don't necessarily correlate, but I hadn't seen it in action quite so forcefully. Need to remember this going forward.

Because otherwise people will ask in the comments, I'm linking.

round and round and round in the circle game Homestuck, John/Roxy, John/Terezi, fluff.

Comments

[edenfalling]

To this day, my most popular oneshot ever is a little Harry Potter fic I wrote in all of thirty minutes and never edited beyond changing one word. It is twelve years old and still beats everything else I've written. *hands*

I always return to penknife's essay On popularity and the Claw when I get frustrated at the weird imbalances between effort and reception.

[mme_hardy]

The Claw Is My Master! (Thanks, I hadn't read that before.)

[recessional]

It can be such a disproportionate and weird effect, can't it?

[oracne]

I know of which you speak! Sometimes, reading years later, I cannot see differences between things I slaved over and things I dashed off.

[sabotabby]

I never got into Homestuck but now I wish I did just so I could read it.

I never get what ends up getting a good reception. I don't think anything I've ever posted has gotten a shitty reception beyond a few things that are so obscure that no one's interested in reading them, but it's always weird when something I think is drawerfic finds love.

[mme_hardy]

Awww, thanks for the compliment.

I mostly wrote for Yuletide over the last few years, so I expect there to be a tiny audience. The most consistently popular thing I've ever written was a Singin' In The Rain fic that gets a kudos every month or so.