"Five Things & a Poll Make a Post" post
#1 Work-related Project of Doom (which I'm calling that not because I hate it - I've actually been enjoying the work - but rather because it is HUGE and SCARY and has had a few dozen people working on it frantically for about eighteen months or so) has been postponed another six months.
This means a great many things, but in particular that the upcoming weekends I was supposed to spend at the office, have all been miraculously transformed into spare time! *beams* (Well, not quite. I'll still need to work those week-ends sometime in the spring of 2011, but for now that's a very distant future.) That includes the week-end of our wedding anniversary, so we'll actually be able to celebrate that real-time!
#2 All in all it's a good thing the project got postponed (um, okay, I'm not supposed to say that. In the grand scheme of things, it really isn't) but it's a good thing for us because we recently got the news that the house we bought last year - the house that still needed to be built - isn't going to be built anytime soon.
Long and frustrating story, but the bottom line is: neighbors got angry about the new houses that were going to be constructed (on what, admittedly, used to be a large patch of trees) and decided to take it to court. We're not directly involved, in that it's a prodecure between the neighbors and the city council, but we do need to wait for the court's decision, which as we're told could take months or even years... So in the end, we decided not to sit it out, but just start again from scratch. :( Thus, house-prospecting is resuming with a vengeance, and we're actually relieved the next few months aren't going to be devoured by work-related stuff.
#3 While we were waiting for the house situation to get cleared up, I made the (somewhat impulsive) decision to plan a trip to Southwest USA. Well, not entirely impulsive, but at the time we still thought construction of the house was going to start sometime this year, so I felt a little guilty about spending the money. Now, though, I'm tremendously happy I did it - planning the trip actually kept me sane through all of the craziness about the house, and without it I don't think I would have handled it so well.
#4 I seem to have hit a dry spell in writing, darn it. Still, I finally got an idea what to write for my help_pakistan fic - or rather, how to go about writing it - so that's something! Now I just need to start putting words on paper.
I don't even dare to start thinking about whether or not I'm going to do Yuletide this year. Somehow I have this nagging feeling I was unbelievably lucky last time, both with my gift and with my assignment. The gift I'm not too worried about - anything that gets written for me, I'm sure I'll be happy with - but looking at the list of unfilled requests, I've finally realized how big the chances are of getting a request of the type 'characters A and B, any kind of story' or even harder 'fandom X, any characters, any story would be great!' I'm sure there are people who love getting complete freedom in what they write, but I'm not one of them. Nope. *gnaws fingernails*
#5 I've been peeking at the hit counts of my various fics over at FanFiction.Net and AO3 - trying to jump-start writing by boosting my ego? *g* - and was surprised by how different they were. I don't mean in terms of AO3 still getting less hits than FF.Net, which I was expecting, but in terms of popularity of the fics relative to one another. More often or not, there's a major difference between the most/least polular types of stories on either archive. Has anyone else noticed this, or found a clue as to the reason? I'm wondering if it's just a coincidence, or if there's such a major difference between the readers' profiles on both sites, or if it's something else altogether. I use the same summaries at both places, so that can't be it. The only other difference is AO3's much more extensive tagging - could it be that the tags actually work to one's disadvantage sometimes? On FF.Net the summaries are probably a more important criterion to draw people in, as summaries are usually all there is (plus a few character tags, if you're very lucky).
For example, on FF.Net I get surprisingly many hits on Awkward Positions, the smutty 1500-word Londo/G'Kar ficlet that I wrote as a Yuletide treat. And while my ST:TOS fics are pretty popular on both archives, they're obviously more polular on FF.Net, whereas on AO3 they can rival with much of my far obscurer Babylon 5 and Twin Peaks stuff. Several of my Twin Peaks fics get read pretty decently at AO3, but not the R-and-above rated ones - my Porn Battle ficlet Flashes of Light, for one, only has a handful of hits at AO3, to the point where I'm wondering if its being part of the Porn Battle collection is actually keeping people from reading it. Same with the TP gen piece Five Times ALbert Rosenfield Lied, where I'm wondering how much of an effect the character death warning on AO3 has. A big one, probably.
Speaking of which, I'm still in doubt about which warnings to use on AO3. Personally I don't like warning for character death, for one simple reason: it spoils the effect. What I usually do on FF.Net is put a warning at the top of the fic mentioning something like 'not a happy story', but on AO3 I can either choose the specific warning or the 'Choose not to warn' label. Which - well, I wouldn't want someone to walk away from my fic thinking it had bloody gore or explicit p0rn if that's not the case, so I'm mot much for that label, either. How do you usually solve that?
Finally, in terms of comments, I get the feeling stories at AO3 get commented upon less, but I really write too little and in too small fandoms to be able to make a statement on that. Mostly, I keep finding it strange that so few people on AO3 reply to comments on their fics. Maybe I'm just spoiled and/or biased, but that does have a way of annoying me a little.
Poll AO3 versus FF.Net
This means a great many things, but in particular that the upcoming weekends I was supposed to spend at the office, have all been miraculously transformed into spare time! *beams* (Well, not quite. I'll still need to work those week-ends sometime in the spring of 2011, but for now that's a very distant future.) That includes the week-end of our wedding anniversary, so we'll actually be able to celebrate that real-time!
#2 All in all it's a good thing the project got postponed (um, okay, I'm not supposed to say that. In the grand scheme of things, it really isn't) but it's a good thing for us because we recently got the news that the house we bought last year - the house that still needed to be built - isn't going to be built anytime soon.
Long and frustrating story, but the bottom line is: neighbors got angry about the new houses that were going to be constructed (on what, admittedly, used to be a large patch of trees) and decided to take it to court. We're not directly involved, in that it's a prodecure between the neighbors and the city council, but we do need to wait for the court's decision, which as we're told could take months or even years... So in the end, we decided not to sit it out, but just start again from scratch. :( Thus, house-prospecting is resuming with a vengeance, and we're actually relieved the next few months aren't going to be devoured by work-related stuff.
#3 While we were waiting for the house situation to get cleared up, I made the (somewhat impulsive) decision to plan a trip to Southwest USA. Well, not entirely impulsive, but at the time we still thought construction of the house was going to start sometime this year, so I felt a little guilty about spending the money. Now, though, I'm tremendously happy I did it - planning the trip actually kept me sane through all of the craziness about the house, and without it I don't think I would have handled it so well.
#4 I seem to have hit a dry spell in writing, darn it. Still, I finally got an idea what to write for my help_pakistan fic - or rather, how to go about writing it - so that's something! Now I just need to start putting words on paper.
I don't even dare to start thinking about whether or not I'm going to do Yuletide this year. Somehow I have this nagging feeling I was unbelievably lucky last time, both with my gift and with my assignment. The gift I'm not too worried about - anything that gets written for me, I'm sure I'll be happy with - but looking at the list of unfilled requests, I've finally realized how big the chances are of getting a request of the type 'characters A and B, any kind of story' or even harder 'fandom X, any characters, any story would be great!' I'm sure there are people who love getting complete freedom in what they write, but I'm not one of them. Nope. *gnaws fingernails*
#5 I've been peeking at the hit counts of my various fics over at FanFiction.Net and AO3 - trying to jump-start writing by boosting my ego? *g* - and was surprised by how different they were. I don't mean in terms of AO3 still getting less hits than FF.Net, which I was expecting, but in terms of popularity of the fics relative to one another. More often or not, there's a major difference between the most/least polular types of stories on either archive. Has anyone else noticed this, or found a clue as to the reason? I'm wondering if it's just a coincidence, or if there's such a major difference between the readers' profiles on both sites, or if it's something else altogether. I use the same summaries at both places, so that can't be it. The only other difference is AO3's much more extensive tagging - could it be that the tags actually work to one's disadvantage sometimes? On FF.Net the summaries are probably a more important criterion to draw people in, as summaries are usually all there is (plus a few character tags, if you're very lucky).
For example, on FF.Net I get surprisingly many hits on Awkward Positions, the smutty 1500-word Londo/G'Kar ficlet that I wrote as a Yuletide treat. And while my ST:TOS fics are pretty popular on both archives, they're obviously more polular on FF.Net, whereas on AO3 they can rival with much of my far obscurer Babylon 5 and Twin Peaks stuff. Several of my Twin Peaks fics get read pretty decently at AO3, but not the R-and-above rated ones - my Porn Battle ficlet Flashes of Light, for one, only has a handful of hits at AO3, to the point where I'm wondering if its being part of the Porn Battle collection is actually keeping people from reading it. Same with the TP gen piece Five Times ALbert Rosenfield Lied, where I'm wondering how much of an effect the character death warning on AO3 has. A big one, probably.
Speaking of which, I'm still in doubt about which warnings to use on AO3. Personally I don't like warning for character death, for one simple reason: it spoils the effect. What I usually do on FF.Net is put a warning at the top of the fic mentioning something like 'not a happy story', but on AO3 I can either choose the specific warning or the 'Choose not to warn' label. Which - well, I wouldn't want someone to walk away from my fic thinking it had bloody gore or explicit p0rn if that's not the case, so I'm mot much for that label, either. How do you usually solve that?
Finally, in terms of comments, I get the feeling stories at AO3 get commented upon less, but I really write too little and in too small fandoms to be able to make a statement on that. Mostly, I keep finding it strange that so few people on AO3 reply to comments on their fics. Maybe I'm just spoiled and/or biased, but that does have a way of annoying me a little.
Poll AO3 versus FF.Net