merlin fic thoughts
So that Merlin fic I mentioned is still going - I thought I might get it finished for today, but apparently not. I wrote all the way up to the breath before the kiss that night, and then when I came back to it I realised that I needed a lot more build up to get there. I have now added about 2000 words and still haven't made it to the actual kiss.
But it reminded me of a comment I got on my first Merlin fic - someone said it was nice to see a longer fic. And I laughed before I replied, because that one was a bit less than 1300 words and I would never have considered it as being 'longer'. I suppose it was longer than other Merlin stuff around back then, but it made me think about how I perceive fic lengths. You see, my main fandoms, in chronological order, are Highlander, due South and Stargate: Atlantis and I've also read a fair amount in Smallville and Harry Potter - and in any of those, 1300 words would be a short fic.
So I tend to think of anything less than a few thousand words as short, 5000 - 10,000 words as fairly standard and I don't start classing fics as long until they're 30,000 - 50,000 words.
Short pieces can be beautiful, or incredibly powerful or sometimes hilarious, and a bad long fic is just as irritating as a bad short one. But I think it must be very unsatisfying to have a fandom where everything is what I would call short.
Like that original commenter, I'm glad that there are fics of a bit more length arriving in Merlin fandom now.
But it reminded me of a comment I got on my first Merlin fic - someone said it was nice to see a longer fic. And I laughed before I replied, because that one was a bit less than 1300 words and I would never have considered it as being 'longer'. I suppose it was longer than other Merlin stuff around back then, but it made me think about how I perceive fic lengths. You see, my main fandoms, in chronological order, are Highlander, due South and Stargate: Atlantis and I've also read a fair amount in Smallville and Harry Potter - and in any of those, 1300 words would be a short fic.
So I tend to think of anything less than a few thousand words as short, 5000 - 10,000 words as fairly standard and I don't start classing fics as long until they're 30,000 - 50,000 words.
Short pieces can be beautiful, or incredibly powerful or sometimes hilarious, and a bad long fic is just as irritating as a bad short one. But I think it must be very unsatisfying to have a fandom where everything is what I would call short.
Like that original commenter, I'm glad that there are fics of a bit more length arriving in Merlin fandom now.