A good reminder, if I may say so myself.

Write on!

Well I love your stories, and I think that most of your work is feature box worthy. No me, I feel like I'm just writting things and putting them out and suddenly everyone goes crazy for it. You are the talented one not me. I just got lucky.

*sigh* So true, so true.

It's stupid. Absolutely stupid. I've seen plenty of wonderful fics that don't make the box. It is reserved for catchy titles or the more famous authors. That is it.

It isn't all it's cracked up to be. I enjoy your fics just fine, and I do all I can to get your name out there. I believe you deserve much more recognition than you receive, and you should most definitely make the feature box.

You write for yourself. Not anybody else, yourself. That's how it should be. Fuck what everybody else thinks. I'm certainly not important.

As a wise pony once said "Oh, Rarity, I hate being a model!"

True words. Just be great at what you're doing/capable of and you will succeed.
Great, now I feel like my ideas for this AppleDash fic feels like ehhhh. I was hoping it would jump out of the regular "I like her, I have to tell her, kiss, happily ever after." If I were to write this, can you be one of the editors/pre readers? It would be an honor.

Meh. I wouldn't know anything about writing well or great stories. But I know you can write so I encourage you to keep doing so because your stories are awesome. I'll just stick with my amateur writing skills.

325655
Thank you! I will.

325667 325673
Just to make it perfectly clear, this isn't sour grapes. I wasn't sitting here saying "Why did X make the feature box and I didn't?" I love to see people I know get popular, and as much as I love it when people push my stories, I don't expect it. I also wasn't sitting here saying "Why hasn't Church made me popular yet?"

It's more that I find myself thinking about an idea, and thinking "But will people like this? Does fandom really need another AppleDash fic, or another bookplayer-is-obsessed-with-Applejack fic?" And I have to remind myself that I don't know, and can't know, the answers to those questions. All I can do is write the fics I think of, even if it's more AppleDash or Applejack fics.

I'm also not saying that popularity isn't important. If it wasn't, we wouldn't be putting stories on the internet. We all want people to read and enjoy our stories, and the more people the better. We just can't control if or when or how people read them or like them. So enjoy it if you get it, but if no one reads the next story, you didn't do something wrong. You just can't control it.

325669
It's not a bad thing. Or a good thing. It's just a thing. Just keep writing however you want.

325679
That's the thing: being good doesn't promise success. A better way of saying it is "Do what you like to do, do it well, and whether you succeed or fail at least you enjoyed yourself."

And let me know when you write your fic, if I have time I'd love to pre-read for you. I'm also always available for brainstorming, if you want to PM me with ideas. I love bouncing ideas around. And I never get mad if they don't get written, I have a whole folder of ideas that haven't been written that I've mentioned to people.

325732
I know, but just once I would at lease like to have one of my stories to be on the Feature Box and manage to get a few extra views.

325689
And that's just fine! You control how much you want to learn, and how much effort you want to put in, and you should never feel like you're not as good as someone else just because you don't want to put in more effort. As long as you accept that it's something you control, and are happy with your results, you're doing it right.

And I really appreciate your encouragement. Thank you.

Why would you want to make the feature box? It's full with... ugh... Comedies.

I told you that last story needed a dog and a helicopter chase.

325732 BUT WHY HASN'T CHURCH MADE YOU POPULAR YET?

Technically, you are still more popular than I.

I'm kidding. Seriously, do what you want. And does the populace want another AppleDash fic, or another bookplayer idea, or another Applejack story?

We are always thirsty. Whether you do it or not, there will always be more of them. But, personally, I want to read the ones bookplayer writes.

You speak a cold, calculated wisdom for certain, Bookplayer.

However, as with all things, there shall one day be a special little victory reserved just for us, given freely for an impossible alignment of timing and placing, mm? Until then, we can do nothing but affect what we're able the best we might.

I don't mind the toil, so long as it remains worth it - art and friends, art and friends.

325736
I totally understand. But there's nothing you can do to make that happen. There are things you can do to write better stories, but writing a good story doesn't mean you'll make the feature box, or get views. So there's no point in seeing it as a goal, because goals should be something you can take action to achieve.

"I'm going to write a story and fix it until it's perfect." is a goal. "I'm going to make the feature box or get 100 views." is not a goal, because there's nothing you can do to make it happen.

325741
I happen to be very good at writing comedy. I just don't have any ideas for it, and I can't make myself have ideas for it so that I can make the feature box.

325745
You were absolutely right, that is exactly what kept it out of the feature box! Next time I'll listen to the focus group.

Seriously, your advice on the last story was invaluable, it really made it a much better story. And if I had taken all of your advice, who knows? It could have been a great story. I just had to decide how much effort I was ready to put into it, and I made my decision. But I can't thank you enough.

325746
Hey! It turns out that I can write the stories bookplayer writes! You're in luck.

325787
The art and friends are the victory. And it's totally worth it, whether the glory comes or not.

325790
I didn't mean it like that, I just meant why would you want your fic to be between all the crap that gets featured nowadays

325790
I know, I know. I just gotta remind myself, that there are stories better than mine, and I should learn to accept that. Like my brother's stories.

325790
>So there's no point in seeing it as a goal, because goals should be something you can take action to achieve.
This is too black-and-white. You can take actions to increase your chances of getting in the feature box. I wrote "Twilight Sparkle and the Quest for Anatomical Accuracy" as my first blatant grab for the feature box. I wrote the story to fit the name. Would have made it, too, if the feature box weren't so much more broken back then. It wasn't something I would normally have written. But I got a bunch of watchers and got closer to making the box. When Device wrote his blog post on Dark Demon King Ravenblood Nightblade, I said, "I will stay up late writing something silly with that name and post it tomorrow, and people will remember the name and click on it and it will get featured," and it happened just that way.

It sounds like you want to get in the box, but you're trying to convince yourself that you don't. Or, you think you want to get into the box, but what you really want is to write good stories, not to get into the box at the cost of writing strategically and tactically and commercially.

Me, I'm open to prostituting myself with 2000-word comedies in order to get people to read the stories that mean more to me. I just don't know if it works. If nothing else, it turns out prostituting myself was kinda fun. The moral of the story is: Don't try to reform the sex industry from within unless you enjoy sex. Or something like that.

I'm now going to finally test whether literary prostitution works. I have 199 watchers. (YOU can be my 200TH watcher if you sign up NOW!) I'm going to post a new story today or tomorrow that is meaningful to me, that would probably sink like a stone if I had no watchers. GhostOfHeraclitus predicts the response to this story will involve tar and feathers. I'll see what happens.

325876 This is, sadly, perfectly true.

applause, Bad Horse, applause.

True, very true, but even if I know you mean the song, the sentence would be "Lo que será, será"

I sense somebody needs a hug what a depressing blog entry i hope all is well. The fics are good just incomplete. The more you put out and complete, sharing your ideas with your readers the more static you are going to pick up.give it some time and have some faith in your fan base.even the best start small.

325876
I agree to a certain extent. There are things one can do that make one more likely to be featured. For some people, it's cleaning up spelling and grammar, for others it's writing commercially.

But what's really important to remember is that even writing 2000-word comedies, you can't control it. The Importance of Being Earth Ponies and Farce of Nature both came within a slot of the feature box. I believe Farce of Nature hit during Friendly Uncle's reign, and Earth Ponies was my third story published, so that was with maybe 5 people watching me at the time. I can say "next time I write a 2000-word comedy, I'm sure to get it!" . . . but that might be the day TAW, kits, and AbsoluteAnon all decide to publish stories at once. Or Knighty cuts the feature box down to two slots, one of which will be for whatever the newest TwiDash is. Who knows? It's not something I can control.

And since I can't control it, why bother writing for that? I would love to make the feature box, but I'm all out of 2000-word comedy ideas. Even if I came up with one I can't write it thinking that it's going up there, because that's a lot of stress over something that I can do nothing about.

I write because I like writing. I wrote original fic for three years and showed it to no one but my husband. I love writing fanfic so I can share it with more people, but if it's stressing me out then why am I doing it?

I'm doing it because I like to write stories. That's all I was reminding myself. And maybe hinting that other people who are stressed out might want to think of it the same way.

326304
It's always tricky, finding a balance between too much stress and not enough. Isn't it more satisfying to achieve something that's beyond your control, than something that's completely within your control?

I looked at trying to get into the feature box as like trying to get the high score on a video game. It was a game. Sometimes it was fun. Sometimes it made me want to whack the computer and walk away. If it was never fun, it would just be a sad obsession.

(Knighty still hasn't fixed the basic problem with the feature box - kinda irritating, when it's so simple to fix. But it's a lot better with the added slots.)

As arguably the least experienced of the scribes here -- two stories in all -- I properly shouldn't have anything to say here, but if I weren't in the habit of shooting off my mouth I'd never have written those two stories. (Or the third I'm currently plotting, but you don't want to know about that.)

I have pretty much made peace with the idea that I'm not going to get within a three-day train ride of the Featured Box. And I begrudge nopony the opportunity to be Featured: it's a nice little bit of egoboo, and if you're working to build up a rep, you need all the views you can get. But I have learned, in sixteen years of writing nonfiction for the Web and eleven years before that on more primitive clouds, that of all the niche writers in the universe, I am one of the nichiest: ultimately, I suppose, I'm writing for myself, because who else would put up with this?

Of course, if I actually were writing only for myself, there'd be no point in cleaning the stuff up and submitting it for publication: I could do the Emily Dickinson thing and pile up a bunch of papers in the back of the room and maybe somepony won't throw them away after the wake and the estate sale. Otherwise: add a dash of OCD, stir briskly, and garnish with entirely too many colons. Bake until underdone, and submit. Simple recipe, once you get the hang of it. Not that anypony needs to take advice from the likes of me.

Which is, I suppose, entirely too convoluted a way of saying that I have (at this time) no desire to become a household word. And if I did, all of a sudden this would be a lot more like work, and if I wanted to work, I'd be at the office right now instead of taking three days off. (Though I admit I did all the yardwork before dinner, so I won't have to think about it again for a while.) Maybe twenty years from now, assuming I have twenty years from now, I'll look back at something I wrote and say, "You know, that wasn't half bad."