Feathered Hearts milestone · 4:00pm Mar 22nd, 2023
300 likes! Everybody can pick up their helms, red capes, spears, copper shields, and chest wax, as we’ll be marching to the Hot Gates to face down the Persian Army shortly.
All joking aside, I can’t help but note that even at that milestone, the story has less than a fifth the likes of the original and will probably be lucky to ever hit a quarter of them. I once asked Demon Eyes Laharl himself what his secret of Fimfiction success was, and his answer was simple: he got lucky. Hit the feature list and caught a wave of interest in the early days of the fandom that gave him a flood of fans for a very popular verse, riding it for years.
The original Gentleman for Mares, coming hard on the heels of Xenophilia and incorporating some of its more popular aspects (most notably high female-to-male ratios and RGRE plus herd culture), took off and enabled pretty much all his subsequent stories to be hits.
From G4M’s sequel Gentleman’s Gift to Feathered Heart and its two one-shot side stories (Feathered Heart: Preening and The Last Stand of Arnau) to Changeling Roun, which is another story of his I regret not seeing finished, he had a spectacular five-year run, which I can only imagine he finally burnt out on. Indeed, his last blog post implied that he was, saying his creative juices had dried up.
It happens to the best of us. I don’t know what happened to him, only that he finally drifted away and left his two biggest and latest works unfinished. He hung around on fanfiction.net a little longer but ultimately disappeared from there too, last seen in 2017. And now? Who knows? I wish him well, whatever happened and wherever he is. But unfortunately, I’m pretty sure he’s gone for good.
Needless to say, I have no plans of my own to disappear and leave my stuff undone. If at all possible will finish this tale and all my others, for that matter, in due course. It may take five years from beginning to end (check out Into the Storm for an example of that), but it will be stamped complete someday. And it will probably end up being my Fimfiction legacy, even more so than Turnabout Storm or Firefly.
And I’m fine with that. Just like most of my others, this is a story good enough to publish and appear in a bookstore that I can never sell—or at least, not without Hasbro’s lawyers coming down on me like a ton of legal bricks. But that’s just the way it is. As for a story update, the next C&C chapter is at 15.5k words and coming a bit slowly at the moment simply because work is very busy and I’ve had one or two personal distractions thrown into the mix.
Maybe I’ll blog about them later, but there’s likely still several thousand words to write for chapter 34. And just like before, if it keeps growing and growing I’ll have no choice but to chop it in two again. If so, I’ll save the ending M-rated scene for the following chapter. Yep, there’s going to be another, and as I’ve said in previous blogs, this one only involves Gilda as a supremely smug observer. Protip: Don’t ever offend a Changeling Queen, even a friendly one, who already knows you intimately. Or she may seduce you on the spot in front of others to make a point.
At this point, the best I can promise is that it will most likely be off to prereaders sometime this weekend, and then launch midweek. A new chapter of Eros is what I’ll be working on after.
Every reader is now bluebells until arrival
Maybe we,are lucky and he comes back.
I have a neck for commenting on storys again and again and i bring many Authors motivation to write back that way.
👍
Sound silly to some, but comments keep Authors motivated.
Works on me as well.
Don't take mutch, but i see the comment section like a energy drink shared under friend and good acquaintances
Eat up hardy, mon ami. For tonight we dine in Hell!
I don't think it's fair, to compare later works in a fandoms life cycle to earlier stuff. Since a lot of people tend to drift away over time and only very few joining later on.