Featured! · 9:24pm Feb 20th, 2015
Ever since last night I've had a smile plastered on my face. I think I even slept that way which is kind of weird.
It came as quite a surprise that "The Old Gray Mare" was so well received in the February Writeoff. I wrote it in a couple of hours near the end of the submission window and sat on it for about two and a half weeks while the reviews continued to say nice things. It ended up in the middle of the pack, of the finalists, which I thought was great considering I had no real ambitions for it going to the top. With a little polish and another thousand words or so, I posted it up on fimfiction hoping to see it do one step better than last month's story "A Spoonful of Sugar".
I think I had the fortune of getting in at the end of a wave of approvals. The story stuck at the top of the New Stories list for about 4-5 hours last night. Slowly, the upvote count crept upward. As always, I waited for the inevitable first downvote. I played a couple games of HotS and checked the page between matches. Things looked pretty good, until I noticed something I had never seen before: my story was in the feature box!
With the caliber of story already in there showing upvotes in the hundreds, I really didn't think I had a shot of making it. Two other stories from the Writeoff dominated the top spots. What was even more strange, this was with "Mature" listings on. How in the world did my 40 like, everyone fic make the mature feature box? I even got the cool little flame thingy too. 
From there things took off. I finally went to bed around 2am after showing 70:0 upvotes and thanking every person I could for taking the time to read and like my story. This morning I woke up to another 50 likes (and the inevitable one downvote). I think it's even in the "top spot" on the list right now and that might mean something good, but honestly I have no idea what to think.
Thank you to everyone that took a few minutes to read the story, leave a comment, like, fav, whatever. It means a lot given where this story came from and where it's at now. I'm having a hard time thinking about what I need to do next to try and top this. 
Featured and not clop? What is this madness?
Congrats by the way.
My vote is don't think of it in terms of topping it. Just think of it as writing.
I've only been in two writeoffs so far and I have a bad track record on guessing who gets close to the top. I liked yours better than most of the ones that placed above it. I do think the best fic won, however.