Bad Record (rant) · 12:57pm Mar 30th, 2016
Sometimes I see people posting on my (somewhat) new fics.
"I would like to favourite this fic, but this author has like twenty incompletes."
Eeeeeeeh, okay then. I mean it's your choice, but I mean I do update my fics semi-regularly. The only reason they appear to 'slow down' is because when I write any fic, I usually finish the first few chapters before publishing. This means you get rapid-fire updates in a short period of time. I suppose it's my fault too, I shouldn't commit to too many fics at once, but I do actually complete my stories! Technically speaking, the majority of my fics are complete! So I have more complete fics than incomplete!
Maybe a better method would be to do some quick math?
I've published (to date) 670,146 words!
I've joined this site on: 11th Jun, 2014.
Therefore I publish (on average): 670,146 words/659 days = 1016 words a day!
So... I kind of dislike it when someone looks at my record and sees only incompletes and not really whether I'm active or have a good update rate.
As an aside, you can see any future blog post I post that's a rant tagged in the title and the tags as 'rant'. Because that's what I'm doing. Ranting.
I'd like to favorite this rant but its obviously part of an unfinished series so I think I'll just wait and not read anything ever again.
Eh, the way bookshelves work these days, whether a fic is fav'd or not is nowhere near as important as it once was. So long as someone is reading the story and puts the fic on their "I'd fav this but..." bookshelf you are golden, and it is obvious the person is reading it whether or not they bothered to fav.
That kind of comment is all noise to signal, and easily glossed over in the scheme of things.
It only really matters if you are unhappy with your own record of completes, and that is determined in part whether that kind of comment is striking a nerve or not.
Let all your rants out!
But yeah, people judge by completion instead of story quality.
They really don't know what they're missing, do they?
3836668 I would like this comment but... WHAT HAVE YOU STARTED?!
3836676 Yeah, it just peeves me when they say that and they don't do anything with the fic, and they mention that as if that's a major criterion that prevents them from favouriting! I'm fairly happy with my record, but I'm still mindful for what my readers think. After all, they're the ones doing the reading!
3836722 I wish I could say that to them in a way that doesn't come off as arrogant or full of it :)
3837647 I would recommend, for future reference, not posting a story until it's complete. A lot of people just get turned off by waiting times and stuff like that. While they are missing a good story, waiting makes people give up on stories and move on to other things; it breaks the flow of the story.
3838183 It's not a trivial task to work on a feature-length story and complete it before publishing. That would be like me going off-grid for more than a year and then coming back with it done. After about five years... well, you see.
3837647 Then don't justify yourself to them. You don't owe it to them.
Keep being awesome instead!
3838418 I agree it would take a while, but it is worth it. I would almost say that complete stories are better than ones that are regularly updated (not that yours are bad of course). It's your choice, though. I have no qualms with whatever you choose, your stories are awesome anyway!
While FiM Fiction is far better for this than most fan fiction sites, some people have been burned enough times by authors that never finish their stories that they simply do not wish to waste their time reading something incomplete only to get perpetually textually blue‐balled. The sad thing is that authors who merely update at a glacial pace (like Minalkra — if you’re reading this get back to work on Oh to be Old Again, slowpoke! *cracks whip*) and those that seemingly cannot update the same story twice get lumped in with the serial offenders because nobody can be fucked checking your record closely enough to tell the difference. The especially impatient readers won’t even give a cursory glance at your record because that’s time that could be spent reading a story that will be completed this year.
3845572 True, true. You make good points. What I'd like to add is that these are my views and opinions, and I'd like to share with you what my personal views and experiences are. Authors are human (like I say a lot) and what you don't normally see are the pressures of trying to put out decent content (for free I might add) while trying to update around the schedule of our lives. Although some authors have expressed that they do not like getting notifications to update their fics, it does help motivate me when I receive comments or PMs suggesting I update a particular fic, because it shows people are still waiting around to read it!
Some fics die because there's no poke or prod to show the author it's still around, in the meantime, the author has redirected their interests to the more active developments of their fictions. Also, what you don't see is the effort that goes into publishing words. For every one thousand words I've published, I've probably written three or four times that amount in rewrites, edits, and abandoned plot threads. I might sound a bit arrogant saying this, but writing fiction isn't as easy as it looks, especially as a hobby with regular updates and doing it free!
Of course this isn't for all authors, I understand, but I'm just sharing with you my side of things and telling people to keep an open mind when giving a cursory glance over my works and judging the entirety of my character with that one glance :P
Anyway, sorry for the wall of text and thanks for sharing your thoughts.
You don’t say.
…well, except for certain authors who put out a, quite frankly, inhuman number of words. Like Short Skirts and Explosions — that guy has got to be half typewriter, I tells ya! (I fully get your point, I’m just ribbing you.)
In that case… more of Hell Yeah and Takes The Cake. *cracks whip* Mush! Mush! Wait…
that’s for sled dogs, not snow leopards.
Oh, I know all too well the frustrations of the creative types. I’ve got a scenario for Blades of Avernum that’s rested in development hell for years due to the equivalent for writing code on top of the standard problems with writing fiction. Well, that, laziness, a tendency to be distracted by anything and everything, burnout, and a tendency to be unable stick to a single single task so strong that if I didn’t know better would say is genetic.
Only to those ignorant of exactly what the process entails. It is a seemingly inescapable fact that we underestimate anything outside of our area of expertise.
I get the feeling you’re walking on eggshells around me; while I fully admit that I’m a cantankerous jackass personally invested in the topic I have no beef with you per se, I was (mostly
) explaining the psychology behind such attitudes and reactions. I find that, more often than not, empathy with seemingly irrational actors requires cognizance of their reasoning. It can be frustrating to deal with the aggressively irrational and it can be all too easy to mistake wildly differing priorities as irrationality — something I thought you did and hence why I laid out the psychology behind it.
Nah, you’re fine.
As you might have been able to tell walls of text and me go waaay back.
3847009 Walking on eggshells is my thing :P Takes the Cake and Hell Yeah? Interesting choices, as you wish :)