2019 Plans · 10:00pm Dec 20th, 2018
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, folks!
And I must say, this has been an extremely successful year for me. I expanded this blog to double its original size and went an entire year without missing a review blog (although I might have been late on one occasion, if I recall correctly). I topped 1,000 total reviews and 500 unique authors. I released 11 stories this year, including the highly successful Bulletproof Heart that I am immensely pleased with. I surpassed the two million cumulative words published mark, achieved ~567,000 written for the year so far, and I’m likely to add another 10,000-20,000 before it’s out.
It has been a good year, and I want to thank all you folks for being around to witness it. Here’s to an awesome 2019!
Ah, but speaking of 2019… it’s time for some changes.
I’ve had a bit of insomnia these last couple days, and used that time thinking about things. The first night was an extended, four-hour eureka in which I devised a way to connect one of my ancient, incomplete Original Fictions to a new FIMFic I conceived of in the past week or so. I was extremely proud of myself, for the overall idea is extremely ambitious and the two fit together like a glove.
But then last night came, also with roughly four hours of insomnia and thinking, and my mind shifted gears. I began wondering about my goals as a writer and how I could achieve them. I am forced now to accept a fundamental truth: FIMFiction can no longer support my ambitions. I’ve never cared about the status of “published author” that so many people here view with glowing eyes, nor have I ever had any desire to make an income off my writing. But I do want an audience. I want my stories read by more than a few hundred or a thousand people. I’m writing because I want my stories to be known and loved, and I can only achieve so much of that here. Let’s face it, the fandom is shrinking, and while it probably won’t ever die it’s getting harder to amass a lot of views for any one story.
Now don’t go getting your panties in a twist. None of this means I’m leaving FIMFiction or the fandom in general. Frankly, I don’t see me ever leaving. I love Rarity these characters and this world too much, and I’ve invested too much time and effort into franchises like No Heroes, Trixie vs. Equestria, and the Generosity series to just quit. But if I am to achieve my goals as a writer, I will have to buckle down and start focusing less on horsewords. I must also recognize that the future is never clear. Someday I might just decide the time has come to leave FIMFiction behind, and I want to be ready if that time ever comes.
With these thoughts in mind, I spent last night outlining a few long term goals for myself and how to reach them. The first goal, but not one I aim to achieve for a while, is to start my own separate blog that handles both Fanfiction and Original Fiction reviews. To get to this goal, however, I will need to reduce how many FIMFic stories I review by around half. This poses its own problem, as I personally see stories being listed in my RiL as a promise to those authors to read their material, and I absolutely don’t want to break those promises. The last thing I want is to quit cold turkey with a bunch of unreviewed stories on my lists. To this effect, I’ve devised an exit strategy so that, should I ever decide I do want to leave the fandom, I can go out with a bow and say that I reviewed everything I ever added to my collective reading lists.
For starters, I am retiring the Recommendations List and will no longer be accepting any. That list lost its primary function ages ago anyway. There are still two stories on the list and I will be getting to them as they’ve been scheduled, but once they are gone that will be the end of the list.
Next, I will be enforcing a strict limit to how many stories get added to my RiL, starting today. I will add no more than two stories a week. This means that at most I can add only 104 stories to my collected lists in a year. In the meantime I will continue reviewing 10 stories a week, which means I’ll be rapidly catching up to my overall list count. The goal is to reduce the list to no more than 50, which will become the new limit. Once I’ve hit that 50-story goal, I intend to reduce these blogs by half – five stories a week – and also reduce the amount of words I read in a week. This will give me the extra time I need to focus on reviewing Original Fiction and setting up my own blog for that purpose. More importantly, if ever I do decide it’s time to move on (Luna forbid), all I’ll have to do is read 50 stories to clear out my queue for good.
To facilitate this, I will also change how I approach individual authors. In the past after reviewing an author I thought worth paying attention to I would go into their library and RiL another of their stories. From now on I will instead create a separate Author’s List and add their stories to my RiL if I have the room for them at the end of the week to do so.
For those of you wondering, Review Requests are still allowed, but will be held against my two-stories-per-week rule. If I get more than two requests in a week, I’ll simply roll the extra requests into the next week. Incomplete stories will not be held against the count until they are actually completed, seeing as I don’t add them to my RiL until that time anyway. Sequels will also be counted against the weekly limit.
Another element I’ve decided to work on is limits for how much I read in a given review blog. I’ve already been experimenting with a 90k word cap, which we’ll start to see the effects of in January. The intent behind this is to build up leads so that review blogs are ready for release several weeks in advance without having to struggle with the unpredictability of actual story wordcounts. I’m learning to be more flexible and take on stories when they are beneficial to me rather than to a set, written-in-stone schedule.
I should also note that the 90k word cap is strictly limited to the short-term schedule; the long-term schedule, which consists of stories 70k words and longer, will always be released on top of the 90k.
I’ve already seen great benefits in this setup, including a steadily building lead and lighter overall reading loads per blog. The downside is that it gets tricky to schedule medium-length stories (20k-70k words), as they tend to take up the brunt of the 90k limit. To account for this I’ve started a separate list consisting of just these stories, ordered by type, and make it a point to release at least one a week, carefully selecting the stories released around them to ensure this is possible without breaking my 90k limit. That said, if I build a big enough lead that I can dump a whole bunch of these medium-length stories into a single blog, I will ignore the 90k limit and do so.
Basically, the point is to give myself more flexibility with my schedule as I work on the long-term goal of reducing the size of my review blogs. The good news is that you, the reader, won’t see any difference for a while yet, probably for the whole of 2019.
But wait, I’m not done! Moving past reviews, there is still the issue of writing Original Fiction, which I need to focus more on. In the past few months I’ve had a goal of working on two FIMFictions stories and one Original Fiction at any given time. This will continue for a little while yet, but eventually I’m going to reverse that and start work on two Original Fictions at a time and only one FIMFiction. When this will happen, I’m not sure, but it may correlate closely with my gradual review changes.
This leads to another big decision on my part: I intend to start no more big MLP-based franchises. I will continue working on those that have already started – No Heroes, Bulletproof Heart, Trixie vs. Equestria, and so on – but I have no intention of starting any more highly ambitious stories in the MLP fandom. Thinking about the new stories I conceived this past week has made me realize that any new idea I have can be translated into original fiction with great ease. MLP may continue to be my muse, but the works will need to be original if they are to aid me in my overarching goals.
I will continue to write short stories and expand upon my existing worlds here, albeit at a slower pace. There are a few ideas I really want to explore, such as an Audience of One sequel and a Frequency sequel. I may also start new short story franchises like the Generosity series. So my work here on FIMFiction is absolutely not done. But in terms of new multi-story epics were each book is 150,000 words long? I’m done. Those are better suited for Original Fiction now, and if I want to get out there I need to toughen up and break away from the safe harbors of MLP.
So there it is, my road map for the future. It’s a long-term thing, and only time will tell if I have what it takes to implement it in full. But after five-and-a-half years of this, I think I have the fortitude to pull it off.
I’m out for now, folks. Once again, I wish you all Happy Holidays!
And just to make sure we end the year on a good note...
I love this artist...
Godspeed you magnificent bastard
Rarijack makes for best Christmas
If you're gonna be reviewing original fiction, does that mean you'll accept book recommendations?
I relate to this in an extreme level.
Just be sure to post updates here on anything original you put out so I can support your efforts and read them!
I know the fandom is shrinking, but honestly, where are you going to post original fiction where it'll get an audience as big as this one? Unless it's some niche site that'll have the same principle of a built-in audience, it's a big world out there with not a lot of readers to go around. You might eventually get a few thousand views, if you let them accumulate over years, but any more than that probably will take becoming the dreaded Published Author.
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It does, doesn't it?
4983534
When I start reviewing Original Fiction regularly, then probably. I won't work out all the rules until the times comes. But that won't be for a very long time, so don't get too excited yet.
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But of course!
4983591
"Dreaded Published Author?" You make it sound like I don't want to be one. All I'm saying is that I don't look at the title with rose-colored glasses. All of this is geared towards eventually becoming published. But when the times comes and I have my first book out there that the masses can read, I won't promptly don a top hat and white tie and declare myself a successful author. It'll just mean that my potential audience pool has expanded.
It took me several years of development as a writer and regular productivity to gain traction here on FIMFiction. I have every expectation of having to do that completely from scratch in the so-called "real world", with the exception that I might get a little boost from the people in this community. It'll take time, it'll be a lot of work, and my first several books will likely go completely unnoticed (assuming any ever are). I'm certainly not going to make any real money out of it. But one doesn't get to be a success by waiting for it to fall in their lap. I've got to get started if I ever want anything to happen.
Well good luck and you are right about the fandom, most likely this site will be near dead by the end of next year. But remember to link us that original fiction review site before you leave.
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