STEAMER'S BLOG
What am I doing wrong?
Friday, May 9, 2008 1:31 PM
Yeah....ain't rightly sure what I was expecting with the fanfic (The Guns of Yamenmiao). I post it in five different places on five different days of the week, but since liftoff it's had a steady decline in readership - in fact only two people have responded to the latest chapter all week. That bein' the case, <b>Angellemarcs</b> and <b>Yinyang,</b> please take my sincere thanks for coming along for the ride and staying. It'll surely help keep the fic in the air.I mean, this has happened many a time before. I profusely wrote fanfic for <i>Due South</i> and <i>JAG</i> when I was big into those fandoms, but once both shows were over I lost interest in them and in writing fanfic for them. <i>Star Trek DS9,</i> same thing. Then I got back into the Star Wars fanfic groove and found what seemed at the time like a likely place to put it - the Jedi Council fanfic forums at theforce.net. What'd I write, five very long novella-type fanfics there? They got posted chapter by chapter over a period of three or four years -
- and in all that time I was extremely lucky if three or four <i>people</i> fed back to each post.
I know what I was doing wrong there. I wrote plot-driven, action-oriented, adventurous fanfic there that had almost no romance or mush or love pentagons whatsoever, which seems to be a death warrant for fanfic over there on TF.N. Shouldn't be, but it is. It contributed to abandoning a story that I thought was really good and promising and exciting, and even then only one person indicated a care.
I feel much the same way about GoY now. Not that I'm going to abandon it - I REALLY do not want to - but that it's good and promising and exciting and I don't want to be discouraged by bare-bones feedback. And I can surely tell you, bare-bones feedback <i>can</i> be discouraging especially when you see other people getting gobs of rave reviews to every word they post. Can't tell you how much that sucked on the Star Wars board.
So - once again - what am I doing wrong with GoY? Is it as simple as bad timing? Are Mondays (when I post it here) some sort of feedback black hole or somesuch? I'd <i>really</i> hate to think the readership has dropped so sharply after only four chapters just because they have no romance beyond the occasional Wash/Zoe....
True and I don't read a whole lot of fanfic my own self, but that's mostly because it almost always turns out to be Rayne, which I can't stand. I really would rather not give up on writing again, and even more so would rather not see GoY go the way of Firefly itself. Angellemarcs and Yinyang, once again, thank you for helping to keep it flying, and PhyreLight, ALWAYS THANKS A MILLION for beta!!!! I'll be back with Part 4 next Monday unless a change in the posting schedule might be in order.
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