>>52884770And a word about discipline:
It's very easy to second-guess, to want to pander to what's popular, and to be nervous about reception. Especially in the case of fan-fiction because you know that 99% of the apparent attention (hits, favs, etc.) goes to the lemons. A story asks a lot more of the reader (to pay attention on the scale of hours rather than to unzip for a few minutes) so truly you cannot judge your success on the same metrics.
Yes, it's nice to see a large hit count, but my sense of esteem and reception is in feedback.
• The people who write me with lists of questions about details in my stories.
• The people who tell me that my stories have affected them in ways that other media never has.
• The people who will say things like, "Just read the mienshao story," with that THE standing out, being the DEFINITE article that it is, as though there were only one mienshao story that exists (or at least, that stands out so distinctively that all others stand at its shadow).
• The artists who have generated fan-art unbidden to share how they saw the the words that I wrote when I wrote what I saw.
• The fact that, years removed from the writing (and after a few years of inactivity), I can spontaneously click on a /vp/ thread simply because Mienshao doesn't often inspire an art spam thread, and find something of myself in it.
Writing yourself takes courage because it might be a hit or a flop, and it's difficult for some to not take how a work is received as a critique of one's own worth. But only by telling YOUR stories as they are and leaving it to the audience to take them as they may do you put into this universe something truly unique.
I'll never see the numbers of the lemon farmers and the fetish panderers with my personal writing (at least till the day I find my wallet empty and have to sing for my supper), but no number of drive by hits or dismissive up-votes outweighs one piece of earnest fan mail.
Earn them and cherish them.
