One of my favorite things about AFF is the karma system. I think it's a fun way to quantify just how much other people enjoy what I'm doing.

Some people say that fanfiction is about writing for yourself, for your own sake, to put your ideas to paper, but the one thing that has remained the same is that that's not what it's about for me. From the simple, "What if this had happened instead of what actually did?" to fantastical AU fics, to me, fanfiction has always been about sharing ideas with others. If it were only for myself, I would keep it in my head. That being said, my primary goal is to share, not satisfy. I consider fanfiction a fun thing, and fun things stop being fun for me when there's pressure behind them. None of my stories follow a regular update schedule for that reason. I work on what I want to do, when I want to do it.

That being said, as is natural, my more popular fics tend to get more attention than my less-popular ones. Satisfying might not be the goal, but for me it's more difficult to write the less interested people are in what I'm doing.

I judge my own fics based on the following: A fic I can be proud of has one subscriber for every twenty views, and one upvote for every ten subscribers. think that only one of my fics fits that bill, which is Hyung, I Shrunk The Kids, at 1:18-19 subs:views, and 1:9-10 votes:subs. The votes:subs have always been like that, but I can't say it doesn't worry me that earlier on, the fic was doing closer to 1:15 for subs:views. I'm guessing it's natural for things to slow down, but still. I also know that since the story isn't "subs only," anyone can read it, enjoy it, and not leave feedback, but still, it's the emotional effect of seeing the viewcount go up without the subs or votes going up that slightly irks me sometimes.

I would like to have a featured fic someday, but I know I'm farther from it than ever for reasons I'll discuss in another blog post. It became clear that earning enough karma to promote my stories would be nearly impossible. And yeah, at one point, I went to an upvote shop and put in a request. This was before people really started catching on and getting angry about such things, but I still felt uneasy about it, and I cancelled my request immediately after, before it could be fulfilled. At the time I felt like my fics were being buried by poorly written featured (whether by upvote shop or honest means) fics on this site that make me lose an IQ point for every chapter I read, but not only are upvote shops dishonest, I realized that I'm not a great enough writer to deserve being featured, either.

HISTK is my most upvoted story at 16, and it's 12 chapters long now. The longer the story, the better the chance of getting enough upvotes for a feature, but this story would have to be hella long for that. Far longer than necessary.

You know what's better than a feature, though? Comments. Comments are life. Seeing how much individual people enjoy my story makes me feel warmer and fuzzier than anything.

I really appreciate everyone who's liked my stories and taken the time to upvote, subscribe, and/or comment ^_^