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My stuff varies on the main characters, sometimes they’re gay or bi, sometimes not, depends on the story. Though, my Dale’s Game does have the main characters as gay (in a homophobic world), so if you’ve not read it @CloverReef, feel free to read and review it I am planning a sequel and it does have a short prequel in the 2016 holiday stories. For me, by relaxing the requirement for perfection, it lets me actually post, and posted material is much better than holding out for “perfect”. When I wrote The Repair Guy, I deliberately experimented by going for short chapters and one-pass proofreading; the result was, I finished that story in a couple of months, not years, and I’m overall happy with how it turned out.

I would like this comment a thousand times if I could. I fucking love Dorian. To me, there’s shit on this site that is totally perfect. Especially the vulgar stuff. Thanks to the subjective nature of our craft, we get to redefine perfection every friggin second for ourselves. If your story is gripping, you have characters I root for and it’s not bogged down with way too many excess words, to me, that’s perfection. (Oh and the mains have to be gay kuz I don’t stan a cishet dude. Just saying) And vulgar helps. Of course when people don’t review, I start to get in my head about what’s wrong with it until I go crazy and see issues that might not even be there, even though I reassure my friends all the time that review counts and dragon prints have nothing to do with quality. And I whole-heartedly believe that claim. It’s just the crazy happens.

Fortunately, I’ve got next week off With what you described of the real person stories, I’d probably be pulling them too. I too, have some perfectionist tendencies, but I’ve learned to temper those with practicality and pragmatism, recognizing the desire to get something written; a slightly imperfect story is better than no story at all!

I did download the mod to let my male Wardens romance Alistair… And in Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dorian. That’s all I’m saying.

Full listing? I’m in…. Well I’m not, I’ve got 100+ of the fucking things. I don’t have all week. Samahlen (combined one-shots): 22260 / 105 – Now this is a good story. Literally so good it got me to play a game that I then loved and wrote a bit of fanfic for myself. [off topic] Alistair should totally have been a male warden romance option. And Morrigan a female warden option. And Dog for both of… Ok, ok, I’ll shut up now[/off topic] I respect that. I guess I get squirrelly at the thought of someone’s first impression of my writing being something I’m not 100% proud of. That kind’ve sums up alla my writing to be honest… Nothing’s perfect! Multiparters definitely seem to have more chance of picking up reviews. And, yep, genre definitely makes a differene. That’s sort of the point I was making with the HP stories I have – some of them are really bad and some are kinda ok to good, but there’s only one of them that never got a review. Even that unfinished scat fic I wrote got reviews and that was just me being vulgar. As for story pulling: I pulled all my Real Person Fic stories years ago from AFF, but have re-written and expanded some of them to be about non real folks. I also have a few stories – some of drabble or micro fic length – that I’ve never really put up on AFF for one reason or another. The reason I pulled all my early JD stuff originally in like 2006 I can’t fully remember now. 12 years ago! I think one of the old mods said or did something that irritated me. This was pre-current forum days, I think, though possibly after… was it yahoo group? There was that AFF livejournal for a bit too... For my old username I took ‘em all down because of the one username rule, and because some real world folks saw some of my writing, but later on I asked DemonGoddess and she said it was ok to have my old username stories under my old username so I re-loaded some of the best of them. Probably coulda stuck a few more up but I doubt I will now. Maybe one of these days.

I sort of expect my Games fandom stories to not get reviews. I don’t write for “popular” games, and that’s fine. But in posting order, with hits/reviews: Alchemy: 1086/ 16 Samahlen (combined one-shots): 22260 / 105 Stormborn: Book 1: 3103 / 7 Stormborn: Book 2: 949 / 0 In Lord of the Rings, I have a co-authored work, writing with the inestimable Pippychick: The Lost and the Hidden City: 1430 / 4 And my Originals: Almost Home: 358 / 4 Special of the Day: 513 / 4 Harrison Winter: 1109 / 4 The Accident: 270 / 3 Play It Safe: 452 / 5 Missing: 623 / 3 Compassion: 799 / 2 Culloch’s Rest: 2640 / 36 Hazardous Duty: 706 / 7 Hunting Elysium: 700 / 6 The Brownstone: 371 / 3 First Step: 973 / 6 Indigo: 520 / 4 Punch Line: 784 / 4 A Good Morning’s Sleep: 596 / 6 The Scapegoat: 1540 / 2 Surrender: 1190 / 5 Masking Intentions: 1780 / 19 Buggered if I know why some get more than others…

Yep, minor1 is one of those tags. And I find that for every line I attempt to draw in the sand, I’ll eventually cross. I will qualify tags, if appropriate, because I do tend to overtag (ie, minor1 even if it’s just nudity w/o sexual activity, or, alternatively, exposure to adults doing the deed). Since I record the dragon prints, I know Jefferey’s count goes up several hundred between episode posts, so I suspect I’ve got some readers despite just having two reviews. Generally, I try to refrain from pulling, even earlier works. There are fanfics I’ll go back and re-read from time to time, and even though I do start to realize how...well, with experience, quality, I do appreciate being able to re-read them. I’ve considered going back and rewriting my first potter fanfic, because I’m sure I could do a better job today, but I think it’d lose some of the charm for it having been my first, so I plan to leave as it is, warts and all. And thanks for that endorsement… reviews are always appreciated

I’ll ignore that link in your signature….. I had the rate bomber attack one of my earlier stories, Alaska Trekkers, before the feature went away. At the time, I was rather new to AFF, and it nearly discouraged me away; to get that downvote seconds after uploading a new chapter … in hindsight, that sort of response time hints at a bot to me. As they never said anything, all I could do is guess, and the tags are a likely culprit – but that’s the way my main characters are, I like ‘em naked.

omg, that is the worst! Just seems so incredibly inconsiderate to me to ask someone to put hours or days or weeks into working on something and not even a friggin thank you.

Full listing? I’m in…. Originals (ignoring holiday/halloween) The Repair Guy: 3516/2 Dale’s Game: 2605/9 (DA was an active reviewer until she went off grid0 Jefferey: 9241/2 Fiends: 1481/0 Dolbourne Chronicles: 1721/0 Alaska Trekkers: 2783/2 Harry Potter (another site, can’t bring ‘em here) Red and Green Patches: 14188/24 In the Crosshairs: 10161/175 So yeah, genre makes a difference.

Bam! Another tag just materialized into the story. Don’t worry, the offender will be punished.

In my case, a smart reader would see the post/updated dates … fifteen years ago for that first fanfic, and read my comments about it being my FIRST, and understand. It’s on that *other* fanfic website, so it gets plenty of traffic there, its last review being about five years ago (a decade after posting it).

I respect that. I guess I get squirrelly at the thought of someone’s first impression of my writing being something I’m not 100% proud of.

I’m not nearly as prolific as a lot of writers, and most of what I write never sees the light of day, so my unreviewed things were years ago, and I took them down because of the lack of interest. Though I do have a recent one where I got just one review that pretty much just sounded confused, so I don’t know if that counts, lol. I’m not sure why readers are more vocal about some stories than others. I mean, sometimes I think that they’re less vocal about the more masturbatory stories because they just cum and go, but then I stumble upon smutfests with hundreds or thousands of reviews and it blows my theory out of the water. More often than not, the stories I see getting very little attention are among the better written. Maybe they don’t cater to the particular audience here? But that wouldn’t explain the mass of dragon prints some of these unreviewed stories collect. Maybe it’s just not cool to support authors anymore? I don’t know. It drives me crazy. You guys are awesome writers. I personally think I’m a fucking awesome writer, and even if we weren’t, the time and energy we put into crafting free content certainly deserves a word or two.

I suppose I am a glass half empty kind’ve person. I see flaws in nearly everything. With the exception of The Price, by Pippychick, which I am again not going to link and review whore for. But, you know, if you happen to see a link to it somewhere, and click it, and read it, well the decent thing… I don’t really hold in my head concerns when folks don’t review – when I did the list above I had to stop and think about some of them to try and figure why they’d been overlooked. I never really thought ‘bout it before this thread. One thing that annoyed me in the past was when I did a story for someone and then they gave me literally no feedback on it. It’s like “Jesus, it’s your request, if I’ve missed something you need to get off let me know!” Back in the day some of the low ratings would make me laugh. It’d be obvious a “seconds after loading” downvotin’ had happened literally because of the tags or summary. I had one story that got rate-bombed with 100+ 1 ratings over night which I guessed was because someone really didn’t like the story.

I suspect Minor1 is one of those tags like Rape that a large portion of readers understandibly actively avoid and a small portion actively look for. Some of the tags will get readers for a fandom or original topic about which they know/care little just because the fetish/kink/straight up mental sickness (Hello ABDL! I kid, I kid!) is the most important element to them. Though, weirdly, they’re often more likely to review to plead for more of said fetish sometimes in fandom they do know better, “Wow I really loved seeing your OC Mike wearing that pair of Depends, have you ever thought of how Batman must use something similar?” etc etc Than click and skip by unreviewed. Recording the dragon prints like that sounds like a good idea, but I suspect I might find it a bit depressing if I tried it with mine.

I’ve got nothing above single digits. Two are unreviewed: Originals > Fiends Originals > Dolbourne Chronicles Both are WIP, haven’t been updated in a while, so that’s understandable, and flooded with tags. I’ve been moving insignificant tags into the story itself so it’s less daunting to the prospective reader (they still get full disclosure at the top of the story). And yeah, some of mine have minor1, so that’s a detractor too. What I have been doing is recording my dragon prints, so I use that as a proxy for interest in the stories.

Something to keep in mind regarding story codes (also known as 'tags'). When you're uploading your story, you're required to include the appropriate codes (such as m/f, m/m, oral, etc), which get added to the end of the summary field. The potential problem is that the summary field accepts a maximum of 240 characters, so if you have a long summary for your story, you might run out of room to include all of your story codes. The answer is to simply manually type them into the header part of your story, after the title information and before the story begins. AFF has a limit of 600 words for author's notes per chapter, but story codes aren't included in that count, so add all that are appropriate.