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Hey, thanks for responding to my query. I guess first off, I definitely think you’re right about having a thread dedicated to the story taking away from reviews. But I guess it still kind of bugs me that my other stories have no reviews despite having what I’d consider a decent dragon print count. It does kind of make me wonder though if you’re right about Oneshots getting less reviews due to the fact that the reviewer knows there won’t be another chapter. I’m not sure, however, that as far as celebrity fiction is concerned that its a lack of wanting to be recognized that keeps them from commenting / reviewing. As you’ve said, there are many...very disturbing celebrity fan fiction enthusiasts who go out of their way to make their comments known. I try not to get enmeshed in those type of things. I write celebrity for two reasons. One, I’m a fan of the celebrity. (I like their work, or find them attractive so I bring my fantasies to life). I certainly do not wish that something that happens to them in my story, or any story would happen to them in real life. I’m just a fan who wants to fantasize, and... Two, in the vein of liking their work, I see celebrity fiction as a subsection of the Movie, Television, or even Novels category… basically, I feel that if a character (Hermione, Aragon, Black Widow...etc.) has been portrayed by an actor/actress, then 99% of the writers and readers of such fiction are just picturing that actor/actress as they read/write anyway so what’s the difference. Anyway, back to the topic at hand. I don’t know that I completely agree that Dragon Prints don’t signal quality. I mean I get what your saying that its just a count of people clicking on it. But at a certain point, as the count grows, you have to associate that with readers finding quality in your work… don’t you think? But I totally agree that one of the main reason people comment/review is to push the fetishes and (in the celeb writing world), the people/characters they want to see featured on the writer because they want to see more of it/them. Finally, JayDee, I don’t think you’re a writer of shitty stories at all. I’d like you to know that I have your bio page bookmarked, just so I can more easily find your work. Your story, Whore of Heaven is one of my favorite erotic works and that it was part of the inspiration for me to peruse my own erotic writings. (FYI, I have a penchant for seeing the beautiful and the pure corrupted and or humiliated…) Desiderius Price, I totally agree that dragon prints help feed/dispel the doubts a writer may have about their work. When I release a new chapter or story, I find myself hitting the site sometimes 10 or more times a day just to see how the count has changed and when I see a rapid increase I think “well that must have been a good chapter,” and when its the opposite, I fall into despair and sit at home with the lights off playing video games to bolster my self-esteem. Ok, that might be a slight exaggeration...but only slight. Reviews and or comments really help me understand, like you said the answer to where I went wrong or where I went right. And watching dragon prints rise consistently definitely leads me to feel that I have a growing readership and that people are genuinely enjoying my work. Alright, well I thank you both for your responses and I guess I’ve droned on long enough. Till next time, -Mal

New phones always fall on the first day. It’s a universal law. It’s motherfriggin science. If you got a new phone and it didn’t drop the first day, then you’re a witch and you need to stop cheating because it’s not fair.

Yippee! Ep #14 has been written! (Now, the usual wait, well, 13 has to be posted first).

It’s not just the not getting another chapter factor – and to be fair a few of my oneshots with a clear ending and everybody dead have had a sole review of “Can you do X in a second part?” – it’s more the way the site works with oneshots being less likely to be seen once they’re off the latest page unless someone goes looking in the specific sub folder or searches for a specific tag. Less people seeing them mean less opportunities for reviews. Now, older stories still get seen, sometimes quite a lot, but the other factor is that readers do seem less likely to review older oneshots than newer ones. Hence one of my HP oneshots with 10s of thousands of hits but most of the reviews are much older. I’m just theorising here, but it does feel like a factor with alla my unreviewed being oneshots There’s definitely some of that, I guess, and it’s going to be a case of depending on the writer, but for me a lot of the time the character is more fun than the actor/actress because all I know about the actor/actress is what the PR people say, or they put on twitter or something, but the character can have amazing powers and with books/comics and that which also have movie/tv equivilent you can even feel right in their head. At the end of the day Hermione could kill you with a flick of her wrist, while Emma Watson (or the stage actress for wossname child) can’t. I realised as I was writing this there’s a joke in there somewhere, but what the hell. I think maybe I didn’t communicate clearly (“What we have here is… failure to communicate.”) – by saying they don’t necessarily equal quality I was getting at the fact that there’s some heavily viewed and even reviewed stories that are still really shit. No disrespect to the writ… fuck it, they don’t know I’m talking about them. I usually see more hits as a sign of a more active fandom or more popular tag than necessarily quality is what I was going for I guess. Thank you! I appreciate it! That was always one of my more popular original stories it seemed. Someone once requested to write a sequel, I think where a student saved her from her imprisonment at the end by the power of love. Sent the request from a college email. I never heard from them again, but suspect the IT team asked questions about the stories they’d been reading. I just have a mental block against rating most things I’ve written very highly, I guess. Some authors I like have said they like my stuff and I’m half sure they aren’t just returning a compliment, and one character and story I did went on to appear in a bunch more by another writer (who asked!) so I’m sure there’s something in it, but when I look at most of it I just think it’s bad. I’m reading through a story I did in May 2008 at the moment, haven’t looked at it since then and my every other thought is WTF? Ahh well, for my part I just tend to avoid celeb stuff these days for personal fears and reasons but if you ever do anything with original or fictional characters let me know and I’ll have a read! Yes. Yes we do. There was someone on HF had a policy they would only do fan art for characters that had a game/cartoon/comic version not of actors/actresses portrayed version and I think it might well have been the same mentality behind it. Although, sometimes the thing that sells a cartoon character is a sexy voice in your mind… well, to me anyway.

I think you’ve just helped me realize why I have absolutely no fics outside of the Cartoon and Originals domains. Writing porn/erotica (which is mostly what I write) about real people is uncomfortable for me, and so is writing about characters played by real people.

I track mine via a spreadsheet. Normally, I do it daily unless I just posted, at which point, I’ll do it a bit more often. (And refresh a lot in between to see how it changes.) I also try to avoid clicking *into* my own story because I know it’ll disturb the counts. I do put a lot of time into my stories as I don’t have that natural talent to sit at the computer and have a new story done over the weekend. I like my stories to be consistent, well reasoned, and plausible; that takes effort, I’ll even burn some vacation time to write, because I do enjoy it. So it’s nice to know that it’s appreciated by the readers, because I’m definitely not doing this to get rich (that’d be nice, have movie made of one of my stories, or something, but that’s a lottery type payoff). And we do like to drone on in the forums

I don’t necessarily see Dragon Prints as a sign of quality – it’s a sign someone clicked, not that they read it. I guess at most it says “This summary/codes/title/pairing/fandom was appealing” and a big multiparter, where the parts are posted at intervals rather than all at once, will often have many more hits than a oneshot purely because each new chapter will bring it back to the front page, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s any better. The oneshot could be amazing! For the celebrity thing… eh, I’ve said my bit on why I stopped doing ‘em, so purely in line with this topic - I sometimes think with celebrity stories folks don’t want to be commenting/reviewing positively on something the celebrity might have a lawsuit about later – but I guess the same could apply for many copyrighted works. I do know that if, say, I commented on a rape fic about a celebrity and them someone linked them to it on twitter, or a talk show host bought it up (as occasionally happens, it ain’t just mean tweets! Or, hell, a lot of these folks are waaay more into the internet than before, prolly find thm theirselves) I’d feel pretty bad for ‘em. Maybe other folks think the same thing and are less keen to have their reviews in that context, but quite happy to masturbate over it? But even that theory doesn’t hold up because there are people out there happy to use internet anonymity to tell someone to their twitter/IG whatever account that they hope they get raped/murdered/not allowed to be in another Star Wars movie. And those angry folks seem like they’d not be bothered reviewing celeb porn. Hell, some of ‘em are probably making the deepfakes. Having a quick look at yours, I see that three of ‘em only have one part, and the other one only has two parts – every single one of my unreviewed stories is a oneshot and I think that can have an impact as well, maybe more so than the domain thing (unless it’s a nosex multiparter in a really unknown fandom with other really niche tags or something!). Might even be more that factor than the celeb factor, because as you have with your big multi-parters once you get regular readers they’re keen to offer input, and feedback and interact, and guess about how things will go and so on. Just a thought. When I was writing celeb stories I got the vast majority of my reviews by email, maybe you’d get some by sticking a “Hey folks! If you don’t want to post a review, email me your thoughts!” message?

When I’ve finished the application of glitter I’ll stick it in DBZ and leave it until a reviewer tells me a better place then! (Normal suggestions for better places for my stories are “Take them and stick them up your…” well, you can imagine the profanity, I’m sure) Thank you again for your time.

There are Dragon Ball GT stories in the DBZ subdomain, in General, at least...

It comes down to those self-doubts one can have about their own stories. Are they any good? Do people like reading them? Is it worth my effort to take these from an outline/rough to a more polished form for posting? Is this suitable to actually be published (for originals)? In the absence of reviews, I can’t answer these, not really. So, having the dragon prints going up consistency after posting/promoting at least hints that some people are reading it, and coming back to read with each installment – it’s not guaranteed, it could be a different group of suckers each time, or, it could be some habitual readers; my assumption is that it’s a bit of both.

I’m just using domain in the sense of AFF’s subdomains because when I went through my stories I did it by subdomain originals and movies etc. Genre’s a better term for general fiction discussion and you can have same genre stories in different subdomains. I’d say least likely to be reviewed on here is a oneshot nosex original story, or little known fandom. People’ll definitely review a shitty story with a fetish they like, often to say they want to see more of it. I speak as a writer of some pretty shitty stories with reviews of that nature! Same with certain popular fandoms where a particular character or theme will get reviews just ‘cos folks want to consume any media they can with it. That’s how it seems to me. I’m sure you’re right that getting replies directly to the forum means you’re getting less on the story – those regular readers’d definitely be making at least some of the same comments as reviews! Gotta rush, will comment more later!

The wee corgi lass is in the hospital. ::sigh:: I fucking hate epilepsy.