swirlingdoubt

What Clover said!
But really, fan fiction is a terrific way to hone writing skills. The world building and basic character development is done, and you just get to put your own slant on things. Sharing that online brings valuable feedback and yes, the chance to talk to other writers. 

My writing has absolutely evolved. A few things factor into it. I very much credit my years in fanfiction as a powerful foundation. Though my writing sucked back then, it was an excellent training ground for character development and crafting interesting stories using elements everyone involved was already familiar with. Also formal education played a part. I'm a high school drop out but I went out of my way to teach myself as well as seek out others who could teach me: take classes, read writing books, write essays and long discussions with my english professor mother. 
Plus there's the natural improvement that happens just online from writing a lot and communicating with other writers that I 100% believe has the biggest impact out of all the things I just mentioned. 

Me? With fear, loathing and the occasional chuckle at a forgotten joke that came out quite well when I look at it again. Also trying to work out what the hell kind of obscure reference a name was likely referring to or punning on. Sometimes I think “hey this wasn’t so bad” and sometimes I think “Eh, s’ok.” With my re-writes of some of my old stories there are bits I’ve felt should have been expanded on more than in the original, so expanded ‘em, and also bits I’ve felt were needlessly mean spirited (in rape/snuff fics! It took some doing!) almost as if I 2007/2008 me was trying to provoke non-perverts who probably were not even reading rather than entertain peverts who were. Long time ago now. 
If you do go back you can certainly make something worthwhile out of the half-finished, or take scraps and turn them into something new. Good luck if you do!
I really don’t remember everything I wrote at all. Sometimes someone says something to me about something I wrote or an old story and I’m like “Really? Ok!” When I had a review on an old original oneshot recently I had literally forgotten everything about it except that I had thought it was terrible at the time, and why I wrote it, and I finally re-read it after the review. Sympathy for the reviewer there. Another thing, reminded by your home-brew experience, a few weeks back I was looking at an old file full of bios and scenery descriptions I wrote for a non-erotic play by email type RPG game in like 2000-2001. Some of those characters were pretty engaging! At least one is like a proto-Kizurial with an alcohol problem.

How do you think your writing has changed over time? What lead to those changes? Do you remember every story you write?
I am not much of a writer, but I get and itch of an idea and must scratch it down once in a while. I have a smattering of stories written over the last 20 years, and I have forgotten about most of them. I stated that I never wrote erotica before, but apparently that isn’t true because I found one that I wrote 5 years ago - for an obscure home-brew video game of all things - and it was awful. I have no memory of writing it at all, so everything in it was a surprise. I realize how much I have changed even over 5 years – a better sense of reality, or depth, perhaps. Yet, I found another fanfic written even earlier, and I was on the edge of my seat and mad that I left it on a cliffhanger. I might even go back and try to finish and clean it up. So, it isn’t linear.
How do other writers reflect on their past stories?

How do you think your writing has changed over time? What lead to those changes? Do you remember every story you write?
I am not much of a writer, but I get and itch of an idea and must scratch it down once in a while. I have a smattering of stories written over the last 20 years, and I have forgotten about most of them. I stated that I never wrote erotica before, but apparently that isn’t true because I found one that I wrote 5 years ago - for an obscure home-brew video game of all things - and it was awful. I have no memory of writing it at all, so everything in it was a surprise. I realize how much I have changed even over 5 years – a better sense of reality, or depth, perhaps. Yet, I found another fanfic written even earlier, and I was on the edge of my seat and mad that I left it on a cliffhanger. I might even go back and try to finish and clean it up. So, it isn’t linear.
How do other writers reflect on their past stories?

How do you think your writing has changed over time? What lead to those changes? Do you remember every story you write?
I am not much of a writer, but I get and itch of an idea and must scratch it down once in a while. I have a smattering of stories written over the last 20 years, and I have forgotten about most of them. I stated that I never wrote erotica before, but apparently that isn’t true because I found one that I wrote 5 years ago - for an obscure home-brew video game of all things - and it was awful. I have no memory of writing it at all, so everything in it was a surprise. I realize how much I have changed even over 5 years – a better sense of reality, or depth, perhaps. Yet, I found another fanfic written even earlier, and I was on the edge of my seat and mad that I left it on a cliffhanger. I might even go back and try to finish and clean it up. So, it isn’t linear.
How do other writers reflect on their past stories?

Ha, I was trying to figure out how the tags worked since it is the first time I have posted anything. I found this forum very helpful and I had to go back and fix the archive submission after I understood it better.
I honestly don’t want higher views because people think there is rape in it. I tried to be as accurate as possible with the tags given. There is a thread about this, I saw, so I might ask more questions over there.

Assuming I edit the links right, for the past three years:
Halloween 2015 http://original.adult-fanfiction.org/story.php?no=600107953
Christmas 2015  http://original.adult-fanfiction.org/story.php?no=600108028
Halloween 2016 http://original.adult-fanfiction.org/story.php?no=600108385
Christmas 2016  http://original.adult-fanfiction.org/story.php?no=600108443
Halloween 2017  http://original.adult-fanfiction.org/story.php?no=600108780
Christmas 2017  http://original.adult-fanfiction.org/story.php?no=600108835
 

The main story jams over the last couple of years were Christmas and Halloween, where users would write a story with some connection to the event. There may have been  others. I don’t think they actually called them story jams on AFF but the correct terminology has slipped my mind. Anyway some very good writers contributed some great stories.
Most of the unreviewed games stories are really undeservedly so, and please, don’t feel you need to go fill in games. There’s other writers and other stories that’d be better uses of your time! I’d rather say some of the writing I am genuinely proud of is in games too – in parts of Ending the Fan, Shokan Lust and pretty much all of the sex and violence free Friendship’s Gift – though they all have reviews.

At least if you have a review thread linked on the story people who do leave a review know where to look for a reply. In Mal’s case noted earlier in the thread he gets considerably more reader interaction in the thread than he does from reviews left on the archive.
I appreciate anyone looking at my stories who wants too, but – and this isn’t me fishing for compliments or being self-depreciating – there’s some nasty shit there, both in terms of quality and content.
You make a pretty food contribution to the topic here – I was suggesting earlier that with older oneshots the actual age can put people off leaving a review and here you’re confirming it in your case! I don’t see a whole lot of a way around this from a writer’s perspective. On my author profile I put a note asking people to review no matter the age, but a lot of readers won’t necessarily see the profile doing general searches or topic checks. Only thing that might work for writers with less stories would be to go through each story every few months and put a note at the bottom like “Hey, I am still awaiting any reviews you have as of July 8th in the year 5.5/apple/26 “ or whatever but once you get into double figures it’d be too hard as with keeping abreast of changes to story codes.
Ha, the Spyro story… I played some of the games years ago at least. Couldn’t remember much now. There was a user on another forum with a Spyro snuff fantasy. I did a few sub-flashfic length scenes for ‘em as well as the long one as story exchanges. Weirdly I’ve just checked and it was the same user who requested the Dragon Ball GT story I am polishing up to repost now. It just looks prolific because I’ve been writing as JayDee since 2005 (none dated before 2007 on archive due to taking some down and re-posting), and did 52 prompts in one year at one point, of which around 40-45 were seperate flashfics. In the last two years I think I finished two stories.
Thank you for the compliments and the feedback, and all I’ll say is that if you like writing and keep at it it can be fun and rewarding and also a life stealing demon muse. Keep on keeping on! From what I read earlier you’re nailing the erotica and the non-sex stuff flowed fine.
This too! Even a “Hey, I liked this.” is nice to get. As nice as they are, a 20000 word dissertation on the the intertextual meanings between the alternating placings of the money shots isn’t required

Reviews can be a love note too, even if it’s an old story, they’re definitely nice to have.  Heck, on my old potter fic, a good review could stir me to actually *finish* it, it’s been on hiatus for years now (started 15 years ago).  Constructive criticism, points of like/dislike are nice, but at the end, even a simple “I like this” review goes a long way to stoking the ego.
 

I’ll have to check out your Games section more thoroughly to close some gaps.
Oh goodness I am under no illusions about your content. I wish I had more to say, but I haven’t been a part of this community long enough to know what the jams and challenges are all about. You are leading me down the garden path of your parody story arcs.

Thanks, I might make a review thread but I wasn't actually expecting reviews. I noticed most of the Pokemon fiction have very little feedback. I originally planned on putting it on ff.net but saw they did not accept “MA”, so came here. Reviewing seems more popular there. I’ll get to more of your stories later this week when I have more time, as well as @Desiderius Price stories (sci-fi as a vehicle for socio-political commentary is the only way to go).
Hahaha, I got pretty nauseous with Spoiled Meat. It was also funny, though. I did not leave a review for it because 1) it was very old, 2) I did not have anything valuable to say. I wouldn’t wish you to read mine if you didn’t care about it. I don’t know much about the majority of fandoms you’ve written about (although I saw you have a Spyro Challenge in there, which is absurd ). That is the catch with “finding your audience”, I suppose. You are a great writer and much more prolific. I don’t have much experience writing erotica (or writing), and have never had feedback on my writing, so your input would be informative.
I apologize I  took this a bit off topic! But, maybe this thread is a good way for authors to actually get some reviews haha.

I’ll have to check out your Games section more thoroughly to close some gaps.
Oh goodness I am under no illusions about your content. I wish I had more to say, but I haven’t been a part of this community long enough to know what the jams and challenges are all about. You are leading me down the garden path of your parody story arcs.

Thanks, I might make a review thread but I wasn't actually expecting reviews. I noticed most of the Pokemon fiction have very little feedback. I originally planned on putting it on ff.net but saw they did not accept “MA”, so came here. Reviewing seems more popular there. I’ll get to more of your stories later this week when I have more time, as well as @Desiderius Price stories (sci-fi as a vehicle for socio-political commentary is the only way to go).
Hahaha, I got pretty nauseous with Spoiled Meat. It was also funny, though. I did not leave a review for it because 1) it was very old, 2) I did not have anything valuable to say. I wouldn’t wish you to read mine if you didn’t care about it. I don’t know much about the majority of fandoms you’ve written about (although I saw you have a Spyro Challenge in there, which is absurd ). That is the catch with “finding your audience”, I suppose. You are a great writer and much more prolific. I don’t have much experience writing erotica (or writing), and have never had feedback on my writing, so your input would be informative.
I apologize I  took this a bit off topic! But, maybe this thread is a good way for authors to actually get some reviews haha.

Dunno, it’d be different to read ‘em out loud on a crowded train/bus   

I don’t think there’s really a correlation between hits (dragon prints) and reviews. A lot of it is based purely on the fandom—the more active a fandom’s reader base, the more likely you’ll get a review, even if it’s someone questioning your sanity and parentage for not writing their particular OTP. I tend to write fan fiction for more obscure fandoms, and I don’t expect reviews, so any I get are exciting. The only reason my Dragon Age story got reviews like it did is that it began as a series of responses to the weekly Dribs, Drabs and Doggy Tales challenge prompts. (The Quarter of Insanely Obnoxious Words was particularly challenging, but I am proud to say @JayDee and I both managed every single word.)
Certain tags draw readers as well. If the reader has an incest fetish, they will look for that tag, for example. But tags are vital, and we mods do monitor them closely, because some things are highly triggering, like rape, incest, and Minor1/Minor2 content. We get emails from readers who were sandbagged by content they didn’t expect to see, and some of them, quite frankly, are heartbreaking to read. Real life can be ugly, and maybe that’s why some of us write, but our readers deserve forewarning of even the most dubious content. I used the Rape tag on a oneshot with an offstage, not very graphic mention of rape just to be safe. As far as published work, my publisher has exceedingly narrow parameters for even mentioning rape.
One way to try and gain a bit of visibility for a story is to use the Promote A Story thread. @Desiderius Price does use it, which I’m sure helps readers find his work. You can post for each new chapter for a multi-chapter work, and readers who are forum members can follow your post, giving them an email notification every time you post about a new chapter. Very useful, in lieu of a formal “follow this story” feature.
And to sort of finish up for this post, at any rate, I will confess to not being as good about reviewing as I’d like to be. As a moderator, I read new chapters and new stories weekly in an ever rotating set of subdomains, checking for Terms of Service compliance. In that capacity, I only review if I find a disclaimer issue, or have had to hide a story. Sometimes I read something, and I want to go back later and review it in my own pen name, but real life sidetracks me, and I’m always bothered by that. I read it, enjoyed it, and want to comment. But as a further confession (and this is where tags come back into the conversation) when I read for pure enjoyment, I do avoid certain content. It’s not appealing to me, and if I don’t have to read it for moderating purposes, I’d rather not encounter it. So, that’s a partial mea culpa for not reading/reviewing certain things even if written by an author I like, who’s a good writer with an engaging style.

I’m less of a reader these days, so that’s not always guaranteed, I came to AFF because I wanted to post what I was writing, explored the TOS carefully before I signed up.  However, when I do read a story, I try to make a point of dropping a review on it.  I use the “promote a story” to make people aware of my stories.  And I also made a conscious decision a while ago to become more active on the forums so people know I exist around here.  This all also helps with some social anxieties that I have, which included getting over the hesitation to talk about my own stories when it seems germane and relevant to the topic at hand (I still fight that hesitation, but the bar is now lower than it used to be).

This is where I really appreciate the first amendment in the US, and it’s one the supreme court holds pretty dear to its heart.  It may not be perfectly upheld, corporations try to sway it, but, AFAICT, the strongest protection to free speech on the planet.  And, the whole concept of ruling a law as unconstitutional *isn’t* explicitly stated in the constitution either, that has a history too (Mauberry vs Madison is the case that established the court’s authority to rule as such).  I just hope the current prez’s attempt to demonize free press doesn’t bear fruit.
That said, a little tinkering for the purposes of tackling “anchor babies” in the US (ie, the birthright citizenship), or to allow prayer in school (religious right), to the fourteenth amendment (that’s what carries the first amendment protections down to the other levels of government AND grants birthright citizenship), and a nasty war or two with some Muslim countries and/or Russia and/or China (all very real possibilities), and we could have the universe that *my* stories are portraying, where a resurgence in the religious right means that the government now has a duty to see that promote every person’s spiritual well being, and we get…
Yep, and it starts off with an eight year old boy “Jeff” who goes from taking a bath to finding himself in a nudist camp, which lets me explore a group who doesn’t appreciate the government trying to promote their spiritual well being and the implications of that.  My universe here is hard-sci-fi, which means any tech has to be plausible/buildable with today’s general understanding of the world; and with the general setup, there’s an implied suppression of the creative talent who’d be advancing the state ofthe art as “promoting the devil”.
True, future doesn’t have to be “sci-fi”, though it generally is.  I’ve been listing some of mine under Originals/Misc because its sufficiently non-tech enough that sci-fi may or may not be appropriate, despite being in the future and having some elements of tech.  Heck, a recent episode I wrote involved Amish, and while they had a tablet computer at their market for scanning/adding prices, that was the only real tech they had.  I do make the tablet a ubiquitous item in my worlds, because I figure that’s the form factor that today’s laptops will go to for the general user; iPads for normal work (editing documents, watching shows), and smart phones; but even that line is blurring today.  Wireless keyboards might still be a thing for a power user.
With how I’ve setup my universe, as the religious right resurges in the US, and across the globe, with the US government’s “Department of Homeland Morality”, people who disagree with this, people who wish to value their freedom to think independently, tend not to have to worry about it for too long as they get weeded out.  Thus, to show the interesting stories are with the young adults, the teenagers, so that’s where I tend to pick up those minor1/minor2 tags.
When in doubt, keep it in.  Now, you do have flexibility to where you put the warnings tags, your options are 1) summary, 2) top of the story, and/or 3) top of the relevant chapter.  I tend to avoid #3, because that’s too much of a spoiler, I prefer “somewhere in the story” vs “in this chapter”, unless it’s a series of oneshots at which point, top of the chapter is better.   So more recently, I’ve been putting major/significant tags to the summary, and ALL tags at the top of the story; this warns the reader without cluttering up the summary.  So, if the story is ten chapters describing a lick by lick on a blowjob, then [oral] would be advertised in the summary, but if its a half line of “sucked his cock”, one of a handful throughout a M/M or M/F story, and none really significant to the plot other than “built a little bit onto the relationship”, it’d be at the top of the story.  Now, [rape] is more of a general trigger tag, like Minor1 or Minor2, and I tend to suggest keeping those in the summary.  Lots of shades here.

It was definitely for the best for Spoiled Meat to have a Rape tag, or whatever AFF had at the time instead of Rape. I believe the tag evolved something like NC to RapeFic to current Rape and was updated each time on stories because of the importance of warning tags. There’s arguments that can be made that some of my older stories are undertagged, or tagged in ways that they wouldn’t be today but this is because over the last ten years some tags have been added/changed or even removed since then and it’s too big a job to keep lesser story tags all updated. On Spoiled Meat, for example, the more recent Hum tag suits better than Xeno, given he’s ultimately a man with a mutation-like skin condition.
Ultimately the relevence to the topic before we get too far afield is that some tags will bring in readers, some will repel readers and some will bring in readers but not make them want to leave positive reviews to associate them with the content.
No problem! It will be later today so I don’t have half a dozen things distracting me as I read, and of course if you want you can start a review reply thread and link it in your story for other reviewers (like Mine for my original stories, here have replied to your review and thank you!), s’what a lot of us do so reviewers can see replies 

I read Spoiled Meat and I think I am pretty tame.  
Thank you for offering to read/review.

Thank you for the info. I added some additional warnings and put the rape tag back in, just to cover the bases. I don’t think I went terribly over a line for the context but you never know.  Like you say, it is a tough balance when you could potentially mislead people in different directions, either false advertising or not warning them enough.
Is your 10K one Jefferey? That one did catch my eye because you seemed to be very happy with it in your Promote thread. Sci-Fi is one of my favorite genres so I will read a few others, too.

If you do a statistical analysis comparing views:reviews by author, cross-referencing genre, sub domain, and tags, that would be worthy of a PowerPoint presentation, or a leaderboard. 
I am going on a review campaign. 10K views deserves reviews.

Ha, I was trying to figure out how the tags worked since it is the first time I have posted anything. I found this forum very helpful and I had to go back and fix the archive submission after I understood it better.
I honestly don’t want higher views because people think there is rape in it. I tried to be as accurate as possible with the tags given. There is a thread about this, I saw, so I might ask more questions over there.

I read Spoiled Meat and I think I am pretty tame.  
Thank you for offering to read/review.