Stats and Progress

[igenlode]

I went to the library to access FFnet (and retrieve some old PMs), and took the opportunity to download copies of the monthly and legacy stats pages for "High City on a Hill". When I got them home and tried to load the files, I discovered that all I had was a couple of Cloudflare pages displaying "fanfiction.net needs to review the security of your connection before proceeding"! I should have simply saved the HTML tables out as text, and reformatted the data back into table form myself...

However, from memory both sets of data confirmed a fairly consistent figure of about 30 hits taking place on every new chapter; there were also about six people who read all the chapters of the story this month, either in order to refresh their memories after the long gap in publication or because it was the first time they had come across the story.

[Edit 26/06/2022] Copied and pasted in:

Hit Stats Breakdown by Chapter

Chapters	Words	Views	Reviews
1	3,716	480	8
2	4,853	101	1
3	4,040	69	1
4	6,230	53	1
5	4,593	50	1
6	5,488	38	1
7	6,209	46	1
8	5,202	34	1

August, 2022: Break down by Chapter

No.	Chapter Name	Words	Views	Visitors
1	Can It Be Christine?	3,716	54	36
2	We Can Make It Work	4,853	15	11
3	As if Awoken from a Dream	4,040	9	5
4	She Won't Thank You For It	6,230	10	7
5	An Accident -- Simply an Accident	4,593	5	5
6	He'll Stop at Nothing	5,488	6	6
7	It Will Be At Midsummer	6,209	8	7
8	Why So Silent, Good Messieurs?	5,202	34	28

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AO3 statistics (or at least my offline database of them!) record 20 hits in total on the story since the new chapter was uploaded. (There had been no page views at all on this story for the previous fortnight!) Apparently AO3 specifically logs the number of unique visitors to a work rather than the number of pages accessed. Which, if you're only going to give a single figure, is probably the more useful one to pick, but does mean the author has absolutely no idea how many people are actually reading the story as opposed to just glancing at the first page and clicking away...

In good -- indeed excellent -- news, I have actually managed to progress as far as rewriting the first few paragraphs of my 'flashback problem' chapter in Arctic Raoul, while taking the opportunity to tweak a few of the other bits of wording in that section, something that really ought to have been done at the initial typing-up/editing stage but which was put off due to my structural worries about the chapter. (I also managed to remove a reference to 'dawn'! -- only one, alas, of many in the preceding chapters...)

Mei Bruges suggested that maybe the principal problem with the chapter was not the existence of the flashback[s] as such, but the fact that the entire flashback takes place in the gap between a question and answer in the 'present-day' scene, and indeed immediately after the first line of dialogue in that scene, which means that it barely gets a chance to 'start' at all. So I am trying to rewrite the opening to the chapter to be a casual discussion of their surroundings rather than an unanswered inquisition on Christine, in the hopes that this new conversation will provide a more relaxed 'gap' for the flashback to take place in. It should also provide a more natural train of thought to lead up to the question of where exactly the scene is taking place and how they got here -- which is the first thing the flashback was intended to establish, but which was admittedly a massive jump away from 'How are you going to find Christine?' as a chapter-opener!

I think it is probably an improvement, but I have yet to work out how I am going to get back out of the flashback while making it more clear where I am returning *to*, nor how I am now going to manage to introduce the subject of Christine into the conversation *following* the flashback, since it no longer exists in the prior section. And I made extremely heavy weather of the actual writing itself -- even once I had decided what the new conversation between Raoul and Lancard was actually going to be about, which took several false starts that didn't even make it onto paper. (It's amazing the number of unflattering character implications that seem to pop up under the circumstances...)

I'm not sure whether the problem is that after two months of not writing at all I had got out of the habit of doing it, or that I had simply managed to forget how hard it is. Since I know objectively that there were occasions during the writing of this story when I left my front door knowing *exactly* what *needed to be said* in the course of the next sentence and came back an hour or so later, having only wrested free the wording for a sentence or so overall. I suspect the answer is the latter. Sometimes the writing flows, but a lot of the time it takes a great deal of pushing to get it started.

(I also had to soak and rinse out the nib of my pen before I could 'get started' at all, since two months' inactivity with the pen lying by the window in full sunlight and temperatures of over 90 degrees meant that the permament black ink had dried and clogged the nib altogether!)

But after completing the rewritten paragraphs, I found myself glancing backwards in the notebook I was using and rereading the final chapter of "High City on a Hill", which happens to be there. I enjoyed it; I think it does work, and works well. (Now I just have to get that far in the typing-up!)