Praise from unexpected sources

[igenlode]

I picked up a random (well, not completely random, because it was someone I'd critiqued during one of my attempts at catching up on fanfiction.net) review on my "Tale of Two Cities" one-shot:
https://www.fanfiction.net/r/14257033/1/

I was completely fandom blind when I read this, but I think if I were to describe this passage with a single word it would be "elegance." It was such a short snippet of a scene (that I had no real context for), and yet I think its simplicity added to the gravity of the event that was happening.

"Anticipation lost its chill and became an eager impatience." - I love this line. It was such a succinct way to express a complicated character emotion. Really, well done.

Plus a lengthy review on "White Knight" by a fandom-blind reader who just happened to be passing through when I posted it to the self-promotion thread... ("as it turned out, I didn't need to have read Gigi to thoroughly enjoy this well-crafted period piece. The story is self-contained: your spare descriptions animate and motivate every major character in this neat little three-act story, and the agonies and follies of the main character are substantiated and believable").

And then a comment on a snippet I posted to a writer's group on Facebook (you are allowed to post 500 words every Wednesday, so I've been drip-feeding them bits of Hertha as 'work in progress' in the hopes of maybe gaining a 'like' or two -- it sometimes happens):

That's some very fine writing, and I am very hard to impress. What is the genre, may I ask?

Which more or less confirms my instinct that the only chance for Arctic Raoul is *outside* the fan-fiction ghetto; people like my writing for its own sake when they are not actually fans of the source material, but it just doesn't fit into the whole ring-fenced ethos of fandom :-(


(The non-fan feedback I got on chapters 30 and 31 of Arctic Raoul was to the effect that I am relieved to find Erik apparently doomed to die an unpleasant death - but not completely confident this will be the end of him. I spent so much time carefully trying to create a touchingly Erik-friendly ending to match the message of the original story that it hadn't even occurred to me that non-Phantom readers might complain that I was being too gentle on the villain of the piece, rather than (like the fans) that I was being mean to poor little Erik...)

I posted Chapter 14 of Hertha to AO3 (and also to FFnet, but I haven't been able to see any statistics there). To date on the climax of the story I have had 21 page hits, +1 kudos and a three-word review ("A great chapter")... the latter being more than I have had on FFnet at any rate!

It simply is not worth spending years working on a novel-length story when the returns are so much lower than those gained by a whimsical one-shot -- not worth it if the goal is to be *read*, as opposed to having successfully *written it*, that is :-p
If uploaded as fan-fiction I know perfectly well that Arctic Raoul would fall into the self-same hole; it is *not* what the fans want to receive.

(Ironically, I suppose "I'm not a fan but this is so well-written that I enjoyed it anyway as a piece of prose in its own right" is what every fanfic writer *dreams* of hearing... but it would be nice if it actually appealed to the target audience as well :-O)

Comments

[watervole]

I tried to find a link to Hertha on AO3, but failed. Can you tell me where it is?

[igenlode]

'Hertha' is my mental shorthand (and the filename of the document -- because I generally come up with the title last, my computer files, which have to be called *something*, tend to get named after a significant character, so I have documents named Eleonore, Philippe, Anne, Perrette, etc!)

The title of the Hertha-story is "High City on a Hill": https://archiveofourown.org/works/37242388/chapters/92919667

I noticed your review on "Appraisal" and did wonder if it had been prompted by this post -- thank you!