Statistics

I get a real kick out of watching my fanfic stats. Sad and tragic, I know. But the reality is that not many people are reviewing right now, so the only measurement I can get of page activity and story popularity is from my stats.  I suppose, also, I’m not posting right now. I am writing! Really I am.

Fanfic counts a visitor as one person in a twenty four hour period. In that time they can visit many pages; each will count as a hit or a ‘view’ on the table.

For example, I usually average a hit ratio to review rate of about 1%. So that for every one hundred times a page has been read, one person leaves me a review. Heavy sigh.

But right now, my legacy stat page looks like this.

I am watching avidly to see if Apologies hits the three quarter mil mark before Best Friends catches it. I think it is going to be very close.

I suppose I should also see if I survive at fanfic. I hear they are still deleting stories. Sigh.

Just for interest, my most popular one shot is ‘Wake up and smell the coffee’ a photo inspired Paul/Bella fic I wrote and didn’t enter into a competition. Oopsies. Might have made a mistake, there. Lol.

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/7949567/1/Wake_up_and_smell_the_coffee

And yes, I am thinking about extending it. When have I ever extended a one shot before? Oh, wait…

Endings

I was about to go to bed and realised that I haven’t done a blog post for a little while.

I was thinking about the Olympics and the over the top closing ceremony and then I thought about endings.

I watch Supernatural with my teenage sons and one of my favourite characters is the Prophet Chuck. He writes novels that oddly mirror the lives of the Winchester boys.

He does a voice over at one stage that I ran off to look up. The quote belongs to whoever the heck writes Supernatural and I take no credit, but it really resonated with me.

Endings are hard. Any chapped-ass monkey with a keyboard can poop out a beginning, but endings are impossible. You try to tie up every loose end, but you never can. The fans are always gonna bitch. There’s always gonna be holes. And since it’s the ending, it’s all supposed to add up to something. I’m telling you, they’re a raging pain in the ass.

He is so right.

I make an awful lot of beginnings, but winding up a story; letting those characters go is sometimes spectacularly hard to do.

The last time I spoke about works in progress, I had eight things on the go.

http://amgray.blogspot.com.au/2012/07/my-mind-and-wip.html

I have been following an idea from Jerry Seinfeld of all people. People asked him how he could be so prolific and he said ‘don’t break the chain’. Every day he would challenge himself to write a certain number of words and he would make a mark on the calendar (I think) linking each day to the one before. He effectively guilted himself into writing.

[I believe you can buy ‘don’t break the chain’ calendars, too.]

I can do that, I thought. I’m good at that guilt stuff.

So I set up a spread sheet. I am not so good at that, but I can learn. I worked out how to generate a bar graph. And every day I would count how many words I had written and plug it into my spread sheet. And voila.

In the last five weeks I have written 43,823 words. Good job me.

BUT and this is a big but. I haven’t finished anything. Those words are spread over a number of projects from my earlier list.

Heavy sigh.

Endings. They’ll get you every time.