10 million total fanfiction hits

Some time ago, I realised that my fanfiction stats were fast approaching a huge milestone.

And then I kind of forgot about it. I set a reminder in google keep with an alarm date on it, but obviously my math skills are deficient, and I was days late. I suspect I also forgot some of the more recent stories I had posted. They weren’t in the table and skewed the total in Excel.

Today, I was tooling about and thought I’d just check because the daily read rates were higher than they have been for a while, and voila… my legacy story stats total is 10,032,027 hits.

Whoa.

The top three stories make up 6 million of the total. They're the usual suspects.

You know the ones. *grins*

it's my sixth anniversary

I wrote this post back in 2013, but it still works. Except that 'What was she doing?' is now on the fave list of 1469 fanfiction readers and pushes it down to fifth place. It has over half a million hits.

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June 9th. On this day back in 2010 I posted the first chapter of a little story called ‘What was she doing?’ My first attempt at writing fanfiction and the start of my obsession with putting the characters Paul and Bella from Twilight, together. It is little, too - just under 30,000 words. At least compared to some things I write now.

banner by lapushstarlight

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/6036022/1/What-was-she-doing

The title is actually the first line of the story. I am utterly hopeless at thinking of fic titles. If you save a document in Microsoft Word it defaults to name it whatever the first line is. That was the rough draft name and it just stayed, then it spawned a whole set of W stories after that. It is on the favourite list of 999 people at fanfic. That puts it at fourth in that list. Not bad for such a little story.

Some days I look at it and think it begs to be rewritten, but if I started doing that with my old stories I would never write anything new. I’d be trapped in an endless cycle of rewrites. And in a way, it is a view of me back then; my style, my mistakes and things that I would write differently if I wrote them now. It’s historic MTR. I still get reviews from people who love it and take the time to tell me that, and I really appreciate that.

So I will pour myself a glass of wine tonight, toast that story and all the people who read it, and remember how it started my continuing obsession with writing.

Thank you all.

2015 in a nutshell

New Year resolutions don’t seem to work for me, but I like to look back to see what I have achieved. A week ago, if I had to pick a word for 2015 it would have been stagnate. But then I sat down to collate everything and had to think about my year. And I feel that stagnate isn’t quite appropriate now.

Books

I read 236 books - 47,216 pages

The shortest 9 pages, the longest 846 - average 210 pages

My average mark was 3.3 out of 5 stars. But I still have a massive number of books in the ‘to read’ pile. I am a book hoarder… I confess.

I marked 23 of those as ‘did not finish’. If I do this, I write a review mostly to remind myself what was wrong, but I don’t rate it if I didn’t finish it. I aimed for 225 so that’s not bad. I’ve read more than that but I am waiting to finish my review on a couple. Sometimes you need to think about it - let it stew for a little while. It also doesn’t count reading articles and fanfiction of course!

Courses

I did 4 Udemy courses on story writing and understanding Scrivener - 88 lectures - 792 minutes of coursework. I did courses with Tim Grahl, and Shawn Coyne. I signed up for a Nick Stephenson course - your first 10k readers - hours and hours of videos and PowerPoint presentations. I’ve watched them all but the course also relies on a Facebook group to exchange comments and ideas. I hate FB and I have real trouble using it. My issue, not Nick’s - the course is totally worth the money.

I hate the way FB sends you a message to tell you X has changed their status - don’t you want to see what it is? Why can’t you just send me the status? It’s passive aggressive stuff … ugh.

I also signed up for a writing group with the Write Practice, in conjunction with nanowrimo, called Becoming Writer. (I know that is bad English - why do they do this?) I didn’t find it that useful. The writing group relied on the community members to read and comment on your work but everyone was doing twenty different genres, they were all at so many different levels of expertise, and also working on nonfiction and fiction. Plus, it’s your nanowrimo rough draft. It ain’t pretty.

I wrote an Aussie ghost story and one member told me off for having a Ouija board in the story when I also had ghosts, murder, kidnappings, sex and forced adoptions… seriously lady?

I have no idea how many people actually completed nanowrimo in the group. They don’t give us info like that. I also found the website clunky and annoying to use. Posts were made in daily work posts, so one story might be spread across 31 individual posts. It was a mess. I put all of my work on the same story in one post. Even though it was out of order (I don’t write in chronological order) but at least it was all together.

There were video conferences as part of the course as well but the time difference meant I had to be up super early to listen and the presenter had a particularly soporific voice. I’d just fade out halfway through; sitting up in bed with my Chromebook on my lap. I tried getting up and standing at my standing desk but that didn’t really help. I found the group unhelpful but it may be one of those things where I just need to spend a lot more time in there to get anything out of it.

Podcasts

I listen to at least six regularly:

·       The creative penn 

·       Rocking self-publishing 

·       Sterling and stone 

·       Mur Lafferty - I should be writing  

·       Mur and Matt Wallace do Ditch diggers, too

·       The sell more books show with Jim Kukral and Bryan Cohen 

·       Lindsay Buroker Scifi fantasy podcast 

Each is an hour or so and that adds up pretty quickly if they do more than one show a week. I still have to work out how to download them to my phone so that I can listen and walk. I usually listen while at my standing desk so it counts as a kind of a break.

The biggest problem is each interviewed author usually has a sign up or a free book on offer and I end up with a few MORE books in my ‘to read’ list.

Blog

39 blog posts, 57,849 hits

Most of my readers come from the US, and Russia. I get a lot of visitors from Seely James website - no idea why. I should post at least once a week and I will aim for that this year.

Words written

352,957

I confessed in an earlier blogpost that I stopped updating my word spreadsheet for a while, so I guess I wrote more than that. And yes, I’m kicking myself now… I was offered a joint project early in the year and did a huge amount of work on it before I got cold feet. I don’t like not having a legal contract when the final ambit was about 800k words and I didn’t know who owned them or how I would be paid. I don’t regret backing away. I had written a fifth or so, and done a lot of preparation for another big chunk of it. The work is mine, but every time I look at it, I just feel frustrated and angry, rather than excited and eager to work on it. I can rewrite it, and make it into something slightly different but it may take some more distance before I am able to do that.

I finished nanowrimo in November- only 14% of people manage that, so yay me! I also did camp nanowrimo in April with a total of 80k words and in July with 50k.

Fanfiction

I posted a one shot and that was it. My page hits are still big on ff.net and slow everywhere else. I get a lot of messages from people telling me that they constantly reread my works. That’s a massive compliment.

My stats for the year are: 1,452,258 hits and 202,276 readers.

My total hits are 8,904,681… whoa… so, some time this year I should pass 8 figures?

Social media

Pinterest I have 54 followers, twitter 937, tumblr 281 followers. I don’t know what it is about twitter but I can’t go over 940 followers. Every time I do, a dozen people unfollow me. It’s weird.

My feedly gets super scary if I don’t check it every couple of days. It collates all the blogposts and articles from all the websites that I follow. More reading…

Personal stuff

I bought a garmin vivofit about a year ago- one of those bracelets - and it’s been super useful. I am determined not to let it down. So every day it makes me walk a few more steps. I’m up to 10k steps a day - or about 6-7km. I have linked it to a phone app myfitnesspal where I record what I eat. I am fairly honest and I find I won’t eat that cream biscuit if I have to enter it into the calories app. I make choices: I can have a glass of wine or dessert, not both.

I had a slow weight gain over a few years and have now lost almost ten kilos. I feel better and I have less back pain. Makes it easier to sit and write if my back is not complaining.

So, looking at all that, I guess my word ought to be educate or amalgamate?

What was your word for 2015?

2 million hits

Last night as I was sleeping in my warm bed, Best Friends Share Everything crashed through another milestone. You can read it here at fanfiction.

And I'm just… speechless. I can’t believe how far an incredibly rare pairing has gone and how much people love that story. They tell me almost every day.

My total hits are 8,015,828

And now I need to go have a lie down or maybe a skip around the block. So proud of my odd threesome.

*Banner made by GoldenGirl 

2014 in a nutshell

Happy New Year everyone!

Sometimes I lose track of stuff; quite a lot, actually… I am a tad scatterbrained. So now is a good time to look back and reflect on the past year.

Fanfiction.

I posted four stories; three were one shots. Offerings, Kiss me out of Desire, Almost done running and ‘Til your singing eyes.

I averaged 3-4k hits a day total on fanfiction.net alone. My total hits are up to 7,451,326. I won 8 awards.

I did get many, many lovely reviews from readers. Quite a few who said something like it was their favourite story ever on fanfic (for five different stories). It is such a truism that you cannot pick what people will or will not like.

FictionPad and Ao3 were very quiet for me. Wattpad was intriguing and has some new stats I want to keep an eye on. 20% of my readers are Thai? Really?

Original work

I did manage to find and install a script for Google Drive to do a word count. Now, I just need to remember to write in the ‘sandbox’ folder if I want it to be counted. It has worked beautifully all year, except for two occasions when there was an issue that turned out to be verbosity. Yes, too many words in the documents to be able to send a backup email to my Evernote account of the words I wrote that day. Easy fixed by copying and pasting elsewhere, or moving stories that had been posted out of the sandbox folder. (http://www.jamierubin.net/2013/07/11/my-google-writing-tracker-scripts-now-available-on-github/)

My Excel spreadsheet says I wrote 265,000 words in 2014. I am sure that total is not accurate because I keep forgetting to enter some stuff.

My blog has over 48,000 hits. I posted 127 blog posts; 69 of which were short stories. I think 23 of them have possibilities for extension … sigh. (My curse to extend one shots continues.) The Airship Mechanic was my most popular post for 2014.

My ‘how to edit fanfic’ posts from 2013 still take the lead. Clearly a need for that and I was glad to help out.

I won national novel writing month (nanowrimo) - that novel is up to 80k words and still needs work. Oddly, that month I was so intent on posting other stuff, too. I fear I work better under deadlines from others, not ones set by me.

I need to put some completed works out there. I still worry about pushing my wordy babies out of the nest and I clutch them too tight, and then no-one can read them.

Books

Goodreads says that I read 100 books and wrote 100 reviews for them. And I'm currently reading another six. At least one of those has to be moved to the ‘did not finish’ pile. I aimed for 75, so that’s good. I always see this as a challenge to myself, not a comparison with other readers. (I follow too many book bloggers who read hundreds in a year and it would be silly to compete with them.)

Podcasts and blogs

I listened to (or watched on YouTube) hours of podcasts from writers and publishers.

Joanna Penn’s site  is the best! And Chuck Wendig’s terrible minds blog is awesome, too.

I kept up with posts from 200 blogs and websites using Feedly - an RSS reader. My only advice on this is: don’t let it get out of hand. Seeing that you have 365 unread articles is terrifying. Feedly displays a headline, a photo and a small part of the article. Enough for you to decide if you wish to read all of it, or save it for later. It’s a pretty neat way to get through a large volume of articles.

Movies and TV

I watched a pile of movies and DVDs, not sure how many. I have a tag on tumblr ‘watched 2014’ but I can’t count them all. Foreign stuff: Death of a pilgrim (Swedish), Three Kingdoms: Resurrection of the Dragon (Chinese), a large pile of anime. British shows: Happy valley, the fall, the tunnel, last tango in Halifax. US shows: the blacklist, agents of shield, true detective, Fargo and Brooklyn99. Best documentary - searching for sugarman

Black Sails, and Arrow were my guilty pleasures.

I make my kids watch what I consider ‘classic movies’ - This year, that included the usual suspects, full metal jacket, the big lebowski (when I told kid 1 it had been included in the preserved historic movies - he said ‘ the dude abides’), once upon a time in America, dead again, speed, galaxy quest, se7en,

Aussie free to air TV did not show the second series of sleepy hollow, elementary and a dozen others. All kudos to ABCtv Australia that, not only showed Doctor Who at the same time as the rest of the world, but repeated it at a sensible viewing hour. If they can do it, the others can.

Music

Concerts have got so expensive, but we did see Nine Inch Nails and Queens of the stone age.

Personal

I bought a vivo fit wearable fitness bracelet and the damned thing tells me I can walk 6km a day. I told it I was old and sedentary, but it isn't listening. It tracks my sleep and I have discovered that I get much less sleep than I thought I did. Huh. 

Maybe more sleep will help everything? Can't hurt... 

Hurt passes a milestone

*banner made by goldengirl2707

I get a special sense of wonder from stats. Weird, I know. But with people reviewing less and less, the only sign I have that people are reading my fanfiction is the stats that fanfiction.net provides. A lot of my stats are re-reads and they can’t review a second time.

There is a ‘legacy’ button that gives you a table of all your hits, how many reviews, words, communities etc. for each story posted. At the moment, my legacy table looks like this.

I was refreshing like a newbie to watch Hurt pass the half million mark.

Hurt was my super angsty story (I made myself sob)  of Sam and Bella based on the song by the Nine Inch Nails. The cover by Johnny Cash is in my short list of cover songs better than the original.

Their love is complicated by the fact that Sam is with his imprint, Emily, but she treats him very badly; sure that she will never lose him. And Bella is lost and hunted by vampires and struggling with her own emotions. It always struck me as odd in the books that, way before Bella worked out that Jake was a wolf, her life was pretty heavily impacted by Sam. He found her when she was lost in the forest after chasing Edward and his actions saved her again in the meadow. She dreamed of him. And Bella’s dreams always meant something.

blahblahblahinfinity keeps begging me to write the AU of my own fanfic in which Bella and Paul stay together. She swears she has scars from me breaking them up. Sniffs… I know, honey, I know. I sobbed when I wrote it and I still cry whenever I read that chapter.

Another story ‘I’ll be home forChristmas’ has ever so quietly crept up the statistics table. It now pulls the same number of daily hits as Closer to God. An amazing feat given that it is a crazy premise (I made the older generation phase) and a very unusual pairing. It has also crept up to sixth place in my top ten for legacy hits. I am very proud of Josh and Izzy as well.

And my total hits are over seven million.

Whoa…

Pats self on back.

Six million

Unbelievably, today my total hits at fanfiction.net, clicked past a total of six million.

And what is really amazing is that I passed five million in September 2013, so I have gained another million hits in six months.

Blinks.

Side-eyes excel spreadsheet.

That can’t be right? Can it?

The big ones are the usual suspects, Best Friends, Apologies and Closer. Together they make up 3.6m of that total.

Pats self on back.

Milestones September 2013

This has been a big month.

This blog passed 30,000 hits.

Smashwords has nearly 5k downloads.

My continuation of a one shot - I’ll be Home for Christmas earned over 500 reviews for the first eight chapters. It seems to be doing a word of mouth thing; with its hits increasing daily as people must refer it to their friends. That is wonderful to see. It is not a popular pairing. There are THREE Bella/Josh stories on fanfic. It is HERE

I am clearly writing very different pairings, because my most recent one shot Dreams and Dust was a Rosalie/Sam story and there are only three of those as well! Bwahaha. Read it HERE.

The pic is the image prompt #26 that inspired it, from the Truly anon twific contest of 2012. Still challenging myself to write them all - except guitars and cowboys. I’ve got nothing for guitars and cowboys. Not in the Twilight world, at any rate. I can’t find the original source for the shot and it is everywhere on the Net.

But the big milestone is my total hits at fanfic. It just passed 5 million.

5 Million.

There are no totals on the Legacy Story Statistics page at fanfic, but I cut and pasted it into Excel. (See, I do have wicked computer skills. Laughs at self.) I totalled them up recently when I was trying to sell myself to a publisher. Look at me! I’ve got X hits at fanfic. People like me; really they do. I don’t think it worked, as I haven’t heard back from them. 

Closer to god passed three quarter million hits

*

Back in 2010 when I started writing Twilight fanfic wolf stories were mostly all about Jake (what if she kissed him in the truck? Sheesh) but I was intrigued by Paul. At that stage he didn't have a surname and he seemed (to me) to be a bit more worldly than the other baby wolves. Jared and Sam were imprinted and therefore boring. I have written for Sam since then but I still get nothing from Jared.

I started writing a story where Paul was the main character and he was not a nice guy. He picked up a girl (Bella) in a bar and he marks her when they have crazy outdoor sex. He refuses to give her his name and tells her she can call him God. Thus the title and it's a NIN song, of course. I can’t remember where I got marking from; it’s a common theme in fanfic. So they are not imprinted; they don’t have the perfect imprint relationship but they are joined by the mark and then the worst happens - she is pregnant.

That was the story line for Closer to God. It has just passed 750,000 hits on fanfic and has nearly 2,000 reviews.

I called him Paul Aaron, to differentiate him from my W series Paul. I am constantly astounded by readers who tell me they love this Paul. I think he is an ass! He emotionally blackmails poor Bella. He is just horrible to her and he thinks that sex is intimacy or love. He doesn’t know how to date. He flirts with other women to get her to jump him. He knows she will do it in an attempt to prove to herself, and him, that they belong together. It becomes a game to him. But he almost loses everything when that game gets to a point where he doesn't even notice her walk out of the room. She finally grows a spine and dumps him. He gets a terrible shock. He tries to be a better person for her and their baby.

I guess that is it. The bad boy being good for someone? Redemption for the irredeemable? I don't know, but I know lots of people tell me they love him anyway; that I made them care about him, even though he is still an ass.

And plus, if I read one more daft comment on fanfic, that pregnant women couldn’t have sex… I mean… really? Again, in my wild effort to educate all the young girls out there about safe sex, wet spots and the reality of sex, I wrote 75,000 words of pregnant sex. Bwahaha. Might have overdone it a touch.

*banner made by Enjoyyourjacob 

Wake up and smell the coffee passes 10k hits

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Wake up and smell the coffee passes 10k hits.

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/7949567/1/Wake-up-and-smell-the-coffee

*The banner was created by don'tcallmeLeeLee from Printing Paws.

This story is far and away my most popular one shot and has won the Fandom choice award 2013 for Favorite Short (One-Shot). It was a photo prompt from the truly anonymous twilight contest. I have written a few stories for that set of forty-five shots - eighteen of them so far. No idea why that set of shots appealed to me, but it did.

I started with the photo prompt in the left of the banner. It was clearly a guy’s room, laundry on the floor and hung outside the window but the guy looked less invested in the scene to me, I'm not sure why.

I suppose Paul and Bella are my one true pairing but oddly for me writing this pair, it has NO sex!!! And that’s the story that everyone loves. Clearly I have no clue what my readers want. It’s probably just as well that I just write whatever the plot bunnies hop into my head. Well, that is the old writing rule; to write the story you want to read, and here, I wanted to read a Paul making better choices. So he man’s up and goes to tell Bella that he imprinted on her. It’s very sweet and romantic. I am severely regretting not putting it in as my competition entry… lol.

My other milestones this month:

• This blog passed 20k hits
• Facebook - 100 likes
• Twitter 500+ followers
• Smashwords 4500 downloads.

It’s my third anniversary of a sort.

June 9th. On this day back in 2010 I posted the first chapter of a little story called ‘What was she doing?’ My first attempt at writing fanfiction and the start of my obsession with putting the characters Paul and Bella from Twilight, together. It is little, too - just under 30,000 words. At least compared to some things I write now.

banner by lapushstarlight

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/6036022/1/What-was-she-doing

The title is actually the first line of the story. I am utterly hopeless at thinking of fic titles. If you save a document in Microsoft Word it defaults to name it whatever the first line is. That was the rough draft name and it just stayed, then it spawned a whole set of W stories after that. It is on the favourite list of 999 people at fanfic. That puts it at fourth in that list. Not bad for such a little story.

Some days I look at it and think it begs to be rewritten, but if I started doing that with my old stories I would never write anything new. I’d be trapped in an endless cycle of rewrites. And in a way, it is a view of me back then; my style, my mistakes and things that I would write differently if I wrote them now. It’s historic MTR. I still get reviews from people who love it and take the time to tell me that, and I really appreciate that.

So I will pour myself a glass of wine tonight, toast that story and all the people who read it, and remember how it started my continuing obsession with writing.

Thank you all.

Apologies cracks the million

Well… picture me amazed. My second fic crashed through the million hit mark on fanfiction.net.  Best friends share everything did it a while ago in March 2013 and now, it’s Paul and Bella’s turn. In a way, it’s a more impressive feat because Apologies is half the length of Best Friends, so I guess it has been read twice as much! It is a little older, though. I am very proud of them.

This fic is a favourite with a lot of people. A huge amount of people tell me they reread it. The statistics show that, too; it gets a hiccup on the weekends. I have readers who tell me they read it aloud to their husband, printed it out and posted it to their man on active service in the gulf, and I have had over three thousand reviews on fanfic and many, many more on JBNP. (I can’t say how many - they don’t really count them.)

Apologies has won a couple of awards: it won the E is for erotic JBNP award summer 2011 and the Second All-Time Favourite Wolf Story of 2012. It missed out on being nominated in the non-canon awards as I had a limit of four nominations, but a number of people told me I was robbed; that it was the non-canon story. It has been translated into French by Emilie0611. She is up to chapter 43 - only one to go! Impressively, there are more than a thousand reviews for the French version.

I have a list of people to thank: every single reader (whether they reviewed or not), my betas; feebes86 and ruadhsidhe, JBNP for all their support and Goldengirl who made me some awesome banners. It was the kind of story where a whole lot of people gifted me banners. They got so involved in it.

I started writing on mother’s day 2011. My gift to myself, lol. I had been talking to one of my betas, feebes, about Paul Walker of the Fast and Furious fame. I sent her a shot of him from his Davidoff campaign with water trickling down his bare chest and that Paul became a different Paul in my head - the muse was off.

It was just supposed to be a sexy one shot rather than a full story. I posted the first chapter of complete smut; it ended with Paul saying that he was sent to talk to her and apologise for losing his cool and scaring her when he turned into a wolf. A few of the readers just said, “No - she can’t accept his apology. He has to apologise some more.” So I wrote a second chapter.

I had no idea where the story was going and that is unusual for me, so I asked the reviewers what they wanted. And they told me. So, now I had a to-do list of sex positions and locations. It was ridiculously easy to write. I’m not sure why. Maybe because I had that list? Maybe because Paul is my favourite character and I already pretty much had his character and speech patterns set in my head? I don’t know. But it took me from the 8th May to the 30th June and it was written; all nearly 100,000 words of it.

Now if I could just do that with my original works!!! *rolls eyes at self*

I realised as I was working that I needed something more to finish it, that there had to be something else to the story. It needed a finish. I went back and read through and oddly, I had left little hints to myself that I hadn’t noticed as I wrote. Not on a conscious level. I did read one review that stated that I had cleverly woven this thread through the whole fic. Uh-huh; not deliberately, I can tell you. But in any case, I like the ending. It works on a whole lot of levels. I always try to ‘fix’ Bella Swan. I like her to be more independent and to make her own decisions. In this fic she reinvented herself and even changed her name; called herself Izzy.

Funnily enough, I got a new name from this story as well. I made a joke when I posted a chapter that I had fulfilled a reader’s request. I said “Sabby's request for Paul to lose it and bust a nut... wish granted...whoa... I’m like some kind of fairy... the porn fairy.” There was much discussion on JBNP about what exactly a porn fairy left under your pillow. We decided it was booty dust.

And that’s where my profile pic came from. It’s me - as the porn fairy. Made for JBNP by enjoyyourjacob for an interview I did on the site.