The Non-Canon awards 2016

What a fabulous surprise. I was nominated for the non-canon awards and then I confess, I just forgot about it. Usually I try to write a one shot and tell everyone to go and vote. So I didn’t have very high hopes but I got third in the Royal Author category - that’s the one they put you in when you are too big to go anywhere else. *grins*

So thank you to everyone who nominated me, and voted for me. I'll be home for Christmas was nominated for the Royal fic award, too, but missed out to other deserving favourites.

Thanks again.

Links: https://thenoncanonawards.wordpress.com/round-five/

More fun with covermaker

I am still loading stuff onto #Wattpad. This week I did ‘Cleanse my Soul’; one of my darker one shots. Well, technically I suppose it's angsty not dark. It starts with the death of Jared and a desperate Sam knocks on Bella Swan’s door. It was a photo prompt and the guy just looked like Sam to me and then I had to imagine why he needed a bath with all that bubble stuff.

My new cover looks like this and the story is here:

It has less than five reads so far, but I also popped the cover onto my tumblr page, with a link to Ao3 and got some kudos there, too. It all counts.

I did write some notes on extending this one shot, too. Now where did I put those...

Josh is doing very well on Wattpad with 1,600 views and 118 stars (the voting system there for stories), and on FFn it is keeping pace with Closer to God. Who would have thought it?

Quiet achiever

I said back in the first week of October that my story ‘I'll be home for Christmas’ has ever so quietly crept up the statistics table.

Its still doing that, but what I hadn't noticed was how well it is doing on Wattpad. It just passed 1,000 reads. For contrast, on Ao3 it is just over 400 hits and on FictionPad it has 105 hits with 23 followers. With 74 chapters, it doesn't take too many reads to push up the stats, if someone finishes the story. So I find it rather intriguing that the math just doesn't add up. Unless people are following it with the intention of maybe reading it one day? With those numbers one or two people have actually read it all the way through. *shrugs* I don’t know.

I kind of skim read it myself this week. A reader was reviewing every chapter (bless them) and I had to read it to remind myself what happened so that I could reply. They said they were a Cullen fan and hadn't read much wolf fic before. For some reason this story gets a few comments like that. They expressed surprise that I only  had 3,700 reviews… no, really, I told them, that’s huge for a wolf fic.

I just did a quick search on FFN - it has fixed up the search tags a bit more - and found that for a Paul/Bella pairing the story with the most reviews has 3292 and is of course, Apologies… written by ME! bwahaha

When I change that to Edward/Bella the story with the largest number of reviews has just under 25,000.

Sigh. Wolf writers always were swimming against the tide.

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Read the story here at fanfiction, here at fictionPad, here on A03 or here on Wattpad.

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.

Eclipsing sun blog award results

Eclipsing sun blog award results were posted Friday 23rd May 2014 and I got a couple of prizes.

Thanks so much to the site for running the awards; things like that take a lot of work and organisation. And thanks to everyone who voted. It doesn't matter who you voted for, as long as you got involved.

Second place in Twisted Lemonade: The MC fic that leaves you panting for more... With my story Apologies, of course.

And first place in the Make Me Moan: The author that can really juice a lemon category.

For those who don’t know what a ‘lemon’ is, that’s fanfic speak for super sexy writing. Or as Wikipedia describes it:  “Anything with explicit content, especially with erotic scenes without accompanying romantic scenes, may be labeled a "lemon".” 

Thanks again, everyone!

Wattpad versus Ao3 final post

Whoops. I forgot to post the final figures for my month of keeping an eye on my stats for various fanfiction posting sites. Click on the image to enlarge it.

So it goes in this order:

1.     Fanfiction.net 320 hits,

2.     Ao3 82 hits,

3.     Wattpad 28 hits, and

4.     Fictionpad 15

But not many reviews… anywhere… sigh.

Keeping an eye on stats does show one thing, Ao3 is very different to fanfic. There seem to be a lot less Paul/Bella stories there and an unexpected one of mine has leapt to the top of the hit table. Techno Bella - where Quil slips Bella a mickey and she is all over Paul. 

And Wattpad has found one of my creepy short stories, Home.

I think it works that if you comment on a story, your comment is sent to all your followers. More like twitter than fanfic, if that makes sense.

Plus I wrote a small Teenwolf fic called Even more complicated that is smacking everything else in the hits race at Ao3.

Given what that show did to her this week; maybe everyone just wanted to read a happy Allison fic?

Non-canon awards

I have been nominated in the non-canon awards.

Thank you to whoever nominated me. I am not eligible in any other categories because I have more than three stories with 1,000+ reviews. Sniffs.

Some of the pack categories are still open to change, but they are now:

·       Bella/Jake,

·       Bella/Sam,

·       Paul/Bella,

·       Leah/wolf, and

·       a whole set for Seth! Yay

This is much better than previous years, so now you can all nominate those cool, sexy Paul/Bella stories.

Of course, if you have a story that won’t fit in any of those, pop it in the other non-canon pair category. So Quil and Embry can go in there!

Don’t forget they must have been updated in the last three months and the story must have less 500 reviews. 

This is a competition for the underdogs!

Go on… off you go. Well not my stories obviously…

Wattpad versus Ao3

Joanna Penn from the creativepenn declares that Wattpad is a good and useful tool for authors and a great place to find readers. I saw one of her YouTube vids about using the site and decided to sign up.

I have seen mentions of it on the news. Most famously for a sixteen year old girl who wrote a One Direction fanfic being offered a three book deal by a major publishing house because of her statistics. Yes, really.

I have been a member of An archive of our own (ao3) for a little while but have only been reading, when I got the time, and leaving reviews for a few of my favourite authors who are not at fanfiction any more. My post page was empty.

So, as an experiment, I posted ‘Wake up and smell the coffee’ on both sites at the same time. It is my most popular one-shot on fanfiction and has the ridiculous number of 122 reviews and 12,830 hits. They both allow uploads of banners and it has a nice banner that don’tcallmeleelee made for it a little while ago.

Let’s see what Wattpad and Ao3 do with it!

Here are the links for my page on each site: Wattpad 

and A03.

My username at wattpad is mtramg; you can load original works on the site and that is the point of the exercise, so I hope no-one accuses me of plagiarising my own works of fanfiction. Bwahaha.

Most annoyingly, fanfiction is blocking pings from external sites, so you used to be able to copy existing works over with one click… but no more! Dammit. It will take me 78 days to load them all if I do a story per day. AND chapter stories have to be loaded chapter by chapter. Sigh…

Almost done running

One of the pairings I haven’t ever done is Bella and Seth. Ooh can I cross that off my challenge list? I will have to go check. Yes, I can! There ya go wolfgirlandproud.

As mentioned in yesterday’s post, I wrote two stories for the ‘Paws and Art 3.0’ and I finally got around to posting the second one yesterday.

It’s here at fanfiction and here at fictionpad.

Because the original banner had been adopted, don’tcallmeleelee made a new one for me, too. It had to be a seductive and flirty looking Bella and Seth. I think she got that down.

I had to mess with the ages a little to make him over sixteen, and therefore legal for sex in Washington State, and I made Bella a college dropout. Initially I had her breaking up with Jasper when he has an affair with her best friend, Alice, but Feebes convinced me to change that. I believe her words were that I would have to extend it one day and the vampire Cullens might need to visit Forks. She knows me so well, lol.

It has almost twenty five reviews, oddly most ask about the rest of the story. *faceplant into keyboard*

Cursed, I tell you… cursed.

Kiss me out of desire

*

banner made by don'tcallmeleelee

What is it about me and rare pairings?

The ‘Paws and art 3.0’ contest had a huge number of banner entries. Eighty of them!

I subscribe to their page on an rss feed, and I kept a copy of the page so that I could access it offline and chose a Seth/Bella banner. I wrote my story and it wasn’t until after I had entered it that I realised that that banner had been adopted and removed from the competition entries. Cue panic attack. Silly me for not checking first! I wanted to support the contest; previously I have won it in 2011 and come third in 2012, so I chose a different banner. There wasn’t another Seth banner option and the point of the contest is to write to the existing banners.

I literally wrote a one shot in an hour or so and sent it in. I knew it wasn’t my best work, but I didn’t have time to do anything else as I was in the middle of nanowrimo and there were very few entries already posted. I was worried about the contest.

So I chose the banner above and wrote ‘Kiss me out of desire’. The title is a line from the Jeff Buckley song ‘Last goodbye’. The rest of the line is ‘kiss me out of desire babe, and not consolation.’ I love that line.

It is posted here at fanfiction and here at fictionpad.

Summary: Leah's deep and abiding anger attracts the attention of someone who feels emotions. Someone who is tired of control, and strict diets and suppressed libidos.

It has over fifty reviews most of which complain that they need more and I can’t leave it where I did. Bwahaha. My eternal curse!

It certainly has places that it could go but it would be a rare outing for me; I have never written fanfiction with a Cullen main character before, but I like Jasper’s darkness.

Fandom choice awards 2014

Last night the awards were announced. I was nominated in five categories and I won a prize in all five!

1.            equal first all-time favourite author

2.            second all-time favourite Story for ‘Closer to God’

3.            first in best erotica - ‘I’ll be home for Christmas’

4.            first in best non canon story ‘I’ll be home for Christmas’

5.            first in best non-traditional story ‘Swan’s mate for life’.

I am just blown away. Swan's is one of those stories that divided people. Some just didn't like it and that is fine; everyone is not going to like everything I write.

And I have said before how excited I am by the acceptance of Josh; my basically original main character. So many people keep telling me that they forgot it was a fanfic story. All good news to the hopeful writer inside me.

Thank you also to the fandom choice awards site and Tricky Raven for running the awards. Great job! There were clearly a few close runs this year. Thank you also, to everyone who nominated me and voted for me.

twifanfiction recs for the month of December

‘I’ll be home for Christmas’ has been nominated in the twifanfiction recs for the month of December. There are seriously 46 stories and 45 of them are Bella/vampire. Bwahaha. Oh, my god… I love it! They have listed him as an original character - maybe they don’t know he’s a wolf and is Sam’s dad? I am squeeing.

http://twifanfictionrecs.com/top-10-poll-whos-who/

Home for Christmas is finished

I wrote a blog post back in June 2013 about how I was going to finish working on this story. And that I would try hard NOT to write 200k words. [*banner by goldengirl]

Yeah, right…

Oopsies.

It ended up 187,764 words which isn’t 200k – just.

And it has (at the time of writing) 3,425 reviews which is HUGE for such a rare pairing. I just cannot believe it. It has overtaken Apologies and is now my second biggest story in reviews but not for views. It is way behind on views.

To explain: fanfic counts each page visit as a ‘view’ and it counts each person as a ‘visitor’ within a 24 hour period. So if they click again the next day that would be two visits from them in the month. So, on a normal day, I get 6-7k hits and about a thousand visitors. That means each person reads 7 or 8 pages. Which is good. It means that they stay or that they read a whole story while another visitor is reading the latest chapter only.

So if each person reviewed every page that they read, my ratio would be 100%. It isn’t. It’s closer to less than 1%. For Apologies for instance, it is 0.2%, but for Josh it is almost 2%. Big difference.

Josh seemed to get readers who loved it enough to review; more so than other stories. The ratio of views to reviews is much higher. Not sure why that is. Maybe it attracted the more loyal readers of mine? The ones who were willing to experiment with such a rare pairing.

Previously when I have finished a story there is a massive spike in hits as people who waited to read the completed story, read it and others may go back and reread their favourite parts. That didn’t happen with Josh either. Well a little bit, but after one story I hit 28k hits in one day. That might have been Apologies, I forget.

And the reviews are very different. They keep telling me that it is the best fanfic they have ever read. I often get ‘great story’ comments I don’t get ‘best story’.

I am not sure why that is, maybe I made them cry? I killed characters that they cared about, and that leaves an emotional shadow. A resonance that sticks with them.

MTR’s Challenge list

When I posted a lot at JBNP (Jacob Black N Pack - a wolf friendly Twilight fansite sadly now closed) someone started to challenge me. ‘Hey MTR write this pairing,’ or ‘write for this song,’ they’d say. Now my mind is a very strange place. For some reason I view a limited pairing in a competition as a limitation, but tell me it is a challenge and I see it as… well… a challenge. Go figure.

Over the years, I did more than a few requests and I still get them. I had forgotten about it until the other day when someone asked me about one and I realised I had lost my copy of the file. I found it eventually. So I have cleaned it up a lot and will post it here, so that I can keep track of what I have and haven’t done.

Completed:

•       Jasper-replaces-edward: I would really like someone to write a fic where Charlie does actually shoot someone ‘coz he threatens it a lot … Best friends share everything but I can’t say where or who gets shot.

•       EnjoyYourJacob: My challenge? Jake stealing Bella away from Paul. Now, that!!! would be something I'd love to read. … The Wild One

•        LittleFurryCannibals:  posted a techno remix of the song ‘Closer’ by the Nine Inch Nails, with this: See if you can write a sex one-shot depicting Bella and any wolf. LOL, listen closely to the tempo change and include that in the sex. The only stipulation is, the sex scene can't be linked to the characters engaging or meeting at a club…. Techno Bella

•        Melinda(dorme99): wanted a song fic to go with ‘Shoots and Ladders’ by Korn…. bonus - entered it in the Christmas one-shot and it won 2nd prize 'All I want for Christmas is your two front teeth' 

•        LFC has requested Quil catching Bella dancing to the song YMCA... 'No man does it all by himself.'

•        Melinda(dorme99): the song... Rumour has it by Adele 'Rumour has it' (Actually killed two birds with this one and it was my entry for the Paws & Art contest 2011 and won! Yay)

•        Rtnnc10 challenge: Coldplay 'warning sign' …'Warning signs'

•        In the chat box one day we were discussing SM vamp theory. If everything they are is enhanced after they are turned, then Bella ought to be clutzier. I challenge myself to write that one. … 'BreakingThings'

•        My beta Bansidhe challenged me to write a crossover fic with Twilight and Shakespeare... ‘I'd like to see the wolf version of a Midsummer Night's Dream now there's a challenge for you!’ … ‘A Forksummernight's dream’

•        Yemonja wanted a Leah/Nahuel pairing in the category of Angst/Hurt/Comfort, pretty please with lemons and sugar on top?  … ‘Freaks of Nature’

•        Suz 26 wants: Maybe you should try writing an evil Seth story? Has anyone written an evil Seth yet? Maybe some screwball take on the campy, classic, The Bad Seed, where everyone thinks Leah's the bitch sib but it's really sweet little Seth masterminding everything and Seth is the evil one? ... 'The bad seed'

•        tamfan wanted Billy Black to have wheelchair sex or better still a glimpse of pre wheelchair Billy... ‘Second chances’ - I healed him too, and he walked again in ‘I’ll be home for Christmas’

•        soily (notashamedtobe): ‘If you're up for challenges and we know you can more than handle slash, do a Bella/Leah fic. Let them heal one another's broken hearts.’… ‘Swan’s mate for life’ one shot then extended

•        stealthliberal: a Paul/Leah/Bella fetish. Something about those three makes me wanna beg you for a oneshot or a oneshot that runs rampant with you. … Swan's mate for life - extended story - rampant? Jeez *rolls eyes at self* it hit just under 220k words.

•        Yemonja: a Leah/Paul … Anger Management

•        Shreveport1: ‘I was listening to a favourite song of mine earlier and was wondering if you could write a fic to go with it? its Leader of the pack by the Shangri La's - … The leader of the pack

•        Jake'sgirl: wants bad boy Jake - inspired by Lana del Ray's Blue Jeans music clip … blue jeans & a white shirt and then she wrote the smut I left out, for the Autism Speaks charity one shot compilation *fans self*

•        Yaya: I was wondering if maybe you could write one based on the song Payphone by Maroon 5. The song has been playing on the radio like crazy and it’s been stuck in my head. I would love to see a story for it :)… Payphone

•        brankel1  Can you do a Leah & Billy one? … ‘I’ll be home for Christmas’

•        wolfgirlandproud wants a Seth/Bella story ... 'Almost Done Running'

•        Jakejunkie wants a multi-chap fic with some twisty ending where Jake and Bella end up together… not very twisty but it WAS different ‘Offerings’

Remaining challenges:

•        Jbnp chat ladies wanted some Charlie Swan loving

•        Golden Girl and LaPushStarlight challenge: I wanted this waaaaay back with Apologies and didn't get it - so I wanna see a paul/bella BDSM tied-up sorta thingy. like maybe she initiates, but he turns the tables?

•        Taoist elf - I kinda want to see a fic where Paul either imprints (or even better) falls in love with a prostitute (who is of course a good hearted girl who's been through tons of stuff).  Wanna give that a shot?

•        rororogers   I would really love to see you do a steamy Bella/Embry. A multi-chapter one please, I loved the Casper friendly ghost you did with them, but I can't get enough of this pair.

•        Tamfan also wants Bella catching Jake jerking off. In his little single bed.

•        WolfGirl_JB   I would love to read a Sam/Leah, preferably post imprint Emily -  to me, Sam always loves and has the total hots for Leah regardless. I would like to see where you would take that particular thought:-)

•        Yemonja asks (extremely politely) for: an Emmett/Leah in their supernatural forms in colour of Angst!

•        bmitw wants a fic where the Sam/Emily imprint does not result in them becoming lovers - either because Emily chooses not to go down that path, or Sam resists it and stays with Leah. I suppose that would make it an anti-Hurt. Hard to know which would be better to read - there would be angst for someone either way. And with a wolfy partner maybe he could remain Alpha... :)

•        CCBTH from fanfic requests - Still wishing you would write me a hot bella/jake story...you could soooo do it... they need one... come on... pweeese? I hate jake/leah... Jake/bella/paul would be hot if you need to dilute the jake.. lol.

•        Fitmom: I would love a story where Bella/Paul and Jake are in a relationship together. It would be PERFECT if Jake and Paul get it on too with Bella in the middle or at least respect and like each other in some way. I would like it if Bella and Jake are together romantically and then Paul imprints on her, but she still loves Jake and he won't imprint (I don't believe Alpha's should imprint), somehow they could be together like the three of them.

•        sisteria wants: I want a Dom Bella and a Sub Paul...I know that Paul is always so Dominant but maybe he might like to give up control since he has to be all Alpha Male in everyday life.  Bella being so meek in her everyday life might like control in the bedroom.

•        blahblahblahinfinity I saw a comment where u mentioned an AU of your What was he thinking fic, but I would love to see u write an AU of Hurt where Paul gets Bella for a long long time and Rachel goes the same route as Edtard and never comes back? Seriously. You made me hate Rachel in that story so much that I'm still scarred.

•        Samibear9 from fanfic wants: so I want to ask you to plz PLZ write a one shot of chapter 21 when Bella wakes up to Quil making love to Embry after he hits him from Best Friends.

•        Silkylove13 from fanfic wants: I think that you should do a bella/brady/collin. Not enough stories with bella and either or both of the twins. I did tell her that they are not twins any more - thank you the new twi guide. Sigh

•        connect2tjb from fanfic wants: I adore your writing. Have you ever considered doing a Tara (True Blood TV version) and Alcide or Sam story? I'm a big fan of your Leah and Alcide story. I haven't found a Tara story I liked.

•        ilikedirtywordz on twitter wants: I've read all your fics but have yet to read a Jared/Bella....would you take up a challenge?

•        Codiroo from fanfic wants more Leah and Alcide, maybe an extension of 'Bought and paid for'? If you were ever to write them together again it would be the best thing ever!!!!!

•        RealityDidMeIn  I loved your Quil/Embry/Bella, and then I kinda had a funny/sexy idea. Could you write a story where one of the wolves (Paul?) imprints on one of the other wolves, then has to convince his male imprint into various *activities* while fighting himself all the while? It would be both hilarious and hawt!

•        Littlefurrycannibals wants me to write Bella the reluctant porn star...

•        Fatpplarehardertokidnap wants more twilight/sookie stackhouse x-overs. Specifically, Bella with either Godric or Eric, and more Leah with Alcide… extension of ‘Bought and Paid for’

•        Chamsp: looking for Jake/Emily OR Paul/Emily fic.

•        Chamsp: wants Jake marrying both Leah and Bella, and all three living together. Maybe be some humour.

•        butterflybitch - I so want a Sam/Bella/Paul imprint were the two of them fight over her a lot eventually learn how to share her of course saving her from an insane Edward and a physco Jacob hehe and she has to be fiery sarcastic and hot! that would be awesome

•        Chamsp:-Forced marriage between one of the pack and an OC -Preferably Paul or Jake -Male-very alpha like, dominating, intimidating, anger issues etc. Doesn't like the female lead -Female-innocent, quite, shy, fun loving and not Bella like ;) (might as well have a back bone). She likes him and tries to win him over -I would love it if there is a age difference btw them. Like 6 to 8 years (older male)
•        Chelsea Jay at fanfic wants a Paul/Bella/Jared story, or even just Bella/Jared or even Paul/Jared idc.. I'd just love to see you bring Jared to life since his presence is really lacking. She’s right; I haven’t ever written Jared.

Fandom choice awards 2014

Oh my! Thank you so much to all the people who nominated me and then voted for me in the fandom choice awards. I am in the final round in four categories.

1.            all time favourite author

2.            all time favourite story - for Closer to God 

3.            best non traditional - Swan’s mate for life 

4.            best erotica - I’ll be home for Christmas 

The last two surprise me. I would not have described ‘I’ll be home for Christmas’ as erotica but I guess it doesn’t fit in anywhere else and I didn’t think Swans was a very popular story. Huh. What would I know? Lol. It absolutely hits the non trad button as a poly story of Leah, Bella and Paul and the trials they went through to actually get to a functioning relationship that worked for all three of them.

One of my betas feebes86 is nominated five times! I am so proud of her.

There are a lot of familiar names there, so please take the time to vote for your favourites! Voting closes January 3rd.

http://thefandomchoiceawards.blogspot.com.au/p/nominees.html?zx=6a5c5927bb113be8

Oopsies. I need to amend that. It was five nominations, I missed Home for Christmas in the Best Non Canon Romance. Now that’s more like where it belongs.

Ps: if anyone is having trouble voting - for me, the blog post sidebar overlaid the actual voting button and you had to scroll to the right to see it at all and then it would NOT let me select it, they suggest using a different browser, like Internet explorer.

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 

Farewell JBNP

I was answering reviews as I do on JBNP tonight when I went to the home page to check new members, as I also do, and to say ‘Hi’ to anyone who mentioned my name. I’ve done that for a while now. If I invite them to the party, I feel I should look after them when they arrive. The site is quite complex and someone to hold your hand when you are new is often appreciated.

I clicked on the home page just as it changed to display a message “the time has come to close this chapter in our twi-lives.” It went on to say that the site is closing down.

WHAT… noooooo *wails* *gnashes teeth* *pulls hair *pours large glass of red* *mourns*

I understand. Running a website is not easy and JBNP has had its share of issues over the years like all sites where a large number of people of all different beliefs have to get together and play nice. It costs money to run and it also costs time. I would have thought the major issue is finding people to donate hours of their valuable time to be admins and to run it all. To make these things run smoothly is an incredible struggle and requires a huge effort in virtual programming, HTML, graphics and technical stuff. I tear my hair out just trying to get this blog to behave.

Also, the twilight movies have finished and there have been many discussions about whether the interest would continue in the stories and the fandom when that milestone was passed. Personally, I don’t think twilight fanfiction will die. Quote me on that if you want in a few years when it is going down the gurgler. I have noticed a few reviews for my stories lately where people have wandered over from the marble side of the fandom. Maybe people just change and grow up? Who knows, but we shall see.

Werewolves are still exciting; they are still starring in books, movies and TV shows. They are still news. My tumblr tonight is full of True Blood, Hemlock Grove and Teen Wolf wolves.

The site has been a credit to the fandom. It has encouraged and sponsored writers and I am proud to have been associated with it. Their awards are the ones I value the most. Especially the Wolfish Grin Award for SLASH/BDSM - Kinkiest fuckery of all wolf types 2012 - I mean, really? Who can top that? I have tried to encourage other writers and have offered ideas and help to people when they asked me. I don’t believe in being a lurker; I do try to be a valuable member of a site.

I will probably continue to write supernatural stories. I love the extras that come with writing for shape shifters and dealing with the supernatural. Maybe they won‘t be twilight wolves, maybe I’ll finally write that were-koala story that furrylittlecannibals keeps trying to get me to write?

I want to thank the site for all the support it has given me over the years. I will really miss the feedback and ideas that reviewers have given me. Some of them have changed stories I have written or given me ideas for others.

Goodbye and good luck JBNP people.

Ps: I just posted chapter 18 of “I’ll be home for Christmas”; a story idea that originally came from a session in the JBNP chatbox, where we were laughing about Bella’s thing for older guys. I will work out what I do with it now, and let people know once I do.

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.