As the Cardinal Flies

The latest news out of OTW, involving the resignations of three OTW Board members, finds me increasingly thoughtful about the state of the organization and of the sizeable body of material I have on AO3. It's absolutely clear at this point that the OTW is badly in need of reform on both an administrative and a structural level (that is, they have both "people" problems and a tangle of organizational issues in play).

This is therefore the first of two posts addressing these issues, this one focused on my own participation in/on AO3 and Fanlore (I have an account over there under a different hat, and have done a fair bit of editing on that site over time). Post #2 will be longer; I want to take a fairly specific look at just what sort of reform OTW/AO3 is likely to need, which is a subject I think has been under-examined in most of the online activity I've seen to this point.

First, for the record: I am not now and have never been a paid member of the OTW; at present - and despite some of the recommendations I've made previously and expect to make in the next post - I am not inclined to donate money to the organization in its present state.

The short version: While I recognize the severity of the issues facing the OTW and largely agree with those calling for major reform of the organization, I plan to continue posting to AO3 and participating at Fanlore. (At the same time, I expect to investigate alternate venues, such as SquidgeWorld, and to consider creating an old-school personal site specifically for my fanfiction.)

The explanation: There's no denying that the OTW is facing very serious problems involving its treatment of volunteers and the ways in which it's failed to handle those problems effectively. Even so, as a user of AO3 and a participant in Fanlore, it's my view that the results - the enormous resource that AO3 has become, and the smaller but invaluable body of knowledge contained at Fanlore - are valuable in and of themselves, and that they're worth supporting and preserving irrespective of the conduct of some of those involved in their creation and oversight. In posting to these sites, I am in no way endorsing the personal conduct of any individual OTW/AO3 volunteer or Board member, now or going forward.

The primary takeaway is that for the most part, this year's rankings are very, very similar to last year's (because there hasn't been all that much new verbiage since last May). As a result, rather than giving you all the lists all over again, the first thing I'm going to do is point you at last year's lists:

AO3 Stats Meme, 2020 Edition

That said, there has been one notable development:

• By Any Other Name (Enola Holmes Series - Nancy Springer, ~1600 words)

I wrote this Enola Holmes story in summer 2018, for Holmestice, and it's seen a sizeable boost in traffic since the 2020 lists went up. This is clearly, of course, an artifact of the Netflix movie adaptation having been a roaring success.  "By Any Other Name" went from below the top ten to #4 in number of hits, outdrawing everything save my most popular early Castle work. It also jumped from #6 to #1 in both number of kudos and number of bookmarks, and from #6 to #2 in number of subscriptions. (With respect to comment threads, the story didn't make the top ten either last year or this.)

Beyond this, there's not a lot to report. The drabble series collected in "Random Plot Twists" dropped off the bottom of a couple of categories, and a handful of works shifted one slot up or down, this last largely triggered by Enola's rise.  One older story, Player Status: Offline, jumped from the bottom to the middle of the Kudos list - not entirely surprising, as it's a Carmen Sandiego story and the recent Netflix series has evidently led some readers to seek out fic from the '90s cartoon. Nor did any of my 2020 works break into a top ten rank in any category, though that's largely an artifact of the fandoms in question being mostly small to start with.

The one mildly curious non-change is that my other Enola Holmes story - The Women in the Case, which partners Enola with Mary Russell and a female character from Philip José Farmer's The Adventure of the Peerless Peer - didn't get anything like the bump its predecessor did. It did get quite a lot of hits by Holmestice standards, but to date it's gotten only about a third as many hits as the prior story, even though I've put them both under a series umbrella.

Ah, well. This year I have some hope of better productivity - speaking of which, my Unsent Letters deadline is creeping up....

Inherited from astrogirl and thisbluespirit :

Somewhat to my surprise, I don't seem to have ever posted a version of this meme before, despite having pored through the stats themselves from time to time. And my fic-writing range is wide enough that even my tiny readership may be surprised by some of what turns up, so let's see what AO3 has to say about me:

( Lists and commentary within: )

And that's, as a certain Cronkite used to say, the way it is.