As the Cardinal Flies

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.

News comes tonight that co-star Stana Katic "hasn't been asked back" for the prospective 9th season of Castle, though the current showrunners seem hopeful that said 9th season is still a possibility.  A secondary character, Tamala Jones' Lanie Parish, is also being written out.

I've been mostly pretty forgiving of the writing choices on Castle for the last couple of seasons, and have kept watching despite the current showrunners' insistence on pursuing plotlines that highlight the weakest aspects of the series' writing.  But this just boggles the mind; from day one, Castle has been built around the character partnership of Rick Castle and Kate Beckett, and I really don't see how the series can be realistically continued without both characters on board.  One can only hope that ABC will put the fans out of their misery and choose not to renew the show.

For my own part, though, I actually don't think the mythology kerfuffles are as much of a disaster as the huge disservice the writing has done to both Alexis and Martha in the past couple of seasons.  Martha has entirely lost her engaging con-artist's edge, and Alexis' original maturity and independence has been wholly forgotten in favor of turning her into "Alexis Castle, PI" (a role that exploits none of the academic, artistic, or personal interests she was shown to have while in high school and college).  Indeed, the two characters have pretty much stepped into each other's original narrative functions -- Martha is now the mature, wise mentor, while Alexis is Castle's wish-fulfillment enabler and comic sidekick.  It's pure good fortune that Susan Sullivan and Molly Quinn are sufficiently capable performers to sell their new roles, but it's a particular shame that we've not seen the truly brilliant young woman that Alexis should have become.

*sigh*

Ah, well.  I foresee a hell of a lot of fixit fic emerging over the summer.  And if anyone is still actually writing canon-compliant fic at this point, I rather suspect most of it will go AU after this season's finale.

And so 2008 has arrived, the Yuletide author credits are up, and folk are madly wandering round the LJverse hunting Santas.  (Elmer Fudd voice: "Be vewy vewy quiet, I'm hunting witers!")  While I don't anticipate vast hordes of groupies trampling the furniture hereabouts, both of the stories I wrote have attracted a number of comments and a handful of recs, so it seems appropriate to provide a bit of commentary here.

So:

About The Solitary Sorceress of Oz:
( Read more... )

About The Story of the Djinni and the Professor:
( Read more... )

Thanks very much to everyone who's commented on one or both of these stories; I'll be responding to the individual comments as soon as I can.  (I believe I have emailed copies of all the responses to Djinni; several of the comments for Sorceress, however, appear not to have made it through the email engine.)

Slight but significant revision to the bio in my user info. Following a longish trail of virtual breadcrumbs this past week led me to a cycle of Kim Possible fic written by allaine77, with which I find myself extraordinarily impressed -- and perforce required to somewhat modify my opinions and preconceptions regarding at least certain subsets of slash. (The fic itself is more easily findable at Fanfiction.Net under "allaine", or via her YahooGroups page, than via the LJ.) If only it were all as good as this, though I rather fear otherwise.

[It also occurs to me, after having inhaled that whole story-cycle, that my own previously posted piece is dangerously capable of spinning off a cycle of its own. And whereas I don't think mine is likely to veer into onstage slash, I'm not as confident of that as I'd have claimed to be a week ago....]