As the Cardinal Flies

One bit of housekeeping and one unmitigated bit of teasing:

The housekeeping:

I've edited the post regarding the gift story I received in the Unsent Letters exchange, mostly because the story link was borked but also to add proper author credit now that reveals are up.

The teasing:

Herewith a snippet of one of my current WIPs:

I should advise you,” the scientist said in a mild, apologetic voice, “that this is a secure area, and anyone attempting to enter secure areas here at Q-36 is subject to potential shrinking, rabbitizing, multiplication, spectrographic diffusion, gravitational flux…”

“…and explosive space modulation?” That was Zachary. I blinked. Dr. Honeydew stopped in mid-sentence and took off his glasses – which made me blink again, because although the face behind the glasses had appeared not to include eyes, the scientist’s face now sported a pair of small white marbles, evidently sewn onto the fabric of his head, through whose blue-gray markings he was clearly studying my companion.

“Before I answer that,” said Dr. Honeydew in an apologetic tone, “I’m afraid I need to ask who you are, why you’re here, and what sort of security clearances you have. The owners are very particular about those sorts of questions.”

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.

This one's a more introspective meme than I've seen in awhile, picked up from aris_tgd.  I'm going to inject a little more structure in hopes of making it look a little less intimidating (from both sides of the desk).  So:

Below (and I'm putting these under a cut, because it's a long list) is a series of questions about aspects of one's writing process and one's body of work (both existing and prospective).  Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to do any or all of the following:

1. Comment on this post, choosing up to five of the lettered questions for me to answer.
2. Comment on this post, either offering to answer up to five questions of my choice from the list or choosing your own list of up to five questions to answer (in either case, you should post the answers in your own journal and provide a link)
3. Post the full meme to your own journal, thereby encouraging your own friends-list to play (and to keep on passing the meme around)

Note that many of the questions are specifically fanfic-oriented, though many might also be answerable with non-fanfic examples. Anyone choosing to participate should feel free to answer in whatever context they feel is most appropriate for their own process and body of work.  Also: if you are asked to respond to a question you feel uncomfortable answering, you are not obligated to respond to that question.

Now, the questions:
( Now, the questions: )

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.)