Month of Murphy 2024

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GO SIGN UP TO WORSHIP AT THE ALTAR THAT IS LT. KARRIN GODDAMN MURPHY AND WRITE NEW FICS FOR OUR TRASHPILE YOUR QUEEN HAS COMMANDED YOU, PEASANTS.

you ever just click on a fanfic and read the first word and go “shut up” and exit

#yes#furthermore this is a skill#you need to cultivate this skill to survive fandom (dsudis)

LMAOOOOO

To the authors who are unhappy about their hits-to-kudos ratio on AO3: as a kindness to yourselves, please stop. That hit counter doesn’t mean what you think it means.

First, not all those hits are people. A substantial chunk of those hits, as I understand it, are machines, looking to see what the page is. The hits-to-kudos is whack from the hour a story is posted, because a bunch of those hits are machines.

Second, multiple hits can be the same person on their first read of the story. If I open a story in a browser tab to read later, my browser sometimes/often unloads that tab in the interim, resulting in it reloading that tab and creating a new hit when I finally go to read it. If reading it requires multiple sessions, that’s multiple new hits. If I then leave it open for a while to remind myself to leave a comment, my browser will reload it again, generating another new hit, before it lets me write a comment. Altogether, my first read of a story, plus leaving a comment, can easily turn into five or more hits, depending on how hard I’m finding it to find reading and commenting time.

Third, if your story has been up for a while, the people who adore your story are driving up your hit counter with their re-reads. They go away, they come back, they re-read, and they do it again, and they do it again. It’s probably only a small subset of your total readers, but if one of your stories becomes someone’s go-to comfort read for times when they are stressed out (or, if it’s an explicit story, if it becomes their favorite jack-off material), that one person’s devoted re-reading might easily hit your story dozens of times. But most readers feel hella shy about admitting that they treat your story like a fuzzy blanket (or a vibrator); either way, it’s pretty rare for them to tell you about it. (Which I’m sympathetic to! Fuzzy blankets are a very personal thing, and no one wants to feel stared at by the author while they’re having a vulnerable moment.)

Fourth, stories get read by people outside of fandom, people who don’t think of themselves as your friends/neighbors/community-members, and who just… never think to hit kudos, at all, because their social context is so far removed from ours. I’ve got a couple of stories that were linked on TVTropes once upon a time, and their hit-to-kudos ratios are fucking absurd. If your story got linked outside of fandom somewhere, odds are that most of the people coming in from that link will never think to hit kudos, no matter how much they liked it, because they never quite connect that there’s a real live author, breathlessly hoping to be liked and appreciated, standing just behind the screen, and that maybe readers should be polite and say ‘thank you’ to them when they finish the story and leave.

tl;dr Do not assume every hit is new human reader who didn’t like your story and clicked out. Your hit counts will often be ten times greater than your kudos, just for stupid ordinary internet-traffic reasons, and the older a story becomes (and the more times bots and re-readers hit it), the wider the hits-to-kudos gulf will become. Do yourself a kindness and stop calculating that ratio – and if you can’t stop making yourself crazy about it, go into settings and turn off your hit counter displays. Please be tender to yourselves; being an author is hard enough as it is.

The typical levels of engagement on the internet is <1%, and >6% is considered “very high”, so a 10% kudos rate is actually extremely good. Taking into account the above traffic reasons, actual levels of engagement are going to be over 25% at least.

Me: *silently writing fics*

Angel on my shoulder: Y'know, they don't always have to fuc-

Devil on my shoulder: You underestimate how much of a whore I am.

I feel like my Tumblr community needed to see this

She gotcha there

that ‘pakige?’ post but me, a couple hours after posting a fic, like ‘comints?’

F5 F5 F5

… F5 F5 F5 F5F5F5F5F5

i feel so called out

a self insert fanfic: i brushed my long blonde hair out my face to show off my clear blue eyes and pale complexion

my colored ass:

a self insert fanfic: i slipped on my size 00 jeans and smiled as he wrapped his arms around my tiny waist!

my fat ass:

self insert fanfic: they towered over my small and short frame.

my amazonian ass:

ThESE HIT HARDDDDD

self insert fanfic: only for my dad to say I couldn’t go to the dance.

My fatherless ass:

Self insert fanfic: he gazed into my big round eyes.

My Asian ass:

Self insert fanfic: his thumb grazed over my small perky breast

My big tiddie ass:

This post jumped me in an arby’s parking lot

Self insert fanfic: She looked up at me “You’re so beautiful”

My ugly ass:

Self insert fanfic: “…pink nipple…skin turned red/pink…”

My colored ass:

Just to reiterate that reblog from a while ago about ffnet dying and how one day probably soon we're gonna blink and it'll just be gone:

I'm trying to make backups of the few things I'm not too embarrassed to keep from Way Back When (because I'm also like 4+ computers beyond what I originally wrote that shit on and some of it got lost in data migrations)

And guys

The password recovery is NON FUNCTIONAL.

That site is circling the drain, so if you've got stuff on there you want to keep, go save it now.

This has been a PSA from your local digital archivist/ fandom old.

PSA for my fellow fanfic writers if they have stuff on FFN like I do. I wrote all my stuff in Word docs and then uploaded them, but I’m reblogging for anyone who may have written fics in the Document Manager and then posted the chapters, which means your stuff’s possibly not saved or backed up somewhere. It’s a good idea to check if there’s anything you want to keep if FFN does go down. 

every day i am percieved™️

There is a reason for this though!

The original tweet summarizes it pretty well. Fanfic tends to be popular among certain types of neurodivergent people (aka people most likely to read excessively as a child, and have burnout as an adult) for the same reasons that we tend to hyperfixate–neurochemical signaling (I hope I’m using that phrase correctly). What I mean is, for people who are really dependent on changes in dopamine/serotonin/neurotransmitter levels, who have low levels or wonky neural reward systems (perhaps the most common types of neurodivergence)…people like us rely on dependable external sources of those neurochemicals. In order to function, we spend a lot of our free time trying to level out our brain chemistry using things that can reliably bring us a steady stream of joyful moments (rewards) without costing too much of the mental effort that is already in short supply. 

significantly: the investment of reading has to be balanced with a steady “return on investment”–and this return has to start fairly quickly. because again, we don’t have a lot of attention/energy to invest on tiring things. we have perpetual “low batteries” in that regard.

that doesn’t mean these stories are “simple,” or that they lack complexity or value–only that the reward has to come in short regular intervals, and it has to have a low “upfront cost.” these stories are only “easy” to read in the sense that the effort we put into them is rewarded in a timely manner. which is why fanfic stories are so perfectly formulated for neurodivergent readers–they are often beautifully written, but skip a lot of the upfront costs (of introducing new characters, of world-building, of getting the audience emotionally connected to the story elements).

the nature of fanfiction is that the reader has a pre-existing relationship with this world and these characters. that–combined with the shorter average length of fics–means that fan fics very quickly start rewarding the reader in a way that traditional fiction struggles to. that’s not a bad thing! and maybe it’s something more traditionally published writers should be paying attention to.

Fanfic, as a genre, has been uniquely helpful and accessible to many neurodivergent readers who would otherwise struggle to immerse themselves in stories. I’m glad so many of you have found a way to love and enjoy reading again! The important thing is that you are spending time inside stories you love–the way those stories are published or presented to the world is just one detail. The fact that you find joy in the process of reading (or listening!) to stories–that is what matters.

I feel understood 🥰

a bunch of people have reblogged this with the default “i feel called out” reaction….and i know when we say that we mean it tongue-in-cheek….but this comment sorta blew my mind & shifted my perspective up and to the left a little thank you♥

The Serotonin is stored in the Ao3

anon: i hope you update soon! i can assure you, every fanfic writer ever: 

@gentrychild

so.

i guess fanfiction wasn’t a phase….

anyway tag how old you were when you got into fanfiction, and your first fandom, and how long you’ve been stuck in the trenches with all the rest of us

take your time, they said.

the words will come to you, they said.