Thank you! I hope so too. I find that pretty consistently the fic I've written that I am most happy with is the stuff that was basically just some hopelessly niche fic for minor character, or a rarepair, or rare fandom that ends up getting less than 50 hits on AO3, and more often fewer than 10, but that I had to get out of my head and down on the page so badly that it broke through the fear of no one caring. Once some time has passed, I really don't care about the stats anymore and I'm just enchanted by this fic I wrote specifically because I desperately wanted to.
Like, this is an amateur hobby I do For Fun! I don't have to write "to market" because a) by definition, there can never be a monetisable market for fic and b) if I do not write fan fiction primarly out of love and enthusiasm then literally what is the point?
Chasing the external validation high never produces lasting satisfaction for me, and at any rate, I am not the kind of person who can put up with writing passionless paint-by-numbers fic for big ships in massive fandoms that I don't care about, so I might as well stop cutting myself off from writing stuff that I really want to because it won't have wide appeal to focus on the stuff I like that I think is the Most Likely To Perform Well. How things are received is or how popular they are is not what I'm doing this for in the first place, so imo I should just stop worrying about stats.
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Date: 2024-01-03 03:27 pm (UTC)Thank you! I hope so too. I find that pretty consistently the fic I've written that I am most happy with is the stuff that was basically just some hopelessly niche fic for minor character, or a rarepair, or rare fandom that ends up getting less than 50 hits on AO3, and more often fewer than 10, but that I had to get out of my head and down on the page so badly that it broke through the fear of no one caring. Once some time has passed, I really don't care about the stats anymore and I'm just enchanted by this fic I wrote specifically because I desperately wanted to.
Like, this is an amateur hobby I do For Fun! I don't have to write "to market" because a) by definition, there can never be a monetisable market for fic and b) if I do not write fan fiction primarly out of love and enthusiasm then literally what is the point?
Chasing the external validation high never produces lasting satisfaction for me, and at any rate, I am not the kind of person who can put up with writing passionless paint-by-numbers fic for big ships in massive fandoms that I don't care about, so I might as well stop cutting myself off from writing stuff that I really want to because it won't have wide appeal to focus on the stuff I like that I think is the Most Likely To Perform Well. How things are received is or how popular they are is not what I'm doing this for in the first place, so imo I should just stop worrying about stats.