#anonymous feedback

Some of us had to go to work in five minutes so lacked the time to write our own version in the morning, and waited until getting back home that night to write more and better.

Hi everyone,

As you're aware I've been away on maternity leave, and now that baby girl is nearly 3 months old, I'm thinking about whether or not to return properly and continue writing fanfic.

There's a few factors in play for me at the moment that is shaping that decision and one of the biggest ones is lack of feedback/interaction. I hate complaining about lack of feedback, but honestly it does kill writers' drives when we post into what feels like a void. It's made the idea of coming back a lot more daunting than it probably should be.

It also makes me question if my readers are actually happy with what I'm providing. So I figured now's a good time to get some feedback from you guys and see what I'm doing right and what could be improved or changed. It'll give me a good understanding of what people want and if I can provide it for you guys.

So, below is the link to a feedback form. It is a little lengthy and broken down into sections about my writing/tumblr/website, but should take you less than 5 minutes to complete and it will really help me figure out what to do next. The form is completely anonymous so feel free to be as honest as you want.

>* FEEDBACK FORM HERE *<

Thank you so much if you choose to provide this feedback and help be a part of possible changes to my writing in the future.

Lots of love,

Ok so number 1, I started it when I was just newly into writing fanfic, so as the posts go on you notice little changes.

2, I’m dyslexic so I struggle with what’s “correct” or not.

3, I have some people on here that helps me by giving me hints on things so it makes it easier as the posts go along.

Do you know what’s become one of the funniest aspects in all of this, anon? I’ve literally never heard of these VPN / “botting” processes of which they falsely accuse me. I had a meltdown last year when I tried to use a torrent program I downloaded; I couldn’t make heads or tails of it, and I managed to give my machine a virus to boot. It’s taken me two of my five years on Tumblr so far just to figure out some of the finer aspects of how to code posts so they look the way I want them to. Want to know how I compose stories for posting on AO3? I do all the HTML manually as I’m writing; it’s not just carry-over from LJ posting interface, but it’s literally the only way I can get my formatting to look the way I want it to without fail. I’m too paranoid to trust rich text editors because they never do what I want them to when I paste in text from Word or wherever. I cling to old practices and routines and scarcely understand how most new non-HTML posting interfaces work. Poor @milarca and @neverwhere, who have both beta-read things for me, find my documents horrifying because they’re riddled with HTML tags. When I say I’m backward and old-school in my methodology, I really mean it, and the number of people who can attest to how badly I panic when tech doesn’t do what I need it to do or expect it to do is significant. 

The entire post was bizarre in the extreme; I agree.  And what else I find hilarious here (aside from this) is…okay, in the grander scheme of humans in fandom to whom the label BNF is sometimes applied?  I’m a fucking nobody.  Outside of Good Omens, Pacific Rim, Hamlet, and maybe a few other offbeat TV and rare-lit fandoms?  Who the fuck cares about what I’m doing?  I left Sherlock fandom post-S2; I was one of the first-wave huge writers in that fandom during LJ-era, but I transitioned to AO3 far too late for even my S1/S2-era stories to get the same kind of exposure as most fic in that fandom written, say, post 2011-2012.  Unless I’m very much mistaken about how I’m perceived in wider fandom at this point in time, I cannot fathom who would give a shit about my relatively niche inclinations.  I’m still the same weirdo that I was in grade-school, in my own estimation: rarely plays or works well with others owing to a number of complex factors, from autism to aesthetics.  Talk about blue hell sites, my friend; those of you who have been with me since LJ know that I drown myself in a particular color-spectrum and rarely come out of it.  Me and blue is as bad as, wow, I don’t know, to borrow a comparison from my current secondary-to-GO fandom, Ed and green.  Do you remember my old fic LJ?  A shell of it’s still there.  Getting me out of blue interfaces has been pretty impossible; if I could turn my AO3 pages blue, I’d do it for my own freaking sanity.  I remember bristling at the black-on-white with red accents to no end when I first switched.  Where was this rant going?  Oh: I’m a fucking eccentric.  Like, yeah, I have friends and readers I love, and new folks who come along are always welcome, but seriously, my attitude is, if you don’t like me or what I do, get the fuck away.  I’m not a cool kid who works the big fandoms; I don’t write Avengers or Supernatural or Harry Potter or anything that most people actually give a shit about.  I’m just…so goddamn puzzled.  I’m not a great target for all of those reasons and more, but most importantly?  I’ll report your sorry ass and not care a whit about whatever ridiculous thing you tried to do to me.  

Write my stuff is all I ever do, my friend, and that is exactly what I’ll keep doing ♥ Thank you for your kind words!