The Phantom Librarian

Hmmm. I haven't logged in for awhile, so I went to see if there was any reason why Coming Home was getting reviewed (just call me Nancy Drew; I loves me a good mystery). They've added some bells and whistles to stats. It's got my third highest hit count there (after Family Portrait (FFN version) and Of A Sort, though it's about a fifty percent drop-off from OaS. Seven of the top ten are SW stories (FP, CH, Whatever Comes to Us, The Only Question, The Smart One, Storms, and Autopilot), and the other three are HP (Of A Sort, Detention--number 4, which surprised me, and Lines of Descent). Sorting by number of reviews produces a set which bears absolutely no relationship that I can discern to hit count (except that FP is the top of both lists). My Tolkien stories, which fall in the bottom five on hit count, are in the top ten on review numbers. I'm guessing there was a reset on hit count sometime, as they both have fewer hits than reviews! My OC Star Wars stories--The Flight to Rison's Deep, Uprising, Hidden Home, The Lady of the Lake--are predictably not popular. I really must write about this phenomenon sometime. For people listing a story as a "fav," "The Doll Army" has apparently kicked the butt of of "Invisible," which came in a distant second. All three fandoms I've written make the list, though.

Hmm. I think I'll write about the unpopularity of OCs--not bad Mary Sue stuff, just disinterest--next.

You know, sometimes I fantasize about getting the review counts that the Suefics reported by pottersues and deleterius get. And then I remember that quite a few either boil down to "OMGSQUEEEEE!!!!!" or "WTF?" and I stop grinding my teeth. I then usually note that these OCs generally--and often to the annoyance of the Fearless Sue Hunters--are interacting with popular canon characters, so the stories are really operating on the canon character rules rather than the OC rules.

It's just that it sometimes seems like writing a bad OC gets more attention than writing a good one, and yes, I am an attention whore, for those who have not noticed.
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I got back my results from the National Genographic thing, where they track your genes to find your "deep ancestry" based on mitochondrial mutations.

And, to my utter lack of shock, it turns out that my ancesters were from--are you ready for it?--Europe. Northern Europe, if I'm reading the map right. Haplogroup H. Also known as the genetic group that contains half of Europe. It looks like their final stop for the group was settling around Germany-Poland-Denmark, etc.

Still kind of neat, if not shocking. And my results are in the mix, so they can get their little snapshot of the human race.

I read the HBP spoilers going around. I'm not commenting.

Aaargh.

On realizing that I'm about to have the second ficverse in a year (hell, in two months) put up against the wall and shot, or perhaps run through and cut into tiny pieces--it's inevitable; there's no way I guessed right about everything--I determined to go back to original writing, because it causes less pain. Got out a bunch of stories, all of which I sort of like in theory, and I just don't care about them. If I'm not excited about them, how would I make anyone else excited about them?

Of course, my mood is cellar-bound anyway, for no particularly good reason, so I don't really are about anything at the moment. I think I'll just go eat worms, as we used to say in the dim days of junior high.

Seriously, all the ideas sound fine. I'd read them, give them a shot, if they came across my desk as a reader. I don't know why I'm totally unable to emotionally commit to any of them.

In the "I know better than this" category...

I've put up five of my original stories for your perusal. They are old-ish, one has been published here on LJ and two in a campus magazine called Proteus Continuum, so they have lost their first rights status anyway. The other two? One is a prologue for a novel that just never got written, and the other is short story space opera, which is not, as far as I know, a publishable category.

Don't do this, though. It's a bad, awful, idea that will make sales really hard. I'm not thinking of selling these anymore, or I wouldn't even think about it. But they're lonely, sitting around on my hard drive.

Please let me know if you read and/or like any of them!

Fern Fic