galadhir

It's very odd how it always seems to go this way: You write what you think is one of your best fics ever, and it gets absolute silence from readers. You write a throwaway thing that you don't think is much good, and it gets more comments than you could have imagined.

I'm currently doing the first thing of those. I think 'Visitation' is really good. And more than that, I'm actually enjoying writing it to the extent that I am excited about it and rotating it in my head like I used to do with stories back when I was a proper writer. But I post it and... crickets.

Meanwhile I've just come off what I thought was a rather pointless piece of kid-fic, and that was getting twenty comments per chapter.

And it wouldn't matter so much if I had any idea what made one more popular than the other. Is it just that this one is in Xichen's pov instead of Jin Guangyao's? Is it that JGY is dead in this one, and it might take him a few years to come back? IDK. I cannot have become a worse writer in the space of the two weeks between one fic and the next, so it must be the subject matter and not me, but it is a bit baffling and discouraging.

Never mind. Visitation is for me, so I'm going to continue to write it for me. Whether I continue to post it or not is another matter.

I can't remember who I was talking to about how nice it would be to have a community in which to share original fiction. Because the journey to writing a novel is a long, lonely one and sometimes it's nice to have a bit of company and support along the way.

I was going to make a new community for the purpose, but first I thought I should check to see if there was already anything of the sort. And it turns out that there is!

That community is originalfiction

It was last updated 26 weeks ago, and for at least a year or so has only had one visibly active member, duskpeterson but there are a lot of people signed up with it who might be persuaded out of seclusion if there was activity. So perhaps rather than reinvent the wheel, the thing to do is to sign up to that one?