Oh, you're in the grips of something and I can't wait

It's incredible! I don't have the interest in it, but I love watching other people at work. It's kind of like magic to me

p.s. I have a teeny tiny friend discord server and shared your post with them; they're very earnestly heart eyes over it, so passing along their compliments as well <3

This is gorgeous! I've always got my chin on my hands kicking my heels with glee watching your crafting projects come to life. The color choices are so stunning together!

it's always readers driving this. Fandom is a gift economy. If your cooking is intentionally low effort, don't be shocked that it won't always find a place on someone's very limited plate at the potluck. /end

Sometimes you'll have to go through a significant amount of skill growth to accomplish some of these things. If you don't want to do that, it's totally fine; life is busy, life is hard, you want to have fun. But it's not other writers getting kudos telling you this to be arrogant or dismissive, /6

Even stronger are doing your research, taking care with your prose, editing, and being thoughtful about your plot and characterization. These take time and effort to learn. People are more likely to recommend you to other people, and without an algorithm on Ao3, word of mouth is very powerful. /5

There ARE ways to improve your chances. Running a spelling/grammar check, cleaning up your formatting, and reducing giant blocks of italics and strange formatting, making sure your tense and perspective stays consistent through a scene are all work, but fairly low effort and high impact. /4

There's absolutely nothing you can do to change someone's personal preferences for writing. There will always be readers who sort only by kudos. There will always be people who skip your fic for using lyric titles. There's no formula for pleasing these outliers. However -- /3

This post is definitely prompted today by someone specific but I've seen this attitude as pretty pervasive when returning to fandom.

I am not being unkind when I suggest putting more effort into your work pays off. I've seen readers say they'll close fic if a chapter is too long -- they're picky /2

fingers crossed for you!

Oh this is beautiful 🥺

It can and often does! I couldn't really figure out how to tackle longer fics for the longest time, because planning + prep made me feel like I'd already solved everything, so I ended up splitting the difference between briefly outlining and just writing and it's been working much better for me

Thank you! What not writing at all for a few years will do to someone, apparently. I'm finally delving into longer fics too, on track to finish a second above 50k early next year!