Comments | phoebesmum: Yuletide thank-you

phoebesmum

Yuletide thank-you

Dec 27, 2009 10:01

I've been so preoccupied over the past couple of days, in between Christmas, and family (*shudder*), and being ill, and worrying about my job, that I've quite neglected to say 'thank you' to my yuletide writer, let alone give her the rec she deserves. So: thank you! - very much indeed to the marvellous person who wrote The Startling Yuletide Epiphany of ( Read more... )

yuletide, recs, the kindness of strangers

Comments 4

flippet December 27 2009, 17:25:12 UTC

Eighty hits and only one comment? Ouch! Maybe that's just me, but I can't imagine anyone finds it inspiring.

Oh, I'd love that (if I were a writer, which I'm not). If you can't see the hits, only the comments...you'd see one comment, and think...okay, maybe five people read it, if I'm lucky. I think it would be great to see how many hits it actually got, even if no one's feeling chatty about it. (I'm rarely that chatty myself, especially if all I have to say about a fic is 'oh, nice, I liked it' - which is my shortcoming, not the writer's. I don't always post that, because it sounds like fawning, to me, and I hate that.)

phoebesmum December 27 2009, 19:06:13 UTC

No, I'm quite different. I don't care if only ten people read my fic as long as all of them liked it. But if 80 people look at it and say nothing, I assume that they didn't think it was worth commenting on.

Judging by the lack of feedback I've had from this Yuletide, they'd be right.

flippet December 27 2009, 20:07:41 UTC

But if 80 people look at it and say nothing, I assume that they didn't think it was worth commenting on.

Aw. *pets* I'm sorry. (I haven't read yet, btw.)

I guess I see it this way - I might read a fantastic (published) novel, but it would have to literally knock my socks off for me to write to the author and tell them so. We're not always used to having reading be a two-way street....for so long it's been mainly a receptive activity.

Perhaps that's why more people don't comment, even though it's so easy and the comment box is Right. There. It's not that they didn't like it, it's more that it's a story, a piece of writing, a work of art....not a personal letter that by nature seems to request or require a response.

Maybe some of them weren't impressed. But I'd bet the vast majority of them are simply lazy. God knows I am, LOL!

phoebesmum December 28 2009, 18:14:52 UTC

The thing is: a published author has already had the validation that his effort has been worthwhile - by having his work accepted, and by the sales returns. If they're a popular author like Dan Brown or J K Rowling they have a mass of publicity, if they're a cult author they have literary credibility, if they're a science fiction author at the very least someone will buy them a drink in a convention bar at some time. All that fanfic writers can do is send out their work into the void and hope for the best; readers' comments are the only thing we get in return. And commenting on fic is really quite a long-standing tradition, predating the internet; when I used to publish paper fanzines, we'd get actual, physical letters of comment, letters that people had had to sit down, write or type out by hand (very few people had personal computers in those days), often quite involved ones that took a lot more effort than a quick "I liked this" or "♥" on the internet. To me, it's second nature to leave a comment on anything I read that doesn't ( ... )