I'm Such A Stats Nerd!

It's week two for "Peeping Tomcat" and I'm still getting so much love! This is so exciting for me. I mean, I've had positive feedback on all of my stories, and I've gotten a good deal of love for each of them. Even my obscure ones for fandoms like "Ender's Game" or a Jonathan Coulton song have gotten at least a LITTLE bit of love.

But this is different. This is borderline addicting. Seeing "You've got Kudos" or "So-and-so favorited..." in my email is such a great natural high! It really makes me want to just dump the whole story instead of waiting for Fridays. I'm almost as exited for that Friday update as my readers.

I have to keep practicing delayed gratification though. Especially since I'm still editing the remaining chapters. One by one. One last look before I shrug, go "that's the best I can do on my own", and post on Friday.

All the more reason to keep with this weekly update plan instead of caving into the craving. That way I still give Cyhyr and ChibiSunnie the time they need to finish up their classes, and then they can help beta what I have left. I can have a second, and third, pair of eyes on this thing to help me really kill the second half of this story.

But in the meantime, feel free to read what I managed to achieve on my own. You again have three places you can go to read the second chapter.

DeviantArt         FanFiction        ArchiveOfOurOwn

I've become addicted not only to those "kudos" or "faves" or "following" emails, but to watching the stats themselves for this story. I even tracked how well the story did the first 24hrs it was up. I did the same thing for the second chapter.

From 1pm Friday, April 6th until 1pm Saturday, April 7th, these were the new stats. These exclude any hits, faves, reviews, or follows I received the first week.

FFN: 435 views, 8 faves, and 8 followers
AO3: 236 views, 7 kudos, and 1 new comment
DA: 9 views, 2 faves, but still no comments

Total Results: 680 views, 17 faves, 8 followers, and 1 review

The new comment was: "Very good chapter poor creepy Adrien. Hahaha"

Over 600 views - in total - in just 24hrs! Nearly 700 views, even! So cool!

Comparatively, let's see what the 24-hr stats were for the first chapter. Keep in mind, people can't fave or follow a story twice, so the numbers are a bit skewed there. Also, if someone reads both chapters on DA and/or FFN, each chapter is recorded as one hit, so that skews things a bit as well. Still.... let's see how the weeks compare.

FFN: 361 views, 19 faves, 36 followers, and 7 reviews
AO3: 307 views, 24 kudos, 5 bookmarks, and 2 comments
DA: 10 views, 1 fave, and no comments

Total Results: 678 views, 44 faves, 41 followers, and 9 reviews

DeviantArt stayed pretty consistent, things slowed down a bit on ArchiveOfOurOwn, but FanFiction blew up a nice little chunk. I know that FFN uses email alerts for new chapters to stories you're following. Meanwhile, over on AO3, I know there are a few stories I bookmarked that I only know they've been updated if I actively check in on them. I don't know if there's an alert setting I haven't figured out yet, and I DO have it stated in the story "Updated every Friday," so there could possibly be ways that people know to check in. Still, the drop in hits on AO3 could be explained away by the fact that those who originally bookmarked it didn't realize it had updated. Therefore, those that bookmarked the story may not have come back to it yet, the story may have been buried under new ones, and the "OMG, Miraculous!" buzz could have died a bit since the American viewers have to again wait until we can get the next dozen episodes in one swoop on Netflix.

AO3 also tends to have a different readership. A lot of the content there seems to be either more mature in nature and/or non-heterosexual and/or non-monogamous stories. Since I have an innocent, K+ rated, monogamous, heterosexual coupling, it's not exactly everyone's cup of tea. Instead, those readers do tend to stay over on FFN.

A final factor could be that I was antsy to post my first chapter, and did so at 8:30 in the morning, before I had to head off to work. I got delayed for my second chapter posting, and couldn't do so until my lunch break at 1pm. Perhaps the morning update versus an afternoon update also skewed the results. Perhaps AO3 readers tend to read while having breakfast or something....

Anyway, enough attempting to figure out WHY the stats changed, let's see instead what they look like right now!

FFN: 607 views, 8 faves, 10 followers, and 1 new review
AO3: 297 views, 12 kudos, 1 bookmark, and the previously mentioned review
DA: 16 views, 2 faves, and still no comments

Total Results: 920 views, 22 faves, 11 followers, and 2 reviews

The newest review was a very simple "Interesting. Go on." which is all I need to see. I WILL go on!

Yes, the above stats do include the 24-hr ones listed earlier. These are my "Week 2" stats from Friday until today.

They seem pretty comparable to last week's. The FFN views jumped up, but again, that could be because people are reading both chapters instead of just one. However, last week at this time I only had 457 views on FFN. The AO3 views massively dropped from 420 views, but I already talked about possible reasons for that. DeviantArt stayed pretty even, but still increased from 13 views to 16. I already explained that could probably be because the same person is reading both chapters now.

The total amount of views was pretty consistent though. Last week it was 890 views, compared to the 920 for this week.

I'm still excited, even with the AO3 dip. I don't think I've ever had a story get even 100 views per week before, let alone more than that in just a day! So what if my story isn't the most popular? It's still the most popular one I've written, and that's an exciting landmark on my road to becoming a published novelist.

A fun fringe benefit is that I'm now getting a new influx of readers favoriting ME as an author, and following me. This means they care about more than just this one piece of work. They could easily follow just this one story and get updates whenever I post the newest chapter. Favoriting and following me as an author means they want alerts whenever I post ANYTHING new, not just the next chapter of "Peeping Tomcat." It means they like my writing enough that they trust they'll like other works even before reading them.

I mean, you should know what I'm talking about. I'm sure you each have an author whose work you're excited to read, regardless of the content of it. Or a musical artist whose latest album you're waiting for, even without knowing what the songs sound like. Or a movie simply because you love the director's work. I could just keep going on with examples, but I'm sure you get it.

If you couldn't tell, I'm just all giddy! I've been working on this story for so long, and it's getting so much love. It's finally out there in the world. Others know now what I had to keep to myself for MONTHS. Man, I love this feeling. I love this high. Even if I don't have that many readers, I love that I have faithful ones and that others enjoy my story as much as I do.

Love to all of you!

Hacker Girl Facebook sticker
by Birdman, Inc.

To help spread the love, I'm again attempting to help Omnibladestrike with writers block. He came over this past Sunday and we had a nice chat about his story. We kind of got majorly derailed about two hours in, so we didn't talk as long as I would have liked, but I still hope I helped him tap into a new well spring of ideas.

I mean, I know I'm excited about the potential his story has. We talked about it being at least a three-part series, but possibly being four or five books. We talked about the rise and fall of one of the characters. We talked about character arcs, and power crawl.

For those who might not know what "power crawl" is, go ahead and take an 11-min time out to check out this video. It explains power crawl as well as how to do it "correctly."

Neat, huh? So for the TL;DR version... or TL;DW in this case.... "power crawl, or power creep as it's sometimes referred to as, is basically the speed and force in which a character's strength increases throughout an action serial. So, basically, how powerful a character is at the beginning of a series, how powerful they are at the end, and how quickly they get there."

Anyway, I think our work in figuring out his power crawl has potential. I hope it at least helped him figure out an end goal, power wise, for his characters. I'm actually super excited for this project! I get why Cyhyr is so antsy for Ronoxym to write HIS epic that he's been telling her about for years. I'm now feeling the same way about Omni's story. It just seems so exciting and has so much potential that you want to READ IT ALREADY!

I wonder if this happens frequently: the "sounding board" friends and family members becoming more excited about reading a story than even the author is about writing it.

Hopefully it just means we pass our excitement energy to the author in order to help them get excited enough to write the tale.

It kind of reminds me of a writing meme I saw a little while ago:

Others just seem to get more excited than the author. I guess because the author can only see parts where they couldn't explain exactly what was in their head, or the words seem clunky, or a character seems just the slightest bit out of character. Readers, since they haven't lived in that world or with those characters for nearly as long, only see the beautiful story you were able to give them.

Man, I have so much more to talk about with regards to this, but I'm getting kind of ramblely. So instead, I'll just state that I also challenged Omni to try to use the Snowflake Outline method created by Randy Ingermanson. One of the Writers' Huddle members is trying it out, and I just had to see what she was talking about. It seems like a cool method, as I mentioned in previous weeks when I first found it. However, Omni has kind of been avoiding trying it. So, I sat him down on Sunday and had him try out the first step: Write a one-sentence summary of the novel, preferably with 15 words or fewer. I think his first attempt was about 26 words. Not too shabby.

Talking about the second step - expanding the sentence into a full paragraph describing the story setup, major disasters, and ending of the novel - is when we derailed a bit. That's where we started talking about the power crawl, as well as the generic world build, and how powerful that world's deities should be. So, he didn't get his paragraph written while he was visiting, but I hope our discussion helped him know how to write that paragraph.

I really REALLY hope the Snowflake Method will help him, since writing the story is now in less-daunting bite-sized steps. Another big help is that he's seeing that his writing is improving. For years, he got stuck in that dreaded creative pitfall most stumble into. Namely, the point where you, as an artist, can tell exactly what makes something good, mediocre, or bad, but you don't yet have the proper skills to create good artwork yourself. So, now that you recognize your art as "bad" you feel even less adequate than before. You fear that now that you realize you're not as good as you once thought, that means you will never be good enough, and you quit. Getting over that gap between "I know what's good" and "I know my stuff isn't good", especially after falling from that "hey, I'm pretty good at this" delusion, is super tough. It's where a lot of people do give up and never try again. I was there for nearly six years. My sister had the same issue with her drawings.

So, if you are in that pit, use me as an example. Or my sister. Or Omni. You may have felt your world fall apart once you realized that you aren't as good at your craft as you thought. You most likely see where you need to be in order to be "good" or even "great", and fear you're too far down to ever reach it.

DO NOT GIVE UP!

Practice. Study. Learn. Find a support group, either in person or online. Try. Try. Try. Accept that you're bad now, but you won't always be. Push. Then look back on work you did a year ago, a month ago, even a week ago. Can you see the improvement? Can you notice at least bits that are now "good"? Keep at it! It will take years of constant growth, but you WILL be on par with your high standards eventually.

I'm glad to see that Omni is starting to see that, as is my sister, who is very slowly getting back into her painting and drawing.

Omni probably won't have anything new to read at writing group tonight, at least, not anything based on our talks on Sunday, but I do hope that he has more of the Snowflake filled out by our next Sunday meet-up.

In the meantime, I'm also using the tail end of the Snowflake Method to help me with my editing of "Peeping Tomcat." Step eight, to be exact:

Randy Ingermanson: Make a spreadsheet detailing the scenes that emerge from your four-page plot outline. Make just one line for each scene. In one column, list the POV character. In another (wide) column, tell what happens. If you want to get fancy, add more columns that tell you how many pages you expect to write for the scene. A spreadsheet is ideal, because you can see the whole storyline at a glance, and it’s easy to move scenes around to reorder things.

Sir, you had me at "spreadsheet."

I didn't do exactly what Ingermanson suggested, mainly because the story was already written. However, I did alter it slightly to help with revisions. My spreadsheet has the title for each chapter - so I can see how any one in particular might fit with the feel the rest of them have - the length of the chapter in both word count and page count, and what the plot of that chapter is. This way I have the whole plot of my story laid out before me, and I have a more concise look at what each chapter brings to the over-all story. It also helps me focus on what I want to do for the chapter, which helps me tighten up the narrative a bit.

At least, that's the aim.

I think it helped with the first few chapters I have edited, so we'll see if it helps later down the road as well.

It's getting late, though, so I'll save the last of my giddy ramblings for next week! Take care, and don't forget to keep an eye out for the third chapter of "Peeping Tomcat" on Friday.