the deep moans round with many voices

A new AO3 data meme going around, wherein you list your top fic (by number of kudos) for each year.

This is a little tricky for me since I backdate works, but I'm going to start with 2009 since that was the first year AO3 existed. Also the only things I actually posted there in that year were my Yuletide fics, so even though I have backdated-to-2009 words with more kudos, the answer I'm going with is:

2009: Loving Bonds (The Dark Is Rising, only 29 kudos, but 17 comment threads -- note that kudos did not exist at this time)

The next two years get slightly fuzzy, because I still wasn't posting anything to AO3 except challenge responses (aka Remix and Yuletide) for a while and I legit do not remember exactly when I started to post other stuff there, though I think I may have crossposted a few things during this period for idiosyncratic reasons? But it turns out that my most kudosed fic for 2010 was part of Remix Redux and was therefore actually put on AO3 at the time it claims to have been posted there, and only one backdated-to-2011 work has more kudos than one of my 2011 Yuletide fics, so.

2010: What Isn't Broken (Can Still Be Fixed) (Naruto, 1,323 kudos -- even though I think kudos still weren't a thing when this was posted! It remains my most popular fic on the site, actually; the Claw liked that story, for whatever reason)

2011: As You Wish (The Dark Is Rising, 170 kudos -- I am fairly sure kudos had been rolled out by this point?)

2012 is when I started to post all my work to AO3 -- this is because I started writing for Homestuck and ff.net disallows both funky text effects and chat-fics -- so from here on out there's no need to worry about tweaking for some semblance of historical relevance.

2012: Problems and Solutions (All Things in Time) (Chronicles of Narnia/Stargate: SG-1, 576 kudos)

2013: Take Deeper Roots (Chronicles of Narnia/Naruto, 235 kudos)

2014: Giant Robot Mayhem Doesn't Happen in a Day (Homestuck, 434 kudos)

2015: Broken If Revealed (Daredevil, 297 kudos)

2016: The Courting Dance (Chronicles of Narnia, 160 kudos -- this is a chaptered fic started in 2010 (I backdated the earlier chapters, though I don't remember when I actually posted them), but I finished it in 2016 for WIP Big Bang, so whatever)

2017: Maboroshi (Naruto, 246 kudos)

2018: Edmund and Ginny Go to Harfang (Chronicles of Narnia/Harry Potter, 131 kudos -- this is a WIP collection of loosely connected drabbles that I add "chapters" to at random intervals. Actually, it occurs to me that I should poke at my bingo cards to see if something jumps out at me for the next installment...)

2019 so far: The Guardian in Spite of Herself (Naruto, 310 kudos -- another WIP that I should get back to working on, whoops!)

As of this morning, What Isn't Broken (Can Still Be Fixed) has 1,000 kudos on AO3.

...

I'm a middle ground writer, I think -- I'm never going to get the numbers of a BNF writing juggernaut ships in a juggernaut fandom, but I seem to have a moderately solid readership for various things. But by "moderately solid," I mean I can usually expect double-digits in kudos on my fics. Triple digits are relatively rare, and this is the first time a fic of mine has reached quadruple digit kudos.

I don't expect it to happen again, but it's a nice milestone nonetheless. :)

(via venusmelody)

I actually did this a year ago, but what the heck, let's see if the answers have changed much since then. For reference, I currently have 486 fics on AO3.

Go to your AO3 works page, expand all the filters, and answer the following questions!

1. What's your first and second most common work ratings? Any surprises?

General Audiences (359) / Teen And Up Audiences (97) / Not Rated (14) / Mature (10) / Explicit (6)

No surprises here! I write a lot of gen, and I am skeptical of movie-style ratings' applicability to prose (plus I dislike issuing implicit judgments about what material is ~appropriate~ for people I know nothing about), so I mostly rate things in a spirit of "read the tags and decide for yourself" ('General Audiences'), with an occasional detour into "well, I guess this is a little heavier; maybe I should up the rating so people who care about ratings don't yell at me even though I have accurately tagged for the heavy stuff so what is even the point" ('Teen And Up Audiences').

I love tags. Tags are specific and therefore useful! Ratings, not so much.

The six 'Explicit' stories include actual porn, and the 'Mature' ones include sex that isn't quite porn and/or some heavy stuff. (Mostly sex, though. People get weird about sex in ways they don't tend to get weird about violence, so I usually deploy those ratings based on the presence of sex and stuff that's tangential to sex and stick to tags for everything else.) The 'Not Rated' stories are all from the same Angel Sanctuary fic series, which I CAN'T rate usefully for reasons that are probably obvious if you have any familiarity with the source manga.

(I used to have other unrated stories, but I decided this past year that I wanted to reserve that category for the Angel Sanctuary fics and slapped the others with either 'General Audiences' or 'Teen And Up' based on the ~highly scientific~ system of how I felt when I did a quick-skim reread of each story. *wry*)

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And that is that. :)

I was tagged by klaineharmony:

Go to your works page, expand all the filters, and answer the following questions!

I currently have 445 works on AO3. This tally is therefore missing some stuff I haven't yet crossposted (most notably all my Angel Sanctuary fic) and some things (mostly fragments) that will never exist away from my journal. Additionally, AO3 does not scrape one's entire catalogue once it gets past a certain size -- the sidebar is built from only the first X number of pages (ten? twenty? I don't know the details) -- so these meme results are not completely accurate (most easily demonstrable when it comes to the number of fics in certain categories). That said...

What are your first and second most common work ratings? Any surprises?

General Audiences (335)
Teen And Up Audiences (83)

This does not surprise me. I don't write a lot of porn, and I don't see much point in the Teen And Up rating -- probably because I don't see much point in fic ratings in general. Relatively specific content notes are useful, but ratings are as far from specific as you can get. Seriously, what does an estimated 'appropriate audience' even MEAN? And how do you know whether any given reader will agree with your decision?

I'm also reluctant to issue judgments on who should be reading what content at what age, since I am quite sure that various things I read as a child -- and by 'child' I mean 8-12 years old -- would make moral guardians scream in horror, yet I sailed through unharmed. So I default toward 'whatever, just read it' and only occasionally slap a 'hey, this might be a little heavier' note onto something when my understanding of the public consensus on various issues suggests people might get ticked off at seeing them in the 'General Audiences' category.

(I am even less likely to use 'Mature' or 'Explicit,' because see above in re: not writing much porn. I do occasionally go with 'Not Rated' because there are a few things where I have no clue what the public consensus rating would be and figure it's better to let individual readers decide for themselves.)

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Tag 5 people!

I am terrible at tagging. Play if you want to!

Oh hey, looks like this one is going around again. :-)

I currently have 387 works archived on AO3. Pick a number from 1 (the most recent) to 387 (the first thing I posted*), and I'll tell you three things I currently like about it!

*Technically this is not true, because backdating, but it is the oldest work which is the relevant point.

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#187: "Blueprints" [Inception]

#259 and #144: "What Isn't Broken (Can Still Be Fixed)" [Naruto] and "Narutostuck: The Mother of Necessity" [Homestuck/Naruto fusion]

#227 and #27: "Bluebell" [fairy-tale retelling] and "Mycophilia" [Homestuck]

#167: "Dreams From My Mother" [Black Jewels]

#184: "Lives by Mending" [Darkangel Trilogy]

#66: "Small Favors" [Naruto, specifically the 'Apartment Manager' AU]

#221: "Everything Ends" [Doctor Who with elements from Ender's Game]

#198: "Sparkly Rainbow Blood" [Homestuck]