iMai

Posting from work to say that for nearly a week I've been the proud owner of an iPad (secondhand, black, still with AppleCare and prepaid internet to December, plus cases and a stylus), and I have no regrets whatsoever. As far as slow-burn impulse purchases go, this one's a winner.

I just need to find a cover that is red or black or grey, and iMai will really feel like it's mine.

The AO3 stats meme

The current meme is the one where you look at your top 10 stories on AO3 by hit count and draw conclusions accordingly. (If you did the same meme last year, you can also compare, but I'm pretty sure I didn't.)

Leading the pack at 673 hits (240 more than the next ranking fic) is Solution. Call me cynical, but I can't really say I'm shocked that 650 words of explicit boyslash is in first place. It's not even especially good, having been dashed off for the AtLA kink meme and given a cursory edit, but there you go.

On the other hand, the rest of the top 10 is an interesting mixture of femslash and OC-heavy kiddie fic. In fact, fics #2 and #3 are both Tophzula -- "Inheritance" and the high school AU, "Core Skills" Both of these were comment fics, I think from the same "prompt me" post. I'm trying not to draw too many unflattering conclusions about the fact that my top 3 fics are essentially flash fics.

Number 4 is where it gets odd: "Firstborn Son", a Russell/Holmes babyfic from 2006. And number 7 is "Shabbos", a kidfic/case file/family dramaaaaah from the same series. Either Sherlock is sparking interest in other Holmes pastiches, or I'm getting a boost from bnharrison posting her own fics with the same OC.

Between them, we have "Another Life-Changing Field Trip" (Zuko/Mai/Toph, again from the kink meme), and number 6 is Yet Another Damn Flash Fic, "Daring Rescues Our Specialty". It was the very first Tophzula fic I ever wrote, and while I'm fond of it, I feel like it deserves to be overtaken.

Number 8: "You Had A Boyfriend (Who Looked Like A Girlfriend That I Had In Er Yue)", my girl!Zuko/Zhao fic. I'm pretty proud of this fic, and pleased it's in the top 10. (It's also the first AtLA fic in the list that went through what I persist in thinking of as a "proper" writing process.) A het genderswap fic with a bisexual protagonist isn't something I'd have expected to be popular.

Fic 9, "The Weight of the World In Her Hands". Mary Russell, a resolution of sorts to the events of LANG written well before GOTH came out. When I say I prefer this version to what we actually got, it's more an indication of how unimpressed I was with GOTH than anything else. *mimes sharkjump* I'm still interested that Russell is in my top 10 at all, let alone three fics in that fandom.

And, finally, number 10 is "Family Reunion", which was technically commentfic, only the scenario had been in my head for so long that all I needed was an excuse to put it on the page. It's yet another OC kiddiefic, in this case Zuko discovering his mother had a third child after her banishment. The whole concept is so self-indulgent that I'm still shocked whenever I get kudos for it. Maybe it's a sign I should write my id more, I don't know. I like stories about children and siblings and inherited problems.

The shorter meme: boyslash predictably popular; everything else kind of unexpected. I was quite interested to realise that my Tophzula series is actually quite popular in the general scale of things (the general scale of things being a comparison with my fics in general, not the fandom as a whole or on AO3). I wouldn't have predicted that for a non-canonical f/f pairing, but there you go.

(Here is a casual mention that the first third of the Epic Tophzula has been edited and posted at AO3, sort of on the down-low in case I wind up going back and rewriting parts of it. But I haven't had any energy to edit, let alone write, for a few weeks, so the rest will be slower in coming than I'd like. ENDINGS ARE HARD.)