It's coming up on three years since I got my AO3 account and posted my first fic there, and I wanted to take a look at what I've actually managed to write over the past three years.
For anyone not already aware, I'm emotionalandroid on AO3, and all the fics are in the 19 Days fandom.
I saw someone listing the four most used tags on their works, and thought I'd start there, and looking at the ratings, categories, warnings, etc. made me want to check out how much the 100 word drabbles and old flashfics skew things in a specific direction.
If you asked me to characterise my works off the cuff, I'd say most of them are M/M, Gen or Teen And Up Audiences, No Archive Warnings Apply, and generally fun, feel-good stories, with a smattering of angst.
I have 40 works up on AO3. These are my four most used Additional Tags, which gives an idea of what kind of stuff I tend to post there.
I crossed out the tags Drabble and Flash Fic because they don’t tell you about the content, just the form.
The “Non-Sexual Intimacy” tag is from the series of 100 word drabbles I wrote in the winter of 2024-5 based off a list of prompts that I found on tumblr.
If I leave out the drabbles and shortest flashfics, and only include works of 200 words or more, it looks like this instead:
Honestly, I don’t tag much past the archive basics (Fandom, Rating, Warnings and Relationship/Character). I mostly rely on the summary/blurb to give a feel of what’s in a fic, and as a result just looking at the tags make the works sound kind of boring.
Here’s how my works are distributed across ratings and warnings:
The longer works (everything I write is pretty short) tend towards slightly higher ratings.
I have just 9 works of over 1000 words length, one of which is an incompletely posted multi-chapter fic* written for a challenge last summer. Some of them are among my most read and kudosed fics, and others are my most commented on**.
Writing-wise, playing around with the classic drabble format the past couple of years, and figuring out what I could do with it, has been a fun challenge. A few of the drabbles are among my own favourites. In terms of satisfying work, the slightly longer fics generally have more weight though, when I succeed in getting them to do what I wanted.
If life ever lets up enough to allow me the time and focus, I would really like to play around more with writing fics, both in terms of crafting a story, and exploring various styles and formats.
*)I want to rewrite the fic and post all chapters - I think it needs to have a different shape/style to work, but I haven't been able to settle on which yet. It's such a mess because I lost the use on one arm immediately after the prompts were assigned, and ended up rushing a half-baked thing to meet the posting deadline once I could physically write again for short periods of time. Anyway, the setting and plot/framework is already in place, I just need to explore it in a different way - the current text doesn't satisfy me at all.
**)My fics don't get a lot of comments or kudos. If I was to speculate on why, it's probably that I don't often write the popular pairing, my fics are generally light-hearted, and I haven't been around in the fandom for long. They could also just be poor writing, but I don't think the writing is poor enough to be the main reason either way.
