A follow up to Lily Hearts Jane (16k, E, no warnings) by @photographer-of-thoughts, here's another Hollanov ficlet:
2k words, rated T, no warnings apply
Summary: Yuna has to laugh. "Men! Honestly. You've been seeing each other for nine years, and you got couple's tattoos before you managed to say that you're in love? He organized an entire photo shoot for you, and it still took you a decade to figure out that there might be feelings involved?!"
Or: Shane got a tattoo to match Ilya's. Now how is he going to explain the sight of a girl's name on his hip to his mother?
What I've been reading in the first quarter of 2026:
Making this quarterly instead of monthly hasn't been on purpose, but after I forgot to do it entirely for January and then I was already halfway through March I figured I could just do it quarterly instead of doing Jan+Feb late... Now that I clicked myself through a truly unholy amount of ao3 history pages in one go, I kinda regret that choice xDxD though, to be honest March was the main offender with over 100 pages of heated rivalry fics... I've just been reading a Lot of shortfics, and also clicking & bookmarking a lot of fics to #ToRead later (which I've then had to go through now too to subtract from the total wordcount...)
I've read 10,946,538 words in fanfic Jan-Mar 2026!
ca 3mil in January, 2.8mil in February, and over 5mil of pretty much exclusively Hollanov fic in March!
I've also started reading two books:
They're both my Frühstückslektüre atm (still trying to keep breakfast time screen free for me, been a bit challenging with the Heated Rivalry obsession though ngl), the first one's on a pretty heavy topic and I can't always read too much on it in the morning, so then I switch to the twilight analysis which is a super fun read! I definitely recommend both books :)
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In January I read 278 fics, a pretty even mix of Poirot, The Witcher (AWAU) and Star Wars, with some Good Omens, Holby City, Leverage, Marvel, Miss Fisher, Pride and Prejudice, Thursday Murder Club, White Collar, Warehouse 13 and Yoko Tsuno thrown in :) some of those like Marvel and TMC were probably just from looking for podfic inspo for a gift exchange though.
388 fics in February - I only started reading Heated Rivalry fics on the 17th and yet they make up the bulk of that xD there's also still a lot of Star Wars in there though, some Warehouse 13, HP, Holby City Berena, Star Trek, White Collar, and a bunch of random fandoms that I don't even know but that were recorded at the europodfriends podfic convention I went to :)
In March I read 1237 fics - 40 per day?!? That seems excessive even for me. But well Hollanov fandom churns out lots of shortfics and for some reason I'm not seeking out only longfics the way I tend to do for example in Star Wars... I guess the shippier fandoms mean I don't need plot heavy longfics if it's all kitsch anyways xD and yeah uh. Excluding crossovers with heated rivalry / game changers? I really only read 1 warehouse and 2 star wars fics, and listened to three other podfics people from the convention I went to in February recorded... the rest is all Hollanov!
We'll see whether April will be more femslash heavy with me getting back into Avorah now that s5 of Hacks is starting!
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I'm going to be real with y'all's here, this was already too much work and while I love my little lists and stats, I've run out of steam so no specific rec lists this time, but you can find all of the bookmarks I've marked as recommendations on Ao3 for January, February and March and filter for the fandoms I've mentioned above if you're looking for reading material :)
Most visited authors of these months were inexplicifics @inexplicifics mossydreamz @mossydreamz goldengalaxies justhockey @everything-i-am miss_little_kitten @miss-little-kitten weirdV @vereel oaks118 verdant_words @verdant-words starrysummers04 @starrysophie04 anincompletelist @anincompletelist thanks y'all's for giving me so much amazing reading material!
past posts • explanation on how to get the wordcount in case you also want to do it :)
hi!! I just found a few of your rec posts (which have excellent recs I’m thoroughly enjoying the stucky and twilight ones thank you!) and I’ve seen a few times you mentioned in posts you’ve read X# words of fic in a given month - I wanted to ask how you go about tracking the fic you read? I didn’t see anything in your ao3 stats tag or faq so sorry if you’ve answered this before!!!! I’ve been trying to find an efficient system for a couple years now that isn’t just manually checking each fic and adding up all the words lmao. thank you in advance!!!
Hi! Omg sorry that it took me over a month to reply to this! I'm happy you've been enjoying the rec lists, and of course I can tell you how to get the Ao3 stats! I think I talked about it before but it's probably quite far down the tag now, and it changed a bit anyway so here goes:
First of all, to get an accurate wordcount you have to know whether you're clicking on fics you don't read, if you do that a lot it'll skew results! I bookmark fics '#to read' and subtract those bookmarks from the wordcount later (and private bookmark fics '#didnt read' when I didn't like sth enough to finish it lol) and I've even started to have a separate browser where I'm not logged in to click around and look for fics without worrying about skewing my wordcount results that's how obsessive I am about this xD
- go to:
random.fangirling.net/script/ao3_works_stats
- scroll to ao3 works list download and make a bookmark of that in your browser
- alternatively if it doesn't work, manually make a new empty browser bookmark and edit it to read this text:
(all from the random dot fangirling page, not my own script)
- make sure your browser settings are on always showing the browser bookmarks (not just in new empty tabs)
- then go to your ao3 history, click the browser bookmark: ao3 works list and it'll download an excel thing of that page of your history, load the next page of your history, rinse and repeat until you've got whichever chunk of your history you want to look at! At the bottom of each work in the history it says 'last visited:[date]', so when I want the history for one month I'll do all the pages that have works from that month - there might be some from the months before and after, I'll delete those in excel later
- move all the downloads into one folder in your computer's file explorer
- open a new excel sheet, select 'import from folder' (you can just click in the search bar and type in 'from folder' and that'll show up)
- click: bottom right of screen 'combine & transform data' - okay, top left of screen 'close and load'
- then you'll have an excel sheet with all of the info of all of the works, there'll be a column of the wordcount somewhere towards the right, just go to the field below that and then let excel make the sum of it :)
- to delete those works from surrounding months, go to the 'last visited' column further on the right, 'filter' select only the months you do Not want in your data, then delete those sheet rows, then back to filter and now if you select all it should show only the ones you want
- if you have many many bookmarks '#to read' to subtract you can repeat the downloading process and just subtract the sum, but if there are just a couple it's easier to just find them ctrlF in the excel sheet and delete those rows
- you can also get info on which fandoms you've read, which ratings, which authors etc! I really like seeing all of the info, but if you don't need it you can just ignore it or delete those columns to keep the info you do want easier to find :)
- if I've clicked on a fic and didn't (re)read it and already bookmarked it before (in a past month, meaning it won't show in that month's bookmarks), I'll edit the bookmark and add '#[month]', and then when doing the stats I'll also filter my bookmarks for that # and subtract those as well... but yeah like I said obsessive xD it's not like you actually need the perfectly exact wordcount so don't worry about it unless you want to o.o
- oh and if you read fics on sites that aren't Ao3 - well, I haven't got a script for dealing with other sites, but as long as Ao3 is your main site: I use the ao3 function 'bookmark external work' with hashtag 'external source' to have them all in one place :) still have to add the wordcount manually but at least I've got them all there.
Okay I realize I wrote a lot here and it might look intimidating but even with my excessive reading it just takes me a couple minutes, honestly the longest part is downloading the individual pages of Ao3 history, when I did it for January-March combined just now I had over a hundred pages adsfg but I know I'm an outlier with how much I read so most likely it won't look quite as insane for you xD
