My second long fanfic made 5,000 hits today! Whoohoohoohoo! That is so cool! Especially as I have over a hundred reviews on it, all of them good.
Total up all my stories, and I have over 20,000 hits. And better than 200 reviews, every last one of them good. My brother suggested if I could collect hits like that, I should check into publishing online.  Go around the crap of traditional book-publishing. That sounded awesome to me. I investigated. And found there are people making a living at it. But the writing–it may be excellent. I don’t know, I’d have to subscribe to read it. But I do know that everything I’ve found so far is smut.
So what’s the problem? I’ve been happily writing little but smut for months.
That is the problem. I’m getting bored. Experiment successful, new friends made, writing improved–time to move on. I’ll never veer away from an intimate scene again, if it’s necessary to the story in it goes, but I don’t want to write on the basis of “when was the last time these two got nailed?” Key again–what’s necessary for the story? Not for my net gain.
Written sex is a very–focused–genre. Take a look at the warnings on any of the amateur sites and you’ll see. There are those (like me) who only read certain pairings. Wouldn’t touch a Crawford/Nagi story with a ten-foot cheese log. Most only read certain orientations–yaoi (M/M), yuri (F/F), and (rare!) het (hetero. you know, normal?). Some only read certain kinks. Some will beg in reviews for a bit of bondage, or something more creative, while some are gone the second it goes beyond missionary position. I’ve come across some pretty nasty stories, written by (apparently) perfectly normal people, and apparently enjoyed by many more…
Case in point, in the Weiss fandom there’s Aya. He’s spent years repressing himself, living for his sister, killing to earn money to pay her medical bills. (she’s in a coma) If you want to write him in a romance, you’ve got to get rid of the ice. Standard ways are getting him drunk, getting him or the one he loves (writer’s choice, in the show he loves only his sister) hurt or sick and delirious or–and this is used FREQUENTLY–shattering the ice with a rape. And the more the merrier, in Aya-rape stories. (Absolute top of my do-not-read-this-crap list…)
Don’t get me started on that. Wrong for so many reasons, but mainly it bugs me because anyone who writes Aya being shattered by a rape doesn’t know their Aya. (ha, you didn’t think I objected to a perfectly reasonable, though certainly horrible, plot event, did you? I can torture my characters as well as anyone–so long as it makes SENSE!)
Wow, lots of tangents in this blog. My point would be–I believe online readers are locked into instant gratification, and I don’t want to be locked into meeting expectations. I want to write my characters as they are, my stories as they want to be, not throw in a sex scene every 30 pages to keep people reading. If I want to write a heterosexual pairing (honestly, try and find a site selling this…), I want to do it, without taking food off the munchkin’s table. You know? So I will continue to keep my eyes open, but I’ll be submitting ms to New York for a while yet.