So here’s the thing.  I’m working on my original works, but in order to keep practicing, I like to still write different things.  For me, that means writing fanfiction, because there is such potential to learn and grow, and the feedback can be both heartwarming as well as nearly instantaneous.  I know that writing a book means that there’s not one certain place, like a personal blog or such, where you will get feedback on your writing.  So it helps me when I write fanfiction to get that feedback from the people reading your work.

Except for the kudos.

If you’re not familiar with kudos, it’s a nice little way of saying, “Good for you,” or “Good job” or the like for a piece of your work.  It can be anonymous, or it can come from a person.  A kudos, though, is like looking over an overflowing dessert table with dozens of different sweet treats available, but only being able to take a single, nondescript nibble from one of the items.  Sure, it’s nice, but you know that there can be so much more.  So in a word, it’s just not fulfilling.

My latest work is in an obscure fandom, for a pairing that may not even exist.  I love the BBC’s Atlantis, and there seems to be a storyline coming up that will pit the sweet, somewhat dorky Pythagoras with the doomed character Icarus.  We have but a taste of the pairing from the Season 2, Part 2 teaser trailer, but what it is looks heartbreaking.  It intrigues me to no end.

So in a writing community that I belong to, there is a time when you can get a picture prompt and then write a story that is exactly 1,000 words (for it is said, a picture is worth 1,000 words).  When I received my picture, the story featuring Pythagoras and Icarus laid itself out in my head, and I knew I had to write it.  And once I did, knowing the Atlantis community is small, and the Pythagoras/Icarus community even smaller, I did a post on tumblr to help promote it.  It worked, because I got some feedback on the story like below.

So that’s good, right?  I get called a “lovely author” (though the tumblr reccer assumed that I was a girl – it happens in the “slash” writing world, trust me), and even a “This fic is so, so good and so, so painful.”  Sounds good, right?  But here’s the thing; people are so focused on SHINY! and diverting of attention, that we can’t be bothered to leave reviews anymore.  Indeed, this fic that I wrote and got such nice words written about shows up on the archive where I wrote it as such:

Two kudos, and not a single review.  Why?  Because clicking “Kudos” is so much easier than the critical thinking and time it takes to actually write a review.  And while I get it, it doesn’t mean that I have to like it.