Postcards and yet more fannish rambling

I don't know why it is, but size really does not matter when it comes to fanfiction. There are some stories, of course, that are monumentally long and have hundreds of thousands of reviews, and of those, some of them deserve it. But then, not everyone's cut out for writing huge long stories. Some people, ie me, can't write long stories. Admittedly, there are some people, like shipperkitten, who can't write short stories, or at least, don't seem to be able to.

But what was I saying? Yes. Seeing as monumentally long fics do tend to have a lot of reviews attached, you would think that the longer a fic is, the more reviews it has. This doesn't, however, appear to be a case of straight proportionality. It seems not to be proportional at all. If you had a graph to explain it - say you plotted one of number of against number of feedback replies/reviews, then it would just be a random scattergraph, until you reached a certain point, where the sheer amount of words would mean the reviews started keeping up proportionally.

I am suddenly reminded of my exams, where I managed to say an awful lot without actually saying anything at all. As Becca said (we had one of those long, ultimately pointless but generally happy forty-five-minute phone conversations earlier) in Chemistry, when asked to talk about steel, she elaborated on how it was made from a certain substance which she didn't specify in a certain process she didn't specify either.

In other words, I am talking complete bullshit.

But I did have a point with the feedback/length of story thing. Because, I got some feedback today, nice feedback, and it occurred to me that Glitter has got more feedback than anything else I've ever written by an astronomical margin. It's maybe a combination of factors - it's set in a large fandom, and I'm much better at the whole "I am a fanfic writer" thing now - but it's still bizarre. It definitely doesn't fit the whole length-of-story idea, because it's very short, only 1500 words, and absolute fluff at that. So I don't understand it. However, the fic of mine that up until now had receieved more feedback than any other was even shorter. That was a seven-hundred-word Stargate snippet, and for some reason I got more feedback for it than anything else. While, on the other hand, the longest fic I have ever written was also a Stargate fic, and for that, I got pretty much no feedback at all.

This entry has been completely composed of self-indulgent rambling. For that, you have my apologies. Although, I have to admit, I'm still considering applying to become one of ff.net's columnists. Is this a good idea, or should I close my mouth and never speak of it again? And does anyone have a fanfic-related issue they've always wanted showcased?

And oh, yes, one more thing I have to mention - I got a postcard! At first I thought it would be from daemongirl, but then I realised she hadn't left the country yet. The postcard turned out to be from language_idling. It was dated June 4th! Thank you, Meredith... we can now blame the postal service that the card's been in transit for a month and a half!