Fics

I'm into chapter 11 now, and judging by its pace, I think the story may end up close to 20 chapters. Maybe 17, like Lead Me Through the Fire is.

I was musing over what fics I consider my very best work out of everything I've done. I think I determined I would rank them thusly:

- Lead Me Through the Fire
- Life After the Tears
- White is in the Winter Night
- Taming the Darkness

All multi-chapter epics, and all YGO. But I'm pretty sure I'll add the Tutu thriller fic to the list when it's done. I love this thing.

Other than Life After the Tears, the fics I chose either do not have supernatural things going on at all or the supernatural events are more of a background thing. Lead Me Through the Fire is the former, while the other two are the latter. Those two are both psychological horror. And then the Tutu thriller fic has some supernatural things going on in the form of Fakir's Story-Spinning, but it's not the focus of the plot.

For some reason, aside from Life After the Tears, I feel that the stories with supernatural events as the central focus of the plot are not my best work compared to some that have a different focus.

I think Close Your Eyes, Clear Your Heart could make the list, once I get it done. And for it, there are some supernatural things going on, but again it isn't the main focus. It's an Indiana Jones-type YGO thriller. In those films, it seems like anything supernatural only comes into play at the end instead of all the way through.

Oh, well this is just great.

Upon arriving at FF.net today I was treated to something I haven't seen before. They locked me out of the page unless I clicked on a sponsor-offered quiz and took it. Maybe it unlocked me as soon as I clicked; I didn't notice that because I thought I had to take the thing. The quiz itself was fine and kind of fun, but it was hosted by one of those sites where it brings up several offers it wants you to sign up for before it will give you your results. I opted out of all of those, of course. But I had to give the quiz site a phone number, which I had not wanted to do.

Is this going to be usual on FF.net now? I thought it was bad enough when they let their sponsors redirect people's webpages to go to sponsor sites. But at least with that we just had to click Skip Ad and get out of it. They must be getting in dire straits; they said the quizzes needed to be taken to keep the site free.

I don't want to have to do that every time I go there or every few days or whatever the case might be. I can appreciate they need money, but I am not pleased by this latest method. This just might be the breaking point that will rout me off the site.

And yet I really don't want to go. My fanbase is there. I've already seen the disinterest on other fic-hosting sites; it's almost impossible to get fans on them. But I also don't like directing people to FF.net in order to read my stuff if this is what they'll end up with too. I prefer reviews on FF.net over anywhere else, but it doesn't seem fair if I send them to a site that will lock them out unless they take a quiz.

Does anyone know more about this? Is it temporary? Does it only show up if you're not logged in? Does it show up if you're using McAfee Site Advisor or is it blocked in that case?