Kudos+

[schneefink]

I don't comment on every fic I read, but I try to leave a lot of comments, and when I can longer ones. I like it, it's part thank-you, part that I enjoy talking about fics I liked, and part that it makes the authors happy and I like that too. (The fewer comments a fic gets the more I try to leave comments of my own.)

The downside is that I have a huge backlog of fics I still want to comment on and feel to various degrees anxious/guilty about if I don't. It's the worst with fics that I love so much that I want to write longer comments but that takes time and often a reread, and WIPs where I usually comment on every chapter – if I don't comment on a particular chapter or leave a much shorter comment than usual, will the author think I hated it? A few times now I stopped commenting on a WIP because I didn't get around to commenting before the author updated once and then told myself I'd catch up and then that never happened, and knowing that that's dumb doesn't help.

Prompted by me spending too much time today commenting on fic instead of doing something actually productive. This is one of my brain's favorite activities to pretend I'm not procrastinating.

Comments

[michelel72]

I have posted only one WIP in my entire fanfic career. (Getting it through beta took far, far, far longer than I had planned.) There were a total of five chapters, and someone commented at length on the first four chapters ... but not the fifth. And yeah, I worried that they hated the resolution! (They later came back and left a lovely comment on the last chapter -- they'd just forgotten.) So, unfortunately, yeah, I get why you'd worry about that. :(

I used to comment on stories, but I somehow lost the ability to come up with anything more coherent to say than "I liked this", and I figure a kudo connotes that just as coherently with no pressure for comment replies. It's a shame, though, because some lovely relationships came out of commenting on fics, back in the day ....

[schneefink]

I only ever posted a WIP once and it was a very short one in a small fandom, so sometimes I'm not sure if authors of popular fics in bigger fandoms even remember the names of their commenters, but when the audience is smaller it's more obvious.
(I was confused for a moment because I remembered you have multiple chaptered fic, until I realized that multiple chapters can be posted at once. It's Sunday morning.)

Leaving longer comments for me was a matter of practice - and sometimes I just resort to copying my favorite passages and keyboard smash, but I think it gets the point across okay ^^

[naye]

Just seconding that quoting a favorite passage and/or keyboard smashing is how I do most of my reviews and so far I've had no complaints! (As a writer I absolutely adore an "ARRFGGGHHHH" or seeing someone single out a sentence I've written. Absolutely can't go wrong with that!)