Cambrian
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Maidenless No Longer - The Afterword
🕑 Added 2022-05-16 00:19:28 +0000 UTCThe Afterword. Never done one of these before. Might never do one again. It feels pretentious as all hell, and I know for a fact that this entire this is going to be pretty damn self-congratulatory. But hey, of all of my works, Maidenless No Longer is the one that feels like it deserves it.
Still, don’t blame anyone who gives this a pass. As such, let me start with the most important point of order first; my gratitude to all of you guys, my readers. Thank you for taking the time to read Maidenless No Longer. Thank you for being here with me throughout this journey, whenever it was you came along in the first place.
Your support has meant the world to me. I knew from the very beginning that I was going to finish this story, because for the first time ever, I went ahead and fully outlined every single chapter. I started by making a list of every ‘waifu’ that the Tarnished was going to ‘save’, and then cut a couple who just didn’t have enough character or personality to make sense. One of those, Loretta, got added back in via the Bonus Chapters. Another, Alecto, got cut entirely in the end. Alas.
But that original story outline I made all the way back on March 15th was nothing compared to what we ended up with. The original story outline was 41 chapters long, including the Epilogue. And in the end… here we are 69 chapters later. 55 chapters to the Main Story, and 14 bonus chapters besides. It feels incredible, to say the least.
I fully believe this story to be the best thing I’ve ever written. Which is good, because it also happens to be my favorite thing I’ve ever written. If you’d asked me what my most popular fic before this was, I would have easily said it was A Motherfucking Dragon, in which I self-insert into Drogon, one of Daenerys’ dragons in Game of Thrones.
But if you’d asked me what my favorite thing I’ve ever written before this was, I honestly couldn’t have answered you. I truly didn’t know. This though… this story, no matter what I might manage to achieve in the future, will always hold a very special place in my heart. This story proved that my best days aren’t behind me.
I’ve been writing fiction ‘seriously’ since 2015 (We don’t talk about Perverted Seal Masters which was circa 2012). I’ve been writing as a career/job since 2017. It’s crazy to find out that even after seven years of writing, and five years of doing it professionally, I haven’t reached my peak. That I can still pull out stories like Maidenless No Longer makes me excited for what the future might hold.
I won’t lie, I’ve got nothing in the pipeline right now. I’m not going to be replacing Maidenless No Longer with another story that updates daily any time soon, I don’t think. But maybe one day I’ll be inspired again, and I’ll be able to say I’ve topped MNL with something even better.
But even if that day never comes, even if Maidenless No Longer is my best fic ever for the rest of my life, I don’t think I’d mind all that much. I’m really proud of what I managed here with this story, and the numbers across all the websites I posted it on back me up. Here’s some statistics, for those who care about that sort of thing.
Over on QQ, aka Questionable Questing, this will be my first story thread to reach one hundred pages all on its own. Before this, I’ve had two other threads breach that point. One of them, a quest that helped kickstart my popularity back in 2016 and allowed me to build my business in 2017, had a lot of voting going on, so the number of pages was a bit over-inflated.
The other one, my one-shot thread, has four hundred and eighty pages at the time of writing, but is also the home of around a thousand or so unique stories, so it doesn’t truly count either. Maidenless No Longer will be the first true story thread to breach that one hundred page benchmark on QQ for me, making it not only my most popular story ever on that website, but also one of the website’s most popular fics.
Over on FF, aka Fanfiction, this will be my third story to reach over a thousand reviews. It will probably be the most reviewed fic I have on FF, by the time I’m done releasing the last eight bonus chapters to the public. It was hands down the fastest of my stories to ever reach a thousand reviews over on FF, and the fastest to reach fifteen hundred followers and favorites beside.
Funnily enough, I get to take credit for the creation of the Elden Ring category over on FF. I originally posted Maidenless No Longer under the Misc. Games category, and despite how popular it was from the very beginning, it annoyed me enough that there wasn’t an Elden Ring category that I ended up figuring out how to send in a support email myself so I could have them create one.
Over on AO3, aka Archive of Our Own, well… this is my most popular story there, ever. AO3 is a website I only started posting to in 2021. As a result, Maidenless No Longer gets to be the record holder for pretty much all of the stats. Its my first AO3 fic to breach 100,000 Hits, it’s the most kudos, most comments, most bookmarks, and very nearly the most subscribed fic on my AO3 profile.
And for most of those categories, its not even close. It’s not been easy for me to find the same traction on AO3 that I’ve found on other websites. I’ve never taken that personally, but its really nice to see a story like Maidenless No Longer take off like it did on AO3, because it means there is an audience for my work to be found there.
Over on HF, aka Hentai-Foundry… well, admittedly, this story didn’t do nearly as well on HF as it did on every other website I posted it too. Can still be called the ‘most popular’ Elden Ring fic on HF, but I think the 50/50 split of smut versus plot didn’t serve it too well there. Still, its my second most commented fic on HF of all time even then, which is saying something.
And I’ll never stop appreciating my audience on HF. Pretty sure at least half of all my patrons are still from HF. You guys are the backbone of my business, so even if only a handful of my followers on HF seemed to read MNL, I’m glad to have posted it there for those people at least.
Finally, the Patreon. Holy heck, the Patreon. Thanks to Maidenless No Longer, my Patreon has seen the best two months in its entire life. Might be the best two months it ever experiences honestly, who can say? About three to four hundred of you are brand new to my Patreon and likely only here for this fic.
To you all, I say, thank you for coming along for the ride. I’d love it if you stuck around and tried out some of the other things I have on offer here, but at the same time, I fully understand that Maidenless No Longer is a unique experience, even among my works. I can’t even begin to recommend other stories I wrote that could compare to it, because truth be told, nothing feels like it does compare to it, not even to me.
All in all, Maidenless No Longer has been a wild ride from start to finish. At the time of this writing, I believe I have the longest, most popular Elden Ring story on the whole of the internet. I got in early, I treated this shit like a speed run, and I secured the bag, hah.
But even still, I don’t expect to hold the crown forever, and in fact am looking forward to reading whatever overtakes me. After all, I’ve always been a reader first, and a writer second.
For those interested in that sort of thing, I’ve decided I’m going to upload a PDF of the final state of the MNL story outline along with this post. That way you guys can have some insight into the method, or lack thereof, behind my madness.
Some of the outline will probably not match up with what actually got written, because I made split second decisions and changes in the heat of the moment, or just forgot to consult the outline altogether and wrote what I was going to write off the cuff. But all in all, it might be an interesting read to a few.
Regardless, thanks again for coming on this journey, friends. It’s been fun.
Comments
Alun Lewis
This tale has been utterly amazing, start to finish...though I think the biggest achievement it has earned has been making we want to play something by FromSoft :P
Cambrian
Hehe, perhaps. God it felt weird not posting a chapter to Patreon today
Lokhaxz
Crazy run. Definitely my favorite work of yours. I think you might have a thing for writing Defeat though, Cambrian. 😏
