theodosia | DS Flashfiction Stats I (Voyeurism)

For my own edification, I'm slowly going through the postings in

ds_flashfiction and databasing stats about the stories that appeared therein -- it all started when I wondered if there wasn't a predominantly Fraser/Kowalski bias (by quite a bit, it turns out) and then started wondering how many other pairings there'd been, what different POVs (points of view) there'd been and so on, and how frequently were writers actually going over the limit. The answer for the last is (I've only databased two challenges so far) not really that often.

Because it's my project, I'm going to be rely on my own judgment about things like rating and POV and pairing -- I reread each story, and tried to think like a fairly uptight rating board, so male frontal nudity, male/male graphic sexual contact, et cetera automatically got an NC-17, R was for male/male 'romantic' clinches, heterosexual trysts, PG for little if any romantic content, and so on. Like I said, fairly arbitrary.

For the length in words, I relied on the author's stated total, and if they omitted it, I copy and pasted into Word and let the simplistic word count function tell me what it was, so the total may differ from the authorial count.

(I'm halfway into databasing the Masturbation challenge, which is so far all NC-17, not surprisingly.)

So on with the stats for Challenge #1, Voyeurism-

Length

Average Length: 581.38
Shortest Story (tie): 100 words -- "Puppy Love" by cmshaw / "Untitled" by stellamaris
Longest Story: 1195 words -- "Second Sight" by aerye
Total wordage for 29 stories: 16,860 words

Note: there was only one story over 1K

Rating

NC-17: 11
R: 10
PG: 8

Actually on balance I'm surprised there were so many PGs. Perhaps I hadn't gotten my rating system firmed up, or what was being voyeured was fairly tame....

Point of View

3rd-Fraser - (6)
3rd-Kowalski - (5)
1st-Fraser - (3)
1st-Other - (3)
3rd-Vecchio - (3)
3rd-Turnbull - (2)
1st-Bob Fraser - (1)
1st-Dewey - (1)
1st-Kowalski - (1)
1st-Turnbull - (1)
1st-Vecchio - (1)
3rd-Francesca - (1)
3rd-Frobisher - (1)
3rd-Omniscient - (1)
3rd-Other - (1)
3rd-Stella - (1)

Note that this adds up to more than 29 stories, three had viewpoint changes -- separate scenes with a different POV. I would have thought that Ray Kowalski's individual voice would be so unique that he'd get more first person workout here. Fraser is by far the big winner for POV, both 1st and 3rd.

Point of View Frequency

Fraser - (11)
Kowalski - (9)
Other - (4)
Turnbull - (4)
Vecchio - (4)
Bob Fraser - (1)
Dewey - (1)
Francesca - (1)
Frobisher - (1)
Omniscient - (1)
Stella - (1)

Putting the question of whether the narration is first or third, who is the story about? Adding up Fraser getting first and third... we find that Vecchio is tied with Turnbull?

Pairing by Frequency

F/K - (18)
K/Other - (3)
F/? - (2)
K/V - (2)
F/Steve - (1)
F/Turnbull - (1)
F/V - (1)
K/Stella - (1)
V/Stella - (1)

Note that there was one story with more than one pairing in it. No threesomes in this batch.

F/K turns out to be by far the most popular. (The "F/?" are two shorts that referred to Fraser and "Ray" without specifying which one to my satisfaction.) Note the relative popularity of K/Other....

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

oooo! thanks very much -- i forgot i wrote a story for that!

very interesting by the way but i have always been fascinated by numbers etc...

I am totally geeking out over your stats, this is great - I hope you'll keep it up!

Funky. I wonder if reading this will affect what people choose to write for subsequent entries. ;)

Also, in regards to length? I think everyone was following the rules rather obediently until a certain moderator blasted them out of the water. *g* I'd love to know how much more everyone's over the limit post Cesperanza's first entry. :)

DS Flashfiction Stats I (Voyeurism)

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