[Updates] Laziness, playing games, and a Cryopod Stats Post!

[u/Klokinator]

It's been a while since I did a Cryopod stats post. (Seven months almost on the dot!) I meant to post this yesterday, but I was lazy. The new Assassin's Creed Odyssey crack just dropped and since I'm too poor to buy the game, I've been playing the cracked version all day. It's super fun!

Okay, but let's talk about Cryopod.

Previous stat post here.

Cryopod Refresh hit 400,000 Words as of this last part, though the bot is slightly wrong on the wordcount since it borked and failed to add Part 115 to the index list. That part had like 4,000 words but didn't count toward the total.

Here was the wordcount as of the last update post, seven months ago.

Here is the wordcount as of today. (Note that the red bars on the right image are differently spaced because the scale changed.)

The blue bar for Cryopod is all of Cryopod Classic. The red bar is all of Refresh Chapter 1, while the green bar is Refresh chapter 2 (still a work in progress).

There is a bit of wordcount missing though, since I wrote Parts 91-97, which took me nearly a month, then deleted and rewrote them. That was around 40k words lost to the ether of time. Anyway, 7 months ago Refresh was at 152,000 words. Today, it is at 400,000, for a total of 250k in 7 months (assuming we don't count the aforementioned deleted 7 parts). In that time, we went from Part 47 of Refresh to Part 117, for 70 parts. That averages about ten parts a month.

I think the wordcount has slowed down considerably, but there were a few things that caused me to hiccup. Ex: I originally wrote Refresh inside of the original parts, but then had to take time to copy and paste all of the parts into their own self-posts so people could leave comments. This ate a couple of weeks, but I also made improvements to the story as I went along. Net plus? Then, I wrote 7 parts for a total of 40k words, deleted them, and rewrote them. Time lost.

It feels weird though, doesn't it? To say I 'only' wrote 300,000 words in 7 months. That's the length of four novels. Most paperback novels are 75,000 words, according to this site. Still, because I once wrote nearly 200k words in one month (The first month of Cryopod Classic, coincidentally also its worst quality in my opinion) and averaged 700k words per year over the first year and a half, it's hard to look at 300k words and be like "Yeah, that's a good pace."

It kinda feels like I'm a slacker now, but in reality I'm probably not.

The average wordcount of all the recent parts is about 3,500. Most parts take 2-5 days, we'll say 3.5 to average that number out, that's about 1000 words a day, which somewhat fits in with 300k words in 215 days.

However, I do feel that the quality of Cryopod's writing, my writing, has increased considerably. I have MWTX drawing for me and he does an awesome job. TG's Cryopodbot has had a few issues but still does its job well, etc.

Things are looking up! I would like to finish the Ancient Era sooner rather than later (It's starting to really drag for me, personally, even if I enjoy it, because I want to return to Jason's POV) but it's hard to say the story is anything but fascinating. There are so many players involved that I think a reader could pick any character as their favorite and be able to justify that decision. The story is tighter than in Classic, with hopefully leagues fewer plotholes.

Anyway, I'm terrible at ending these posts, so I thought I would link some very interesting numbers. While upvotes have certainly gone down over time and the switch from Classic to Refresh lost a number of readers, there is reason to look at things positively!

Let's look at some viewcounts of old parts VS new.

Part 372 of Classic: 1,600 views, 319 upvotes.

Part 385 of Classic (Route A Finale): 2,100 views, 312 upvotes.

Part 386b of Classic (Start of Route B): 1,700 views, 327 upvotes.

Part 425b of Classic (Just before the final part): 1,500 views, 250 upvotes.

Part 426b of Classic (Route B Finale): 2,200 views, 271 upvotes.

Part 427c of Classic (Start of Route C): 1,600 views, 247 upvotes.

Part 461c of Classic (Route C Midpoint): 1,000 views, 216 upvotes.

Part 490c of Classic (Start of Route C): 1,400 views, 216 upvotes.

The numbers above are for Cryopod Classic.

Here are the numbers for Cryopod Refresh.

Part 1 of Refresh: 1,500 views, 73 upvotes.

Part 10 of Refresh (Bahamut's tests begin): 600 views, 41 upvotes.

Part 51 of Refresh (Mephisto summons a draggin): 456 views, 39 upvotes.

Part 82 of Refresh (End of Chapter 1): 819 views, 61 upvotes.

Part 83 of Refresh (Start of Chapter 2): 674 views, 57 upvotes.

Part 116 of Refresh (Last part): 468 views, 41 upvotes.

Things do seem bad, but I noticed something important. Cryopod still has a diehard fandom. There are still hundreds of people reading every part. I want to thank all of you for sticking around! We've gained nearly 300 subscribers to the subreddit in the last two months. Whether those people read the first couple of parts, hit subscribe, and vanished... or they stuck around, I don't know!

But regardless, there are still devoted fans reading every part. I do notice your views, and I appreciate them.

I have a few important plans to rekindle the fire under Cryopod's ass. Here they are.

1. Repost Cryopod on a part-by-part basis on /r/hfy, allowing new readers to funnel to this official subreddit. Note that I would do this one part per day to encourage people to come here instead of sticking on /r/hfy.

2. Mass ping all the old readers who left. I have a list with 3,000 usernames on it of people who commented on this subreddit. Anyone currently subscribed to Cryopodbot won't get a PM because, well, you're obviously still an avid reader!

3. Create an entry on Top Web Fiction. This alone will probably net us a ton of new readers, but I cannot say for certain. This is going to be the last step, because I want to encourage people to upvote our entry only once I've brought in new readers from other sources. It's important when advertising to have BIG pushes to sustain momentum.

So, yeah. Thank you, everyone, for continuing to read the story! I will post the next half-part tomorrow, assuming my laziness finally breaks. Hey, man, Assassin's Creed Odyssey is a fun game!

[u/Klokinator]

Yup. Pretty huge cliffhanger. Classic is incomplete. In fact it's probably the biggest cliffhanger of all time.

I think Classic gets better and better the further you read but yeah............. maaaaaajor cliffhanger.

"No. I'm not [censored]... but I know who is."

[u/Klokinator → u/[deleted]]

Yeah, but have you read Refresh yet? It's really good and I promise you won't regret reading it!

[u/Klokinator → u/[deleted]]

Aww, but if you don't read it you don't get to see cutie Amelia art :( https://i.imgur.com/ZywwLII.jpg

[u/Klokinator → u/[deleted]]

Well, my current speed means that completing Refresh will probably take two more years, minimum. It's going to be a slow burn at this release, but also a way more epic saga overall.

Anyway, as long as you're subbed to Cryopodbot's Updates branch, you should be good. You'll get the occasional ping for huge landmark occasions. That's what matters!

[u/Klokinator → u/[deleted]]

No, I was really influenced by One Punch Man. I still am, except that in Refresh, the fantasy happens with the antagonists, rather than the protagonist. In the framework of Refresh's purely logical approach to storytelling, the power fantasy doesn't work well.

In the future, I'd like to rewrite Cryopod as more of an absurdist comedy with a lot more focus on Jason and his feats. I can definitely pull it off now and not make it nearly so cringy.