Today's a grant application day, or it should be.  I realized this morning that I didn't have the right documents to complete the application so now it's all been put on hold until later on when I can meet up with someone to obtain said documents.  Luckily this is probably the 5th or 6th year I've been the one doing this application so I'm pretty familiar with the process and I don't anticipate any surprises.  It's a formula-based grant, which is simultaneously comforting (less writing) and horrifying (I have to do math.  Correctly.)

This has been one of those months where I can say, without melodrama, that I simply can't seem to get caught up.  I think it's a case of having too much work to do.  I'm so lucky to have some amazing volunteers in our organization, without whom I'd probably lose my mind -- but it's still more than I can handle at this point.  Bah.  Regardless, things are getting done, and other things are falling by the wayside because I can't stop and worry about them, and at some point mid-October I'll probably start to feel sane again.  Looking forward to that.

In other news, I woke up to several awesome and lengthy comments on the fic I posted yesterday.  I love lengthy comments.  I'm crap at leaving them, but I do love them so much.  I have had some vague hints from reading my flist that there is discussion about commenting (again) and the general dearth of commenting on AO3 even though it's probably the most popular place for long-fic reading these days (at least according to my poll on the subject a while back).  So, here's my policy:

1) I adore comments, I really truly do.  It is no exaggeration to say that they influence my writing - its direction and its very existence, to be honest.  I've spent years writing just for myself but it's far more fun to know that others are enjoying it too.  No one should ever feel like they are "invading my space" by leaving a comment, and I value comments on old fic as well as new.

2) As a reader, I try to be a good commenter but sometimes I am distracted, or incoherent, or just want to enjoy a fic quietly from a lurker's perspective.  So I totally understand the read-but-don't-comment perspective.  In fact, now having access (for the first time in 7 years) to stats on the number of clicks on my stories versus the number of comments, I think only about 1 in 20 readers leaves a comment, at most.  On some of my older stories, the odds are more like 1 in 100.  And that's okay.  Do I wish it was more?  Of course I do!  But I'm not about to hold my fic hostage or demand an homage or anything ridiculous like that.  Comment as you are moved to comment.

3) Back in SGA's heyday (do I sound old or what?) I would sometimes get unmanageably high numbers of comments -- at least, unmanageable for me and my periodically insane RL demands! -- and it was around that time that I stopped being concientious about replying to each and every comment.  I'm trying to redress this wrong nowadays, but rest assured - I read every comment, whether I respond or not.

In short, I still feel much as I did the last time this subject came up.