(I was originally going to wait a little longer to post this, but I haven't yet had time to write the other stuff I wanted to. Ah, well. I'll probably add a list of posts I'd like to keep prominent to the menu or something, as I don't want this to get completely buried until I've given it a fair chance for suggestions.)
This year I am going to make a concerted effort to actually write moar fic, rather than come up with five million and three god tier ideas and wallow in self-pity when I am unable to type more than a few sentences without feeling like a hack. Should I actually manage to accomplish this Herculean feat, I'm gonna need a few venues to spam up with said moar fic. I'm pretty out of touch with the fanfiction community, though, so I don't really know where the best places to start posting are, which places have a reputation for more intelligent critique, which places tend to favor certain genres or styles over others, etc.. Sure, I know of plenty of places that allow the posting of fanfic, but I have no idea which ones are really worth my time (though I may bite the bullet and take a gamble with a few others anyway). Aaaand I was kinda hoping you guys would be able to point me in the right direction. :P
Presenting the longer-than-I thought-it-would-be-when-I-started-this-post list of sites/forums I'm considering. I'm going to try and set aside some time to checking these out in more detail on my own, but it'd be awesome if I could get inside opinions on some of these places, especially if you've posted some fic there yourself. (Incidentally, I'm also looking for more good fic to read, and presumably some of these places also have stories worth checking out. You don't have to make specific fic suggestions here—I'll probably make some other post looking for recommended reading—but ideally "good reviewing" and "good reading" should go hand in hand, yes? Two birds with one stone!) And if you know of a good place that I don't have listed here, mind telling me about it?
Oh, and yes, of course I fully intend to post my stuff on Altered Origin or 649 as appropriate. I'm just looking for additional places that get more than three visitors a month. :P
FanFiction.Net: The obvious choice. I already have an account there, but so far it has seen absolutely no use aside from commenting on a single fanfic. Word on the street (and just about everywhere else) is that it's swamped with dreck and that a lot of decent stuff tends to go unnoticed; I'll still give it a shot, though if the problem is as bad as I hear then I'm wondering how one goes about attracting readers who know what they're talking about, or who won't pass up your work just because it isn't accepting supersparkly OCs. Or does that just come with time? Hm.
deviantART: Possibly a more obvious choice than I'd originally thought—I've been posting artwork there for years, but I never actually stopped to consider what its literature community might be like. I know one friend who's already trying her luck there, and if I manage to get any work done I might just follow suit. I am a little worried that the pervasive "lol nice XD" comment that plagues my artwork will be almost all I get on fic, too, but I could be wrong and there might be enough substantial reviewing to make up for the flood of fluff. Does anyone know anything about fanfic on dA, or maybe have suggestions for literature groups/groups that accept literature deviations that are worth looking into?
Archive of Our Own: I had never even heard of this place until a month or so ago when I happened to stumble across a link. It's dedicated to fanwork, sort of like FFN (I understand it also takes fanart and some other stuff), and it's part of some larger organization dealing with fanwork in general, and I was mildly confused by the way they categorize things, and... that's literally all I know about it.
LiveJournal: ...there are fic communities on LJ, right?
The Cave of Dragonflies Forums: Why not? I'm there all the time anyway. The downside is that the chance of getting replies there, even crappy one-liners, is pretty abysmal; I'm hoping that my own pending efforts to review moar over there will encourage other people to do the same, but still. Meh. We'll see.
The PokéMasters Forums: Ah, my very first forum. More or less my very first exposure to fanfic, now I think about it. The Fanfiction section over there was still pretty lively the last time I checked in earnest, but then again that was, oh, I dunno, over a year ago. Whoops. (Not that it's that hard for me to go and look for myself; I just feel bad even opening the page without something to actually do there, lol.) I'd still like to come back, though, so I probably will go ahead and post stuff there as well. And this probably means nothing to most of you because I'm like the only person I regularly associate with who even knows that that place still exists. Also whoops.
PokéCommunity: I hung around there for a while, but my activity has dropped off of late. I'll probably come back and at least give it a shot, though I've been hearing a few complaints about the quality of the reviews and such. I know I didn't get any reviews on the one-shot I did post there in July, but I wasn't all that surprised/bothered. Is it really as bad as I've been hearing lately, or should I go for it anyway?
Serebii Forums: I have this unfortunate tendency to equate most of the Serebii community's communication skills with those of the site's webmaster, which is a terribly unfair and stupid generalization and I should stop that right now—especially since I hear that the fanfic section over there is actually pretty cool and is home to a lot of people who know what they're talking about. Several people I know and/or respect keep mentioning all of the mysterious loldrama that flares up over there, anyway. Sounds amusing, if nothing else. Honestly the primary reason I haven't spent more time looking at Serebii is because I'm terrible askeerd of the unholy lag that hits it all the time, though it may not be so bad right now (and really, after some of PC's hiccups and TCoD's recent server issues, I ought to be used to boardfail by now). I guess there must be something there that's worth fighting through the wall of members dragging the server down.
I would also like to make some headway on my non-Pokémon stuff—at this point primarily Incarnadine Harvest and, if I'm lucky, a Golden Sun fanfic I've been putting off for forever—and all of that will need somewhere to go as well. As I'm not currently an (active) member of any non-Pokémon fan communities, though, I don't have any idea what to do with the stuff aside from the big fandom-agnostic places mentioned above (FFN, AoOO and dA). I doubt that I have much of a non-Pokéfan readerbase (or a readerbase at all) at this point, but hell, I'll go ahead and ask anyway: anyone know any other good places to post/read Tales of Symphonia or Golden Sun fanfic? I was briefly a member of Namco's official Tales of series forum (but I never posted), and way back forever ago I posted a few times on some Golden Sun forum or other (hell if I remember which), so I could try to find those; I don't remember the quality of most of what I read being stellar, and my standards were hilariously low back in the early GS era, but that doesn't say anything about what they're like now... rgh. (Incidentally, I wonder if The GS Diaries or whatever it was called would still be as funny now as I thought it was when I was ~thirteen. Really should try to remember which forum that was on and see if it still exists.)
...Not having non-Pokéfan friends is hard. :(