Obviously you need to add that secret ingredient, love, to really bring your story to life, but if your works are your children, do you have a secret favorite?
I absolutely do. My favorite ongoing novel gets the least views, maybe because it isn't complete, maybe because it's mostly SFW, but it's the one I have the most fun writing. I generally make my other stories 20-30k words, but I'm willing to write millions of words for my main work.
Oh boy, I play favorites like no other. I'm not ashamed of it. At the core, as soon as I get into a story that way lying around, I always get hyped up - if I didn't like the stories I write, I wouldn't bother with them in the first place, let alone write them down.
But the most destructive fact about this is that the one story that I cared not enough about to want to keep my hand on it, since I'm a control freak, was the one I thought was fine to offer up to some small publishing houses and it really got the bid back then. To polish a turd, they even said they would keep it the way it was (they did general editing, like polishing all the lines, but they didn't change a single thing in the story; not a single sentence was changed at the core, just shortened or tweaked in wording). But I gave so little of a fuck though.
I know I sound like an ass when I say this, because of course I still loved the story, since I sat down to write it, but... that's, like, your least favoured child got married off first and the ones you held to a standard are just sitting around, growing a beard. Sure, I could have send in more of them, not only to one or two publishing houses, but I didn't give it more of a try for that one either.
I just dislike the thought of someone changing things in the stories most dear to me, so yeah, there's that. I can't comprehend it to this day, and it's been around 10 years.